The appealing aspects of this unconventional honeymoon keep the movie pictorially impressive and dramatically promising for better than one hour. Melbourne is left several weeks away by boat, train and horseback by the time the Gunns arrive at their first home, a spacious but unfurnished, ramshackle barn euphemistically misrepresented as "a commodious station homestead." Jeannie claims the dubious distinction of being the first white woman to intrude on this sparsely populated region-"never-never" land-occupied by a handful of white stockmen and the scattered aborigine communities that have attached themselves to the cattle stations, trading intermittent labor for grudging rations of flour, sugar, tobacco and hand-me-down clothes. Having accepted the job, Aeneas defies the conventions of 1902 and takes his adventurous bride with him into a harshly exotic, beautiful wilderness. The heroine is the author, Jeannie Gunn, recalling the savory and bitter experiences of her first year of marriage to Aeneas, who after several sedate years as a Melbourne librarian, leaves to manage a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia. Like the Australian period films that preceded it, notably "My Brilliant Career" and "The Getting of Wisdom," the new Australian import "We of the Never Never" evidently turned to a work of autobiographical fiction published around the turn of the century.
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