Charles Harold Peters (1889-1951) was no ordinary Digger. The message commences: 'In my deep regard for all "Diggers" and, at the request of my very good friend Mr Charles Peters: Digger & Legatee'. The front flyleaf also carries a lengthy gift inscription from the author, signed and dated (Jeannie Gunn, 31 March 1932). Pictorial cloth lightly flecked, with minor blemishes (loss of colour and sizing agent) to a few small areas near the top and leading edges of the rear cover edges foxed, with mild scattered foxing elsewhere a very good copy with a small contemporary ownership stamp on the front flyleaf. Octavo, viii, 107, (colophon) pages plus 25 pages of plates and a map. Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens, 1929 ('Completing the 92nd thousand')/ 1905. The book was made into a film also called We of the Never Never in 1982 and shot on location in the Northern Territory - the setting of the novel.GUNN, Mrs Aeneas The Little Black Princess of the Never-Never In 1988 the book was referred to as a "minor masterpiece of Australian letters" by Penguin’s New Literary History of Australia. Already in 1908 Australia was a significantly urbanised country and the book was seen to provide symbols of things that made Australia different from anywhere else, underwriting an Australian legend of life and achievement in the outback, where "men and a few women still lived heroic lives in rhythm with the gallop of a horse" in "forbidding faraway places". The book is regarded as being significant as a precursor of the 1930s landscape writers. By 1990 over a million copies of the book had been sold. This novel, together with her other book, was adapted for Australian schools. By 1945, 320,000 copies of the book had been sold. We of the Never Never was translated into German in 1927. On 16 March 1903 Aeneas died of malarial dysentery and Jeannie returned to Melbourne shortly afterwards. However, she travelled south and her book describes the journey and settling in. In Palmerston (Darwin), Gunn was discouraged from accompanying her husband to the station on the basis that as a woman she would be "out of place" on a station such as the Elsey. On 2 January 1902 the couple sailed for Port Darwin so that he could take up his role as the station's new manager. Her husband was a partner in Elsey cattle station on the Roper River, some 483 km (300 miles) south of Darwin.
Gunn was the first white woman to settle in the Mataranka area.
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