{"id":97575,"date":"2026-07-29T12:15:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T15:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/2026\/07\/29\/books-offer-insight-into-womens-lives-in-early-outport-newfoundland-resilience-and-strength\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T12:15:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T15:15:42","slug":"books-offer-insight-into-womens-lives-in-early-outport-newfoundland-resilience-and-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/2026\/07\/29\/books-offer-insight-into-womens-lives-in-early-outport-newfoundland-resilience-and-strength\/","title":{"rendered":"Books offer insight into women\u2019s lives in early outport Newfoundland; resilience and strength"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Article content\u201cThey not only handled the family, but they did their share of whatever needed to be done in that household.\u201dArticle content Author Dawn E. Neill wrote a book about her family\u2019s time in Pushthrough after it had been resettled. It\u2019s called Rescued: A Young Mother\u2019s Memoir of Survival on Newfoundland\u2019s Forgotten Coast.Article contentLOOKING FOR SOLITUDE ON PUSHTHROUGHArticle contentWhile Blake\u2019s mother left Pushthrough when the community resettled in 1969, it wasn\u2019t long before it was populated again.Article contentThis time by Dawn Neill, her husband, their son and a family friend. They arrived from Ontario in 1972 with an idea of living off the grid, an idea they had from famed Canadian artist Thoreau MacDonald.Article contentNeill wanted to get away from it all, and MacDonald told them to head east. So, they did.Article contentIt was a journey that crisscrossed Newfoundland and Labrador until they landed at Rose Blanche, which was the end of the road on the west coast.Article contentThey weren\u2019t satisfied and wondered how they could keep going. The only answer they received from people there was to take the ferry along the coast.Article contentAgain, they did so until they landed in Pushthrough and settled at the old merchant\u2019s house.Article content\u201cWe just knew this was the place we were looking for,\u201d said Neill. \u201cWe spent three days exploring this ghost town and found a house we just fell in love with.Article contentArticle content\u201cIt was one of the few houses that had windows facing the ocean.\u201dArticle contentSURVIVINGArticle contentNeill kept a journal in those days of everything they experienced there and later in Great Jarvis, where they built a home. She kept audio recordings, as well.Article contentRecently, she turned those into a book called \u201cRescued: A Young Mother\u2019s Memoir of Survival on Newfoundland\u2019s Forgotten Coast.\u201dArticle contentThe book weaves in the story of Neill\u2019s family and that of Uncle Jack Wells, the area\u2019s lighthouse keeper, into something that tells the struggles of a woman and her family in outport Newfoundland.Article content\u201cIt\u2019s felt just like something has been preserved,\u201d said Neill.Article content Dawn E. Neill is shown here with her son Nick and their dog Colleen in Pushthrough around the time they arrived in the resettled community in 1972.Article contentWASN\u2019T EASYArticle contentAs you can imagine, it wasn\u2019t an easy thing what Neill did by moving to Pushthrough.Article contentWhen they arrived, the four, plus a pet dog, lived in the kitchen as they went about repairing other parts of the house.Article contentThere was weather to deal with and time spent alone as her husband and a friend went fishing or off hunting. She was also concerned with her young son growing up in a place without any other children.Article contentArticle contentNeill struggled with the isolation that came from moving to an outport from Ontario.Article content\u201cI was really torn because it was a beautiful, beautiful place, but tough at times,\u201d she said. \u201cNobody to talk to, and a husband who loved going out hunting and leaving us alone.\u201dArticle contentEventually, they built a home in Great Jarvis \u2013 it\u2019s still there today \u2013 and moved there before spending some time in St. Alban\u2019s.Article contentWOULDN\u2019T TRADE ITArticle contentStill, despite the struggles of dealing with the ruggedness of the area, it\u2019s an experience that Neill wouldn\u2019t want to miss out on.Article contentThey were living in a place with no electricity, no running water and they didn\u2019t have a boat at first.Article contentStill, they made the best of it.Article content\u201cI would never regret the time we had there,\u201d said Neill. \u201cIt was just one of the most beautiful times of our life.\u201dArticle contentTRIBUTE TO OUTPORT WOMENArticle contentIn a way, the stories put out by the Blakes and Neill are companion pieces to each other.Article contentThey both deal with the struggles women faced in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, coincidentally in the same town but in different times.Article contentIn a way, they\u2019re just stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and they\u2019re about family.Article content\u201cWhat we wanted to do from an historical perspective was to recognize women and just how strong, just how important they were in the in in their community, in their family, and in their overall environment in which they lived,\u201d said Blake.Article content<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Article content\u201cThey not only handled the family, but they did their share of whatever needed to be done in that household.\u201dArticle content Author Dawn E. Neill wrote a book about her family\u2019s time in Pushthrough after it had been resettled. It\u2019s called Rescued: A Young Mother\u2019s Memoir of Survival on Newfoundland\u2019s Forgotten Coast.Article contentLOOKING FOR [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":565,"featured_media":97576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,590,1],"tags":[116,589],"class_list":["post-97575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-indigenous","category-newfoundland-and-labrador","category-uncategorized","tag-indigenous","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/565"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}