Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert

This book is about the life and work of Daisy Bates, drawn from her letters and published writings.

vi, [205] p. : ill., map, ports. ; 20 cm.  #170822

• Introduction : Let her sink like a stone?
• 1. The making of Daisy May O’Dwyer, 1859-1904
• 2. The virus of research, 1904-1912
• 3. The great white queen of the never-never lands, 1912-1933
• 4. My natives and I, 1933-1941
• 5. Just a little bit mental : the last years, 1941-1951.
• Bates, Daisy, 1859-1951.  |  Anthropologists — Australia — Biography.  |  Aboriginal Australians — Social life and customs.  |  Aboriginal Australians — Social conditions.  |  History – Biographies – Non-Indigenous.  |  Bibbulman people (W1) (WA SI50-10)  |  Settlement and contacts – English.  |  Race relations – Racism.  |  Ooldea (Far West SA SH52-12)
• Daisy May Bates, CBE (born Margaret Dwyer; 16 October 1859 – 18 April 1951) was an Irish-Australian journalist, welfare worker and lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society. Some Aboriginal people referred to Bates by the courtesy name Kabbarli “grandmother.”
• In February 1894, Bates returned to England, enrolling her son Arnold in a Catholic boarding school and telling Jack that she would return to Australia only when he had a home established for her. She arrived penniless in England, but found a job working for journalist and social campaigner WT Stead. Despite her skeptical views, she worked as an assistant editor on the psychic quarterly Borderlands. She developed an active intellectual life among London’s well-connected and bohemian literary and political milieu.

  After she left Stead’s employment in 1896, it is unclear how she supported herself until 1899. That year she set sail for Western Australia after Jack wrote to say that he was looking for a property there.^[10]

  In addition, she had been intrigued by a letter published that year in The Times about the cruelty of West Australian settlers to Aborigines. As Bates was preparing to return to Australia, she wrote to The Times offering to investigate the accusations, and report the results to them. Her offer was accepted, and she sailed back to Australia in August 1899.

• Bates became interested in the Aboriginal Australians for their own cultures. In the foreword of her book, written by Alan Moorehead, he said, “As far as I can make out she never tried to teach the Australians Aborigines anything or convert them to any faith. She preferred them to stay as they were and live out the last of their days in peace.” Moorehead also wrote, “She was not an anthropologist but she knew them better than anyone else who ever lived; and she made them interesting not only to herself but to us as well.”^{[citation needed]}

  In all, Bates devoted 40 years of her life to studying Aboriginal life, history, culture, rites, beliefs and customs. She researched and wrote on the subject while living in a tent in small settlements from Western Australia to the edges of the Nullarbor Plain, including at Ooldea in South Australia. She was noted for her strict lifelong adherence to Edwardian fashion, including wearing boots, gloves and a veil while in the bush.

  Bates set up camps to feed, clothe and nurse the transient Aboriginal people, drawing on her own income to meet the needs of the aged. She was said to have worn pistols even in her old age and to have been quite prepared to use them to threaten police when she caught them mistreating “her” Aborigines.

  Given the strains that the Aborigines suffered from European encroachment on their lands and culture, Bates was convinced that they were a dying race. She believed that her mission was to record as much as she could about them before they disappeared.^[11] In a 1921 article in the Sunday Times (Perth), Bates advocated a “woman patrol” to prevent the movement of Aborigines from the Central Australian Reserve into settled areas, to prevent conflict and interracial unions.^[12] She later responded to criticism of her effort to keep the people separated, by civil-rights leader William Harris, Aborigine. He said that part-Aboriginal, mixed-race people could be of value to Australian society. But Bates wrote, “As to the half-castes, however early they may be taken and trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead one.”

• Western Australia

  On her return voyage she met Father Dean Martelli, a Roman Catholic priest who had worked with Aborigines and who gave her an insight into the conditions they faced. She found a boarding school and home for her son in Perth, and invested some of her money in property as a security for her old age. She proceeded to buy note books and other supplies, and left for the state’s remote north-west to gather information on Aborigines and the effects of white settlement.

  She wrote articles about conditions around Port Hedland and other areas for geographical society journals, local newspapers, and The Times. She developed a lifelong interest in the lives and welfare of Aboriginal people in Western and South Australia.

  Based at the Beagle Bay Mission near Broome, Bates at the age of thirty-six began what became her life’s work. Her accounts, among the first attempts at a serious study of Aboriginal culture, were published in the Journal of Agriculture and later by anthropological and geographical societies in Australia and overseas.

  While at the mission, she compiled a dictionary of several local dialects. It contained some two thousand words and sentences; she also included notes on legends and myths. In April 1902 Bates, accompanied by her son and her husband, set out on a droving trip from Broome to Perth. It provided good material for her articles. After spending six months in the saddle and travelling four thousand kilometers, Bates knew that her marriage was over.

  Following her final separation from Bates in 1902, she spent most of the rest of her life in outback Western and South Australia. There she studied and worked for the remote Aboriginal tribes. They were suffering high mortality because of the incursions of European settlement and the introduction of new infectious diseases, to which they had no immunity. In addition, their societies were disrupted by having to adapt to modern technology and western culture.

  In 1904, the Registrar General of Western Australia, Malcolm Fraser,^[14] appointed her to research Aboriginal customs, languages and dialects. She worked nearly seven years on this project, compiling and organizing the data. Many of her papers were read at Geographical and Royal Society meetings.