Jeannie Gunn

Born in Melbourne in 1870, Jeannie Gunn was an Australian teacher and writer. In 1902 she married Aeneas Gunn and moved with him to Elsey Station near Mataranka in the Northern Territory, an experience that would shape her most famous writing.

After returning south following her husband’s early death, she wrote We of the Never Never and The Little Black Princess. Those books drew on her time in the outback and became widely read, especially for their lively picture of station life and frontier Australia.

Gunn lived until 1961, and her name remains closely linked with Australian literary history. Readers still come to her work for its strong sense of place and its firsthand view of a world that has long since changed.