Daisy, queen of the desert - Australia/Aboriginal/History
Angela Bennie; The Sydney Morning Herald; 1/3/08
Desert Queen:The Many Lives And Loves Of Daisy Bates;By Susanna de Vries; HarperCollins
Daisy Bates: Grand Dame Of The Desert; By Bob Reece; National Library of Australia
This eccentric Irishwoman provided much insight into indigenous culture but was dragged down by fantasy. It all boils down to this, say the historians, anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists, teachers, doctors, politicians and Joe Public himself: if we cannot trust anything Daisy Bates said about herself, given the many fabrications with which she embellished her life story, then how can we trust what she says about the Aboriginal people?
This, you might say, was and still is the Bates question.
The Sydney Morning herald; No Internet Text
It is certainly the question that dogs all attempts to record and analyse the life and works of Daisy Bates, the strange little Irish woman dressed in neat Edwardian togs, white gloves and boater hat, who lived among and studied Australia’s indigenous people for nearly 45 years.
Daisy Bates certainly had much to say about the Australian Aborigines over those 45 years, which she did forthrightly and explicitly in her writings, speeches, journalism and everyday conversation.
But the question for scholars remains how much of Bates’s research findings were genuinely the case and how much embellished fantasy fuelled by her own ideology - ideology that bordered, in some cases, on pathology?
Three tenets in particular have caused many a hackle to rise, especially in anthropological and scientific circles.
The first was her belief that “the Australian Aborigine” was a dying “breed”, both “uncivilisable” and “unmoral” and destined to disappear from the face of the Earth. Indeed, she titled her autobiographical book on her work amongst her “natives” The Passing Of The Aborigines - her role being that of one who was there merely “to soothe the pillow” as they passed.
The second was her absolute intolerance of the existence of “half-castes”, as they were called - that is, Aboriginal people of mixed descent. She showed them no mercy, the very people who might have needed her mercy. With few exceptions, she said, “the only good half-caste is a dead one. The Aborigines are unmoral, the half-castes are immoral and to breed our own coloured population as under the present system we are now doing is an ugly reflection of all of us.”
But by far the most controversial of her “scientific observations” was her contention that cannibalism was a widespread practice in Aboriginal life. It was to become a lifelong obsession, a tenet she held to the end, and one that she felt backed up her belief that the Aborigines were incapable of being civilised.
On the other hand, many historians today will admit that a great deal of Daisy Bates’s anthropological studies in the field were very important and valuable indeed. The data she accumulated on the language structures of the Mirning and the Noongar peoples along the Nullarbor, and further up in the Murchison area near the Pilbara, is of great ethnological value; as are her detailed accounts of their mythological stories and interpretations of the universe.
She fed and clothed the children, she nursed the sick, she listened to their stories, she took part in their rituals. Without fear, she lived among them to study and to learn.
These contradictions, plus the sheer eccentricity of the woman, the strange mix of indomitable will and desperate yearning for recognition, have attracted many a historian to the Bates saga. The fact that here are two more is not surprising.
Bob Reece, a professor of history at Murdoch University, Western Australia, is an expert in Aboriginal history. At the outset, he says his purpose in writing the book is not to rehabilitate Bates’s scholarly reputation but to give readers some idea of her motivation and beliefs, what kind of person she was. What is interesting is that Reece achieves precisely the reverse. He gives a brief account of Bates’s early indiscretions and adventures but her character and motives remain once removed, shrouded in question and ambiguity.
Instead, what comes to the fore is the extraordinary range of her activities, her research, her time in the field, her endurance, marking her out as someone quite remark-able, no matter the indiscretions, the obfuscations.
The Passing Of The Aborigines, her autobiographical work published in 1938, he calls “one of the most influential books ever to be published in the English language”.
Reece discusses her extraordinary series of articles on Aboriginal maternal infanticide and cannibal-ism, “which were to shock her readers, delight her editors and horrify the anthropological and humanitarian fraternities for years to come” and concludes, that, “on the face of things, it seems that she set out to exploit the sensational aspect of cannibalism in order to sell her articles”.
De Vries is also a historian, now retired. In her account, Daisy Bates, the character and eccentric, is very much to the fore. And what a character: a three-time bigamist, a born liar, a fantasist, an opportunist - De Vries even hints at a possible girl of the night in London’s “demimonde” as well.
Bates’s determination, her endurance, her obstinacy, her bigotry, her courage, her compassion and her deep, terrible loneliness are all there in De Vries’s lively account. Her horror at the suffering she witnessed while nursing “my natives” in the last stages of venereal disease on the Bernier Island reserve; their fear and incomprehension as to where they were and what was happening to them, and the terrible nature of their illness, are there for all to see.
“They were desert people and were afraid of the ever-moaning sea,” she writes in her journal. Their eyes would gaze ,uncomprehendingly out across the water to a place far away where they longed to be.
De Vries presents a bizarre but very moving tableau of the middle-aged Bates at evening, alone in her tent on the vast Nullarbor Plain, looking out to the Great Australian Bight, preparing the evening meal:
“She would lay extra places for distinguished guests she would have liked to invite to a dinner party. Sitting alone at her card table, she would place photos cut out of old newspapers on the empty plates of her imaginary guests,” and tell them how much she was enjoying their company.
Outside, we can image the vault of sky above her stretching into infinity. De Vries’s achievement is that her Bates becomes a human being, as opposed to a historic figure.
Taken both together, the two books complement each other. But whether they answer all the questions that hover over the life and work of Daisy Bates is another matter. Perhaps the definitive Bates is yet to be written.