Daisy Bates was one of the great Irish eccentrics. She struck out alone in middle age to live the hard life of the Australian Aboriginal. Distrustful of her own kind and ferociously independent, Daisy was also a snob who constantly lied about her background and exaggerated her own importance. Yet her life was a story of unconditional love for the most powerless and vulnerable of peoples – the black outcasts of white Australia – and she was uniquely knowledgeable about the southern and western Australian people with whom she lived for nearly forty years.
Daisy’s birthplace could not have been more different from the place she was to spend most of her long life. She was born in the green and fertile townland of Kilnamanagh, near Roscrea, in County Tipperary, on 16 October 1862. Her family name was O’Dwyer, a family of the old Gaelic order. Daisy fancifully claimed that by the time of her birth her family had become absorbed into the Protestant middle class. According to her own wildly contradictory accounts, her rich parents died and she was reared by her grandmother, a fine old lady. In reality, this is an unlikely story. Daisy probably came from a poor, Catholic background, was raised in an orphanage and educated in a charity school.
Wherever she was raised, what is certain is that Daisy was bright, ambitious and could not wait to get out of Ireland. In 1883, after training as a governess, she embarked on the first of her many long journeys: she headed for a remote sheep station in northern Queensland, Australia.
Daisy was happy working at the station, but the following year she made a mistake. After a whirlwind romance, she married a dashing and unreliable horse-breaker called Murrant, who left her just five weeks later and was never seen again. She covered up this indiscretion by moving to New South Wales and starting afresh. In 1885 she (bigamously) married a station-owner called John Bates, and in 1887 they had a son, Arnold.
Already craving freedom, it seemed Daisy was not the marrying – or even the maternal – kind. In 1894 she left her little boy and husband and sailed to England ‘for a holiday’. Once there she found work on a magazine, the Review of Reviews, owned by the well-known journalist and feminist WT Stead. She then worked for the London Times and found there was a lot of interest in what was happening to the natives of Australia. In 1899, five years after her departure, Daisy returned to Australia with a brief to report on the mistreatment of the Aboriginals. For Daisy it would become more than a job – it would be her vocation.
In her late thirties, after a half-hearted attempt to reconcile with her husband and son, Daisy moved to Western Australia on her own. She had made the acquaintance of a priest on her last sea voyage and now she accompanied him from Perth to Broome to camp near a religious mission in Beagle Bay and research the local tribes. She spent the next few years in different camps in the west, learning Aboriginal languages, customs, rites and legends. Daisy kept copious notes on everything and by 1905 she was considered enough of an authority to be given a grant by the Western Australian government to continue her research.
In 1910 the government asked her to assist a Cambridge anthropologist, Professor AR Radcliffe-Brown, with his research into Aboriginal kinship systems. With mind-boggling inhumanity, the government seemed to be legislating against the Aboriginals to the point of extinction, while at the same time collecting data against the day when there might not be any Aboriginals to legislate against. The Aboriginal population was being decimated by diseases carried by settlers, especially venereal disease, which Aboriginals called ‘white-fella sickness’.
Daisy and Radcliffe-Brown spent most of their time together working in the euphemistically named ‘hospital islands’. These were two small uninhabited islands that were used by the government to ghettoise sick and dying Aboriginal people. Daisy translated for Radcliffe-Brown, mediated between him and the tribal people, gave him access to her notes and even lent him money. It was after her time at the hospital islands that she acquired the affectionate Aboriginal name of Kabbarli, or Grandmother.
In 1912 the vigorous fifty-year-old Daisy travelled to the tiny settlement of Eucla on the vast, inhospitable Nullarbor Plain, which stretches across Western Australia and South Australia. Here she started a new phase of her outback life. She lived in a tent, surviving largely on tea, bread and bush tucker – wombat, emu, grubs and lizards. She spent her time caring for what she had come to regard as ‘her people’.
Two years after moving to Eucla, she was asked to speak at a conference in Adelaide. To the amazement of the other conferees, she got to Adelaide by camel buggy across more than 200 miles (390 km) of the unforgiving Nullarbor Plain, accompanied by two friends.
But once in Adelaide it seemed Daisy Bates had already outlived her usefulness. She spoke but no one listened. Those in power had ceased to take her seriously and now considered her a harmless, slightly batty, middle-aged woman. Some felt that her work among the Aboriginals actually damaged their cause in the long run because she wanted to keep them separate and ‘wild’ rather than assimilated on reservations. Dispirited after the conference, Daisy left Eucla and set up a new camp further inland and east along the great Australian Bight, at a spot called Yalata. Surrounded by Aboriginal friends who had followed her from Eucla, she lived here for three years.
In 1918 Daisy had a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital in Adelaide. When she emerged it was into a world changed beyond belief by World War I. She responded to the outward transformation and her own inward cataclysm by retreating once again to the Nullarbor Plain, this time more than 400 miles (645 km) inland, at the very edge of the desert, to Ooldea.
By the time Daisy got to Ooldea in 1919 it was a dreary railway siding with a transient population. Originally a meeting place for nomadic Aboriginals, it had an ancient, life-sustaining waterhole, which had sustained them for millennia. But when the railway came it used so much water that it changed the water table and then polluted what was left. Whites would work on the railway line and move on, and they were not impressed with the little Irish lady in Edwardian clothes who let the side down by living among ‘the blacks’. The Aboriginals were mainly transient too. They would emerge, naked, from the desert and camp with Kabbarli for a while at Ooldea. Then, irresistibly drawn to the promise of plenty ‘further down the line’, they would disappear, only to return later, exploited, disillusioned and sick.
Surrounded by a small group of permanent friends who lived alongside her camp and treated her as one of their own, Daisy would nurse her ‘poor children’ when she could and bury them when she had to. All the time she wrote incessantly about their culture and movements, and she lived on the little income forthcoming from articles published in magazines such as The Australasian. Daisy saw herself not as a bridge but as a barrier between the Aboriginals and the ‘white fellas’ – she wanted to protect her loved ones from what she called ‘the contamination of civilisation’. Lasting fourteen years, Ooldea was to be her longest stay in one place.
In 1932, at the age of seventy, Daisy left the sand dune she had called home for so long. She wanted to go to the big city and write her book, The Passing of the Aborigines. The book was published in the UK in 1938 and in Australia in 1946. Un-PC though it certainly is, it is an absorbing account of the life and culture of the dying tribes of the Nyool-Nyool, Bibbulmun, Baduwonga, Kaalurwonga and Baadu, among others. It shows very clearly that Daisy Bates loved and respected the ‘lost people’, and that she knew what she was talking about.
Daisy could not settle in the city. Despite the recognition she had received – she had been made South Australia’s first woman justice of the peace in 1920 and she was awarded a CBE in 1934 – she just was not prepared to give in and be an old lady. In 1941, aged nearly eighty and still wearing the high collars, hats and long skirts of her youth, Daisy set off into the desert once again, this time to a spot called Wynbring, east of Ooldea, looking perhaps to relive the happy days she had spent at Ooldea.
It was not to be. Things were too difficult. Her sight was poor, most of the old-style Aboriginal people she had known were dead and gone, and she found some of the up-and-coming generation had serious social problems which she simply was not equipped to deal with. In addition, the local whites hated her for encouraging Aboriginals to come and camp near the settlement, and they made life even more difficult for her whenever they could.
Finally, in 1948, after persevering in a tent for four years at Wynbring and living another three years in a hotel at Streaky Bay on the south coast, age and infirmity drove Daisy back to Adelaide. Losing her mental faculties but still sprightly enough to make a run for it, she had to be watched constantly by a female acquaintance, the journalist Ernestine Hill.
Daisy lasted three years like this, attended all the while by Ernestine. She died in a nursing home on 18 April 1951. She is buried in Adelaide, but there is a plaque to her memory in the tiny settlement of Ooldea.