October 2020

The pandemic seems to have skewed time somehow: I’ve probably said this before, but Before Covid 19 seems a very hazy, free and easy period, and the last six months have disappeared into a long blur. The human race lurches on somehow, however, despite dismaying statistics and huge burdens of grief. Here in Greece, things have worsened to some degree, but we are still better off than the rest of Europe. Schools started the new year on time, with all rules being obeyed and masks being worn by all pupils. My granddaughter Natalia is 4, and has just started kindergarten in Athens. It seems a pity that she should have to cope with masks and health rules, but so far she has taken everything in her stride. So her mother reports, and adds that she is enjoying herself. Time for Yiayia ( me ) to stop worrying.

Nature continues on its inexorable way, so that the pomegranates are ripe to the point of bursting, the chrysanthemums are blooming in mad profusion, and the miniature cyclamens are peeping from their favourite places of cracks between rocks. Despite inclement weather and very high winds recently, the area seems set for a bumper olive harvest, which again is a natural occurrence: the olive harvests alternate, with one year being not-so-good to bad, and the next being excellent. And the swallows are sticking to their schedule: I’ve seen several groups flying south recently.

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I’ve reached the stage of re-reading, and listed my reactions to my recent visiting of We of the Never-Never. It seems, however, to be a tricky business these days, that of praising Australia’s pioneers. Nobody was interested in publishing this piece.

Thinking Again

We know that Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears us all away. And we learn that it also changes beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. One recent change is seen in the toppling of various statues of people once respected, but now quite literally fallen from favour.

It’s not just statues, of course. Think books: my childhood reading was guided by Enid Blyton, who was later accused of being both racist and sexist, as most people were in her day. Now she, or her reputation, seems to have made a comeback: after all, she always wrote a well-constructed sentence, knew about plots and characters, not to mention page-turning. The same can be said of Australian favourite Mary Grant Bruce.

I’ve recently been given another old Australian favourite: We of the Never-Never, by Mrs Aeneas Gunn, otherwise known as Jeannie. I suspect it is a first edition, although there is no date to prove this.  But here it is, with its red-board covers and yellowing pages. A pencilled note on a scrap of paper tells me that it was bought in Sydney’s Newtown in 1989, at Palmer’s Second-Hand Bookshop. And there are even some crumbling gum-leaves preserved between the pages.

We of the Never-Never purported to be a novel, but was really a record of the year Gunn spent living at the Elsey Station, 300 miles south of Darwin. The year was 1902, and the book was published in 1908. In 1902 Gunn was newly-wed, and seems to have been very happy with outback life. Alas, that ‘one bright sunny year’ was all she had of it, for then her husband, known as the Maluka (Boss), aged only about 40, died of malarial dysentery. She thus had to return to Melbourne, where she devoted her long widowhood to writing and to various good works.

Elsey was a smallish station by outback standards, being something over a million acres, and Gunn recounts, with great good humour, the general problems of isolation, hardship, and travel: four miles an hour on the few good roads. She also lists the particular difficulties of being a woman in the area, the first being the station employees’ resistance to her presence. But she was not to be deterred, and eventually became great friends with all of them. In her writing she documents a world that is now largely lost: she is very receptive to nature, appreciative of the ‘murmuring bush’, and the ‘purring slumbrous beauty’ of the waterways.

Gunn’s book became famous: in 1931, a survey placed her as the third most popular Australian novelist after Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood. By 1990 the book had sold over a million copies, and had been made into a film. But I don’t imagine that popularity continues, mainly because of Gunn’s attitude towards the First Nations people, without whom Elsey could not have functioned. One academic paper I have read mentions her ‘sickening assumption of white superiority.’ It is sickening to us, but was taken for granted then.

Gunn used a reprehensible label for the indigenous people, but the incident that would give today’s readers most pause is that of the proposed ‘surprise party,’ a raid on an Aboriginal camp: the white bosses made territorial rules for indigenous people, and punished them if they disobeyed, or killed cattle. In the event the raid, which Gunn said aimed only at ‘general discomfiture’, did not take place: the whites had been outwitted.

I like to think that Gunn was relieved. Her account of the excursion is preceded by these thoughts: ‘The white man has taken the country from the black fellow, and with it his right to travel where he will for pleasure or food…’ She went on to say that until the whites made recompense, cattle killing and even man killing, could not be considered an offence against whites. I also like to think she would be pleased to know that Elsey is now owned by the Mangarrayi Aboriginal Land Trust.

Both Gunn and her husband were the offspring of Scottish Nonconformist ministers, yet clearly considered First Nations people and the Chinese to be in a separate non-British category. But they enjoyed the company of both groups, and showed them both sympathy and understanding. In their prejudices, they were the products of their time. Like us.