Jeannie Gunn · 1908 · overland

Jeannie Gunn's 1908 account of a year at Elsey Station in the Northern Territory. She went up in 1902 as the first white woman most of the stockmen had seen on the run, and was told plainly that she was not wanted - and wrote the book after her husband died of malarial dysentery thirteen months later.

1. 1
   Melbourne

   Aeneas Gunn is appointed manager of a cattle station on the Roper River, and announces he is taking his wife - which the men on the station telegraph back about, unsuccessfully, before she has even left the south.

2. 2
   Darwin

   Port Darwin by steamer, the top end of the continent, and a hotel full of people explaining at length why the Never-Never is no place for a woman - which she records without comment, being about to prove otherwise.

3. 3
   Pine Creek

   The railway went this far and no further, so the last of the journey is by buckboard and horse - and the Maluka's wife starts learning the country from men who are hoping she will turn round and go back.

4. 4
   Katherine

   The Katherine River crossing and the telegraph station, the last settlement of any kind - and beyond it the run itself, twelve hundred square miles of it, and the road that becomes the whole of her world.

5. 5
   Elsey Station

   Thirteen months on the Roper: floods, cattle, the Aboriginal people she calls her staff, the Sanguine Scot and Mac and the Dandy - and then the Maluka dies of fever in March 1903, and she goes south and never comes back.