Jeannie Gunn

Jeannie Gunn OBE (pen name, Mrs Aeneas Gunn) (5 June 1870 – 9 June 1961) was an Australian novelist, teacher and Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) volunteer.

Jeannie Taylor was born in Carlton, Melbourne, the last of five children of Thomas Johnstone Taylor, a Baptist minister who went into business and later worked on the Melbourne Argus. Matriculating through Melbourne University after being educated at home, Taylor ran a school with her sisters between 1889 and 1896, after which she worked as a visiting teacher. In 1901 she married the explorer, pastoralist and journalist Aeneas James Gunn in the Presbyterian Church. Together they travelled to Darwin (then called Palmerston) and then onto an outlying station at Mataranka. Jeannie Gunn's husband died early in 1903 and she returned to live in Melbourne.

There, at the encouragement of friends, she began writing the books for which she would become famous. The Little Black Princess: a True Tale of life in the Never-Never Land, published in 1905 and revised in 1909, chronicled the childhood of an Indigenous Australian protagonist named Bett-Bett. Gunn's second book, We of the Never Never (1908), was styled as a novel but was actually a recounting of her time in the Northern Territory with only the names of people changed to obscure their identities. We of the Never Never sold more than 300,000 copies over thirty years, was translated into German in the 1920s, and by 1931 its author was voted the third most popular Australian novelist after Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood in a poll by The Herald (Melbourne). By 1990 over a million copies of the book had been sold.

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