"You would have loved her for her lore": the letters of Daisy Bates

Mrs Daisy Bates is a controversial figure in Australian history today, due to her emphasis on Aboriginal cannibalism, her belief in the inevitability of Aboriginal race extinction, and her disdain for what were once called 'half-castes'. This contrasts sharply with her earlier popular reputation as 'Saviour of the Aborigines', which qualified her to join contemporaries Nellie Melba and Mary Gilmore in the Pantheon of Great Australian Women. I confess that I have been something of an iconoclast myself in my attitude towards her.[1] The unreliability of what she said about her Irish background led me to question the reliability of what she said on other subjects, notably the Aborigines with whom she worked so closely between 1899 and 1935. This is also one of the objections raised by the latest academic commentator on Daisy Bates' career, Jim Anderson, in his essay in Anna Cole's edited collection of essays, Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History.[2] Throughout her long life in Australia, Bates perpetuated the fiction of her Protestant Anglo-Irish origins and the bogus 'memory' of her father (who had run away with his second wife to America when she was still a child) as her beloved mentor and 'tutor', who supposedly read Dickens to her, 'rescued' her during a tour of the Continent and took her to Dublin's exclusive Kildare St Club to meet the hunting set. In later life she seems to have come to believe what had originally been a useful 'cover' for her new life in the Australian colonies.

One objection comes down to this: if we cannot believe anything Bates said about herself, how can we rely on anything she said about the Aborigines? However, as a poor Irish Catholic immigrant seeking to make her way in late colonial Australia, there was every reason why she would have wanted to re-invent her early life as a member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish elite; nor was there anyone in the colonies who knew the embarrassing truth of her humble Catholic origins, who could 'blow her cover' and reveal (as the Irish would say) that 'sure, it was far from the Big House that she was born'. With the notable exception of cannibalism, there is no conceivable reason why Bates would have sought to misrepresent Aboriginal society. Indeed, her wish to be seen as a 'woman of science' meant that she was scrupulous in her empirical research and in her relations with other anthropologists whose respect she craved. Her emphasis on cannibalism from 1921 and her grossly exaggerated depiction of it seems to have been largely to do with her only means of support, journalism, and should not be allowed to negate the validity of her other work as it has in the past.

 

In this article, I want to survey Bates' correspondence and then to demonstrate its potential in illustrating her work and her life.

 

Reading her letters, I must say that while my respect for Bates' energy, determination, enterprise, intellect and sheer physical endurance has increased, I do not like her any more as a person. It is enough to say that she reveals herself on the one hand as a social climber, name-dropper and user of people, a die-hard Imperial loyalist and an apologist for the Western Australian pastoralists in their treatment of the Aborigines, and on the other as an anti-feminist, anti-socialist, anti-Catholic, anti-German and so on. She was clearly someone who could never compromise in her beliefs and attitudes. There is a some significance in her statement once that there was no via media between Perth's Karrakatta Club and a tent on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. At the Club, she was a Somebody (albeit a penurious one) in Perth Society. At her camps at Eucla and Fowler's Bay (1913-1918) and then at Ooldea Siding on the Transcontinental Railway (1919-1935) she reigned supreme over the Aboriginal groups newly arrived from the desert, who regarded her as a reincarnated Spirit Being possessed of magical powers. Perhaps this helps to explain why she stayed so long in the desert, despite the entreaties of friends and authorities to return to the comforts of civilization in Perth or Adelaide. It was the arrival of Annie Locke of the United Aborigines Mission at Ooldea in August 1933, together with her broken health, which inevitably spelled the end of her reign as 'The Great White Queen of the Never Never' [3] when she wielded total power over her Aboriginal subjects.

 

Partly in reaction to her popular reputation, the academy largely dismissed Bates as an eccentric female amateur. Beginning with A.R. Radcliffe Brown, who described the contents of her mind as being like 'a well-stored knitting basket, after half a dozen kittens had been playing there undisturbed for a few days', [4] professional anthropologists regarded her work as unmethodical and theoretically na've. If that were not enough, it took strong exception to her depiction of cannibalism amongst the Aborigines, deplored her attitude towards half-castes ('with a few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead half caste', she told Perth's Sunday Times in October 1921) and condemned her fatalistic assumption that the race was heading for inevitable extinction, leaving well-disposed white people to do no more than 'smooth (or soothe) the dying pillow'. This phrase, originally coined by Captain J.L. Stokes R.N. in the 1840s with a different meaning altogether, became closely identified with Bates' own fatalistic philosophy.

To take some examples of how the academic reaction to her work was coloured by her emphasis on cannibalism, T.G.H. Strehlow wrote in his Foreword to Winifred Hilliard's 1968 book on Ernabella:

For more than a generation much praise has been lavished on Mrs. Bates for her undoubtedly heroic persistence in spending many years in Ooldea with nomads ' many of them Pitjantjatjara ' who had drifted in from the desert lands of the interior. Yet her book is riddled with inaccuracies and marred by tales about widespread cannibalism which are as baseless as they are revolting. The best excuse that can be put forward for The Passing of the Aborigines is that it was produced by a crabbed and singularly self-centred old lady with a closed Victorian mind, at a time of life when her faculties had begun to fail. [5]

A.A. Abbie, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, wrote in 1969 that because of her erroneous information on cannibalism, he 'strongly suspected Mrs. Bates was equally in error in fields in which I am not qualified to judge'.[6]

More generally, Ronald and Catherine Berndt wrote in the second edition of The World of the First Australians in 1977:

Much of her work did not graduate to what can be considered as being seriously anthropological, although since she was working in areas that were rapidly changing under stress, her notes are the only ones available for some groups of Aboriginals. In spite of the legendary aura that has grown up around her, her writings leave much to be desired. [7]

A.P. Elkin, who visited Bates at Ooldea in late 1930, described Bates privately in 1945 as a 'negativist' whose 'everlasting insistence on their [the Aborigines'] passing and other sentimental tosh' had obstructed the cause of Aboriginal welfare. [8] However, he subsequently conceded to her biographer, Elizabeth Salter, that either he or the Berndts should have examined her research materials in the National Library as 'there is much gold to be garnered from it'.[9] Another note of positive appreciation from the academic community came in 1977 when the archaeologist Richard Wright recounted her correspondence with a Melbourne curio collector, praising her as an empiricist fieldworker who strenuously resisted the latter's 'armchair' typology of Aboriginal stone tools.[10]

Nevertheless, even the publication by the National Library in 1985 of Bates' The Natives Tribes of Western Australia, so ably edited by the late Dr Isobel White, failed to make much impression in anthropological circles. Completed as early as 1910, the manuscript was based on Bates' work for the Western Australian government which had originally commissioned her to compile a vocabulary of the state's Aboriginal languages. The project had been intended as a modest counterpart to the major ethnographic work subsidised by the Victorian government in the late 1880s: E.M. Curr's four-volume The Australian Race ' , but the Western Australian government was ultimately unwilling to pay for the manuscript's publication.

In more recent times, the need for reliable evidence to support native title claims in Western Australia has shone new light on Bates' ethnographic work, particularly in the south-west and the Gascoyne, Murchison and Kimberley regions. Her detailed reports on Aboriginal language, social organisation and customs and beliefs, together with her censuses, genealogies, photographs of informants and maps, have made her work something of a Bible. We can reject her pet theory of one system of Aboriginal social organisation and marriage laws across Australia and her belief that the 'degeneration' of the Central Australian tribes was due to their abandonment of these marriage laws, but there is no good reason to challenge the accuracy of the information which she recorded so patiently and carefully from her (always identified) Aboriginal informants. What she said about her Irish background has no bearing at all on her scientific work, except of course for her interesting reflections on the similarities between the Aborigines and the Irish, cultures possessing strong oral traditions and kinship ties, sense of place, physical prowess and verbal skills, and an all-pervasive sense of the supernatural at work in the everyday world. [11]

My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Bates as an ethnographer. That is something which is already in train due to the native title process. As an historian, I see it as my task to make available from her extensive correspondence sufficient of her own writings for people to make up their minds about her motivation and beliefs, about what kind of person she really was.

In this work I have been limited both by what has and what has not been written about Bates' life. The 1971 biography by Elizabeth Salter [12] and Ernestine Hill's 1973 memoir [13] tended to maintain Bates' iconic fame as 'The Great White Queen of the Never Never'.[14] The English writer Julia Blackburn's half-fact, half-fictional confection of 1994 [15] represented little advance. And Eleanor Witcombe, the Sydney screen writer originally commissioned by Katherine Hepburn to write a script for a film in which Hepburn herself would play the part of Bates, is not yet in print after many years of exhaustive research.

Let us review very briefly what is known of Bates' life. Born at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary in 1859, the daughter of an alcoholic Catholic shopkeeper, she lost her mother to tuberculosis when she was five and her father in her early teens. Educated at the local convent, she then trained as a governess. She emigrated to Townsville in 1883 and worked briefly as governess at Fanning Downs Station before marrying Harry ('The Breaker') Morant at Charters Towers on 13 March 1884. Having agreed about two weeks later to separate, she went to Sydney where she met and bigamously married an English seaman, Ernest Clarke Baglehole, in June of that year. On 17 February 1885 she (again bigamously) married Jack Bates, another splendid horseman from Nowra, where his parents had a dairy farm at Pyree on the Berry estate. Giving birth to their only child, Arnold, at Goulburn on 26 August 1886, she was subsequently passed around the pastoral families of New South Wales for some years as an entertaining house guest while Jack pursued his itinerant work as a drover. In 1894 she went to England, leaving Arnold in a Catholic boarding school near Campbelltown, and for the next few years worked on the celebrated journalist W.H. Stead's spiritualist magazine, Borderland. In late 1899 she returned to Perth, was reunited with Arnold and Jack, and went to the Kimberley where she spent four months at the German Trappist fathers' Beagle Bay mission. This resulted not only in her first intensive experience of the Aborigines but an agenda for the rest of her life as she sought to unravel the mysteries of their social organisation. It also provided an opportunity to witness men's secret ceremonies as an honorary initiate and thereby be endowed with magical authority.

After droving several hundred head of cattle 1,000 miles south with Jack and Arnold from Roebuck Downs to the pastoral leases he had recently acquired in the ominously named Opthalmia Ranges (Murchison district), Daisy returned to Perth in 1902 and began to support herself through freelance journalism ' principally articles about the Aborigines ' and the sale of photographic postcards of Aborigines. In April 1904 she was employed on a junior clerk's salary of 8s per day by Western Australia's Registrar-General, Malcolm Fraser, to collect Aboriginal vocabularies. By 1907 this project had burgeoned (to the increasing alarm of some government officials) into a vast manuscript dealing with every aspect of Aboriginal life. In 1901-11 she participated in the Cambridge University anthropological expedition, spending some time at the lock hospitals for venereally diseased Aborigines on Bernier and Dorr' islands off Carnarvon, and then in early 1913 (having failed in her bid to be appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory) based herself first at Eucla and then at Fowler's Bay on South Australia's west coast where she continued to collect ethnographic material until poor health forced her out in late 1918. After a brief and disastrous time as matron of a war veterans' hospital in Adelaide, she established herself again in late 1919 at Ooldea Siding on the Transcontinental Railway north of Fowler's Bay. There she was to remain until April 1935 when she took up the offer to write a series of articles for the Adelaide Advertiser under the title 'My Natives And I'. These articles (produced in close collaboration with the writer Ernestine Hill who first interviewed her at Ooldea in early 1933) subsequently formed the basis of her 1938 book, The Passing of the Aborigines. This established her in the popular mind as one of the world authorities on the Aborigines and encouraged her to put the rest of her manuscripts into proper order. Remaining in Adelaide until early 1941, with extended periods camped at Pyap near Loxton on the River Murray, she then moved back to Wynbring Siding, one hundred miles east of Ooldea. There she planned to continue her earlier work of tending to the physical needs of the Aborigines and protecting their women and girls from the malign influence of what she called 'low whites'. Defeated by increasing physical and mental debility, culminating in a breakdown and hospitalisation at Port Augusta, she retreated first to live with friends at Streaky Bay on the west coast and then to Adelaide where she spent her last years as a well-known eccentric until her lonely death in a nursing home at Prospect in April 1951 at the age of ninety-one.

In the absence of an authoritative biography, there is all the more reason to allow Bates' letters to tell her own story. However, there needs to be some robust threshing and winnowing, followed by a careful scrutiny of what remains. There is a good case for two edited selections: one which illustrates Bates' importance as an ethnographer, as the 'woman of science' she saw herself to be; and another which more broadly reveals her motivation, values, and personality. Nevertheless, it is impossible to make a rigid distinction between the more anthropological and the more personal letters.

 

It has to be said that Bates was a prolific letter-writer: upwards of 3,000 of her letters are extant and doubtless there were many others which were destroyed or are still lying forgotten somewhere. When people ask me: 'What did Daisy Bates do all that time in the desert?' (that is, between 1913 and 1935), my reply is she spent much of it writing letters to lots of different people. Those letters that have survived are held in a number of repositories across Australia. The State Records Office of Western Australia has her substantial official correspondence and reports for the period 1904-1910 when she was employed by the government; the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide and the Mortlock Library have many of her personal letters to friends in Adelaide written from Pyap, 1937-38, and from Wynbring Siding and Streaky Bay, 1941-47; the South Australian Museum has her letters from Ooldea 1928-33 to curio collector Tom Giffen, to J.B. Cleland, Professor of Pathology at the University of Adelaide who acted as her patron, and letters on Aboriginal dialects to Professor J.A. Fitzherbert, head of Classics at the same university; the Royal Geographical Society (S.A. Branch) has some letters from Eucla and Ooldea; the South Australian branch of the Australian Archives has her letters to Commonwealth Railways, principally about the problems created when Aborigines from the desert tribes were attracted to sidings of the Transcontinental Railway; and the South Australian State Archives has her correspondence with the Chief Protector of Aborigines (although the entire Aborigines Dept. collection is currently inaccessible due to legal issues); the LaTrobe Library in Melbourne has one hundred and eighteen letters to William Hurst, editor of The Argus and The Australasian, who published every article she ever sent him; the Mitchell Library in Sydney has her letters to the Western Australian-born geologist Georgina King, to the Melbourne curio collector W.H. Gill, and others; the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland has her letters from the 1940s to her long-time friend and collaborator, the writer Ernestine Hill; John Murray & Co. of London, has her letters relating to the publication of her 1938 best-seller, The Passing of the Aborigines; the Australian Archives in Canberra has her correspondence with the Commonwealth government; and finally the National Library's Bates collection has letters from 145 correspondents as well as some of her own. Perhaps the most interesting and moving of all the letters to her are the three typewritten notes from Ernestine Hill in late 1934 and early 1935 anticipating their collaboration on the newspaper series.[16] Conspicuous in its absence is any correspondence dated before 1901 or with her family in Ireland, except for some rather sad letters from her niece in the 1930s vainly seeking her address. Why this should have been so we must wait for her biographer, Eleanor Witcombe, to tell us.

The National Library also has an extensive collection of her newspaper articles, photographs, newspaper cuttings about her and various miscellanea as well as the manuscript version of The Native Tribes of Western Australia and other notes and writings. All this constitutes the 90 folio boxes of material which she collated with modest Commonwealth Government financial and secretarial assistance in Adelaide from 1936 and finally presented to the National Library in February 1941. Bitterly disappointed that Governor-General Lord Gowrie could not be at the hand-over ceremony due to an emergency Executive Council meeting in Sydney, she subsequently complained to friends in Adelaide that 'an Acting minister received me and my 40 years work ' a man who hadn't even seen a Native and certainly had not the faintest knowledge of the 'blackfellow' '.[17] Nevertheless, she was relieved that her manuscripts were safely housed in the 'National Library Archives' and was extremely pleased with the way they had been publicly displayed for the presentation. [18]

Other Bates letters can be found in the extensive research materials collected by Elizabeth Salter in the course of her biographical work in the late 1960s and subsequently purchased by the National Library.[19] Salter also preserved the letters she received in response to public requests for information about Bates. Some had interesting things to say about her, not always complimentary as we shall see.

Bates was a fluent writer with an easy, conversational style and a wide knowledge of the English literary classics upon which to draw. She also had a working knowledge of French. Although her education appears to have been limited to the Sacred Heart convent at Roscrea, which she attended for some years from 1872, the cultivated nuns had taught her well. She kept a full set of Dickens in her tent at Ooldea and expected her correspondents to recognise the significance of her references to his characters. As she had no filing system beyond a number of deed-boxes stored in a bough shed next to her tent and did not keep copies of her hand-penned letters, she inevitably repeated herself. At the same time, she had a number of favourite hobbyhorses, which she liked to bring out and dust off. To people like Cleland in Adelaide, Hurst in Melbourne and Murray in London, whom she felt she could trust, she at times wrote more personally about her own feelings and problems. Even in her 'thank you' letters to people who had sent her little presents, such as an Adelaide nurse who had once looked after her, she related interesting events from her earlier days in Western Australia or provided vivid descriptions of everyday happenings or circumstances at Ooldea and Wynbring. There are some letters to children, with whom she believed she had a special affinity. She wrote good longhand except for those periods in 1919, 1931, 1937-38 and from 1944 onwards when Sandy Blight (trachoma) was badly affecting her eyesight. Sometimes she confessed to writing without actually being able to see the page. Why she did not use her typewriter (she had been a competent typist since the 1890s) is not clear.

Let us look briefly at what might be called the more ethnographic or scientific correspondence. From about 1902 until 1915 when Bates was pursuing her aim of collecting all the information she could about Aboriginal society in Western Australia and collating it in a substantial book, her principal correspondence was with three established ethnographers and ethnologists, the ageing Alfred Howitt, the retired Parramatta surveyor, R.H. Mathews, and the Melbourne Presbyterian clergyman, John Mathew. [20] Uniquely, we have both sides of the correspondence here at the National Library. In addition, there is some correspondence with Andrew Lang, the Scottish ethnologist-turned-children's-writer who advised her on her burgeoning manuscript from 1907 until his death in 1912, and with A.R. Radcliffe Brown, the hyper-egotistical anthropologist with whom she was to have such a prickly relationship during her time with his Cambridge University expedition, and whom she later accused of both 'mutilating' her manuscript and passing off her material as his own. In other words, plagiarism. Isobel White was non-committal on this point, although the English anthropologist Rodney Needham, who inspired White's work, had no doubt that Bates was right. [21]

What emerges from Daisy's letters to Mathew in particular is her passionate commitment to her work: 'I was bitten with the virus of research and it became a labour of love', she reminisced twenty-five years later about her work at Beagle Bay and in the south-west of Western Australia. [22] She developed a keen interest in the theories then circulating about the origins of the Aborigines (notably, Mathew's theory of successive Negrito, Malayan and Papuan migrations and the idea of a lost continent of Limuria), their occupation of the continent and such questions as the practice of group marriage. What also emerges is her self conscious development as an anthropological field worker. Initially depending upon white settlers in the pastoral regions to fill out questionnaires and blank vocabularies, she rapidly concluded that they could not be relied upon and that there was no alternative but to go out and do the work herself, regardless of personal cost and discomfort. (And we must remember that in April 1904 at the beginning of her work for the Western Australian government she was already forty-four.) From 1902, she spent a lot of time at the Welshpool reserve established by Premier John Forrest east of Perth at the foot of the Darling Range where some of the surviving south-west Bibbulmun people of the full descent had been encouraged to camp. She also spent the latter half of 1907 and early 1908 making an extensive tour of the south-west and of the Gascoyne and Murchison districts to the north.

On 16 March 1907 Bates told Mathew that her Bibbulmun informants at the Welshpool reserve had been dying due to her spell in hospital for some weeks with pleurisy contracted as a result of camping out. What emerges from this and a subsequent letter is a disquieting mixture of genuine concern for them as friends and valuable informants and a more detached perception of them as interesting specimens for the scientific study of surviving racial types amongst the Aborigines:

Poor old Bulyer, or Baabur, died in hospital during my illness ' only three days after I left camp. He was blind and I have been feeding him, and when I went away he was neglected and so starved. Now Balbuk, the last Perth woman, is very ill, and I fear she will die. I have repeatedly asked that photos should be taken, but Baabur died before we could secure his and Balbuk was taken up to Cannington yesterday and if she goes to the hospital it means death for her also ' and hers is a most interesting head. The brow arches so very prominent yet Papuan features. [23]

On 12 April she wrote:

Old Balbuk, who has just died, was Negritan-Papuan, I think, she certainly hadn't a drop of Malayan blood (that's sweeping) but I'll send you her post mortem photo as soon as I can get a copy. It's badly done, and out of focus, because [it was] taken in the undertaker's shop, but you will, I think, agree with me as to Balbuk's type. [24]

And again in the same letter:

Poor old Balbuk is dead. I mentioned having obtained her post mortem photograph. I tried to get her skull but the Chief Protector ' the dearest old lady in the world ' was horrified at my request. If I could only 'body snatch' it would be invaluable. Balbuk was a 'native' right up to the very end, no civilization had any effect upon her. She once killed another woman by driving her wanna (digging stick with spiked end, about 1 ½ inches in diameter) spear fashion through the woman's heart! She knew her laws and kept or broke them as she chose, but when others did so she abused them. You would have loved her for her lore, as I did. I was keeping her alive, but they carted the poor old thing in a springless dray and took her to the Public Hospital where she died next day. Her death has been a great loss to me, for she was my 'Who's Who', etc. I did obtain much from Balbuk, who was a Ballarruk, and from old Baarbur who was a Tondarup. And there is no-one here to really take their place, and so whatever other 'records' they had of their people, they have taken to Kooran'nup [the Bibbulmun afterworld] with them. [25]

 

In accordance with the scientific practice of the time, Daisy also took the cranial measurements of all her informants.

Throughout her correspondence with Mathew in particular, Bates revealed her development as an anthropological field-worker, formulating sound empiricist principles as well as displaying considerable sensitivity in her information-gathering. At the same time, she was loath to theorise about Aboriginal society in the style of many of her contemporaries:

My book [she told Mathew in February 1909] will be the result of patient inquiry but I am only a 'native' setting down my laws, customs etc. without myself being able to explain their meaning. I shall leave the explanation to ethnologists and philologists like yourself. [26]

 

While her re-location to Eucla and then Fowler's Bay in 1913 was motivated in part by the need to further test the pattern of Aboriginal social organisation that she had pieced together from work in the south-west and elsewhere in Western Australia, her subsequent move to Ooldea was more to do with her concern about the impact of the newly-completed Transcontinental Railway on the people of the desert. To her friend Tom Gill in Adelaide she wrote in September 1919 explaining why she was about to establish herself at Ooldea:

While the EW line was under construction, I approached the W.A., S.A. and Commonwealth Governments on the subject of the natives of those areas. I foretold what would happen. The natives lie in wait at certain stations and have in the short period of the train running become professional beggars. It is perfectly tragic - children leer at passengers and beg money, fruit, tobacco etc. I had suggested that a line of demarcation, say between two or four miles, should be stretched along the route between Tarcoola or Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie. This was not done and the consequences are already rather dreadful. Several Musgrave Ranges natives arrived recently at Wynbring and more are on their way. Needless to say they are being civilized 'per salturn'. The Ranges will soon be emptied of their inhabitants as the loafing begging shifting yet safe life appeals to all the new arrivals, who after experiencing its blessings return in haste for their friends to share in the good and easy living that begging commands. It needed a woman here to patrol the line long ago, it needs her more than ever today. There should also be an Act passed forbidding natives to come near train or township, and a woman J.P. installed just as a mild deterrent. There is sickness already amongst the natives at Wynbring, but as that place is to be emptied of its workers shortly, the natives will soon move from there. Several are also here, old acquaintances. I intend to pitch my camp just outside Ooldea, near a tank some mile and a half from the Station. [27]

It was her hope that the Commonwealth government would appoint her special Protector of Aborigines along the East-West Line, but this was to be yet another disappointment in her long experience of officialdom. Nor was she able to secure the position of Protector at Ooldea from the government of South Australia, obliging her to support her work in that de facto role with the proceeds of her journalism.

 

In her correspondence from Ooldea with Professors J.B. Cleland and J.A. Fitzherbert of Adelaide University, whom she respected as scholars, and to the Registrar, F.W. Eardley, she expounded on her methodology. Writing to Fitzherbert in September 1931 about the transcriptions of earlier-recorded dialects she was enclosing, she explained her apparent lack of system:

All the stray notes that I've huddled here and there must be begun. I think you will find them all 'dovetailing' into one or other of the vocabularies and miscellany. No 'order' as there never is any time to question in an orderly way, and you really get very little result from any 'systematic' digging. My success is due to my readiness to leave off and listen to something else ' waiting my opportunity to continue until they are in the mood. You can't rush them ' though 'civilized' men will tell you many 'lies' if you rush them. The voluntary information, the unconscious information is the best. I've had to stop taking notes when I saw them looking askance at my pen or pencil moving, and now and then they have been frightened when I have read out the names of waters etc. they have given me. Cannily and cautiously I pursued my task. Getting them to argue with each other on certain questions was a great help.[28]

She also revealed to Eardley the main source of her influence over her informants:

With my own title of KABBARLI (grandmother) to all, irrespective of their several degrees of kindred etc. coupled with a sort of suggestion of 'magic-reincarnation' of some sorcerer of days gone by, I obtained their complete confidence, so that I was 'initiated' into the freedom of all totems ' in quite a nice way I should add. The great sacred and secret totem boards were brought to me, and the smaller boards and bullroarers placed round about me, while all the men present chanted the sacred totem songs and waved green branches to and fro as we sat in a great circle round the 'totem' (dhk'gurr) fire. The women had been banished to a spot some five miles away. You will realize the great help this was to me in all my investigations in this State ' By quietly assuming beneficent magichood, a tactful scientist ' and always a kindly [one] - will be able to do some splendid work in (I hope) the near future.[29]

 

Almost as important, however, was the moral authority that she presented to the Aborigines as an example of white British civilization. In December 1940 she told the son of Tasmanian pastoralists with whom she and young Arnold had stayed in 1893:

I don't teach them but I have always shown them by my own example amongst them that there are two kinds of white women and so I must always let them see me as I should like our King and Queen to see me!! The fringes of our civilization carry such human 'flotsam and jetsam' and it is this that the wild native first sees! And so I stayed with them through the years and never raised my hand or my voice to one of them! And so I have a special place in their poor savage hearts. [30]

This self-conscious status she demonstrated most clearly in her dress. The Edwardian costumes which she kept in such good repair may have reflected an eccentric old woman's vanity, but they also served to differentiate her sharply from the Ooldea fettlers and their wives, the 'low whites' from whom she kept her distance. The addition of a pair of sunglasses as her eyes began to fail can only have added to her awesome appearance to the Aborigines.

Of her authority as an ethnographer, Bates had no doubts. Just as she had remarked to the Revd John Mathew earlier about the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer's reliance on 'imagination' in his writings on Aboriginal social organisation and Radcliffe Brown's inadequate fieldwork methods, she took some pleasure in reflecting to Cleland on A.P. Elkin's expertise after he had visited her camp in December 1930:

Recently a Dr. Elkin from Sydney University visited Ooldea and called on me. As he had been two years in the Broome area, and others have been working there under his direction, I felt so sure he would have 'Broome' at his fingertips that I rattled off a lot of my initiation names, symbols and so on only to find a 'blank', but perhaps Dr. Elkin's researches are in some other direction. [31]

Many of Bates' letters from Ooldea furnish valuable information about the material culture of the people who came in from the desert. To curio collectors and art dealers in Adelaide (Thomas Giffen and T.J. Crouch) and Melbourne (W.H. Gill), she carefully described the artefacts gathered from the new arrivals. To Crouch in March 1928 she deplored the way in which they were abandoning traditional techniques of tool and weapon-making:

The weapons the natives make today are not worth collecting. They make them with white men's tools, and the weapons being made to sell quickly have neither the delicacy or precision which marked the old weapons. Those old weapons used to take days and weeks to make leisurely ' .

Their spears have no flint heads. You would get those from the Kimberley and other northern areas. And they use no shields. Shields are made and used near the West Australia border, and also in the McDonnell Ranges ' far north ' but the Central Australia natives did not use shields tho' now and then they bartered for them for corroboree decorations. The northern shield is called Koor'dijee, and the Western Australian and border shield Dharra. The new group had not one boomerang, and when I tried to get them to make one, they could not finish it. They had two clubs but I have given these away already. Again I tried to get them to make a club and I think I have that, it is not a success, but the group has only young men and it take some years to learn how to make their fighting weapons ' and now they have entered civilization they will never learn and will just make some with white tools and sell them to train passengers. I will send you a boomerang to show you how badly they are made with white tools. It is not worth sending but it is long since I saw a good native made (with native flint tools) boomerang. [32]

By discouraging the Aborigines from making objects for sale to 'Trans' passengers, however, she was actually maintaining their dependency on her. [33] At the same time, she dismissed corroborees and ceremonies kept up with difficulty at Ooldea as being unauthentic because of their use of recently- learned European dance steps (for example, 'The Lancers') and derivative accessories such as tassels or Tam O' Shanters made of wombat fur. She also did her utmost to prevent Aborigines from travelling by train between Kalgoorlie and Ooldea, although for them it was a welcome means of keeping up their ceremonies. In other letters, she decried the missionaries' destruction of the traditional culture, while emphasising the utter futility of missionary activity amongst people whose concepts could never accommodate Christianity.[34]

Rejecting as ridiculous the 1924 proposal for an Aboriginal state in Central Australia, she set out to Fitzherbert in November 1931 her own ideas about should be done about the remaining full-descent Aborigines of the centre:

What the Australian aborigines ' or the remnants still left of them ' need is an English gentleman to be given the overcharge of every one of them, of every mission and institution and settlement in Australia. Only an Englishman can deal with the aborigines, one above party or politics or any crippling authority. We've had such Englishmen as I visualize, for India, Africa and elsewhere and their rule was always beneficent, for only they can understand and control the native races. [35]

The linguistic and other information she was so carefully transcribing from old notebooks was designed to make the University of Adelaide the 'think tank' for such a native administration. To Eardley she was more explicit, at the same time giving her views on what she saw as the Aborigines' own creation of the desert environment:

I hope some day, though it will not be in my life time, that these central remnants will have a Raffles, Lugard, Gordon, Lawrence, or some such Englishman as the supreme head of all of politics, will knit mission institution and settlement into one harmonious whole, and so ensure that the passing of these native people will be as happy as the best 'Empire Builder' can make it. A lesser man will not do. I have advocated this for years, and have placed it before Governors General, Governors, Prime Ministers and State Ministries. When such a man is at the head of aboriginal affairs, the real betterment of these dying people will begin. Central Australia ' towards the western border ' about Glen Ferdinand would be a good commencing centre, and with aeroplanes the Commissioner could gather up the reins of every native activity in Australia. Not only that, but by gradually gaining the control of the wild creatures of the Central parts, he might be able to get them to change the deserts they made through their age old destruction of tree and plant and bush into a planted 'memorial' for themselves, so that there shall be [a] good memory of these dreadful cannibals in ages to come. [36]

Not surprisingly, Bates saw herself as that 'supreme head' and no doubt suggested the idea to government ministers whom she met in Canberra where she was invited in August 1933 by Prime Mister Joseph Lyons to advise on Aboriginal policy. This came after the sensational national and international publicity following the Caledon Bay murders, the plans for a punitive police expedition against the perpetrators, and the subsequent trial and then suspicious disappearance of the Aboriginal warrior Tuckiar. Other than recognising her work with a C.B.E. in January 1934 and providing her with a modest stipend, the Commonwealth government did not avail itself of her expertise. However, her meeting with National Librarian Kenneth Binns in Canberra on the afternoon of 6 September 1933 laid the basis for its acquisition of her 90 folios of manuscripts in February 1941.

In political matters, Daisy was an Imperial loyalist, rejecting Home Rule for Ireland and lamenting the demise of the Royal Navy in the era of post-war disarmament. In November 1931 she enthused to Fitzherbert:

Isn't England the greatest country in the world! And doesn't she just do the right thing in crises. Our Empire is the World's heaven. Thank God I am British, for I can 'look up' to my King and Empire always and Englishmen the world over are the custodians of law and order and British honour and integrity. 'God bless them every one', as Tiny Tim said. [37]

 

Needless, to say, Bates was devastated by the abdication crisis of 1937 and recalled the impression Edward VIII had made on the Aborigines when visiting Ooldea briefly as Prince of Wales in August 1920:

The Royal Tragedy that made all the Empire one in its sorrow and its reticence was tragic too for my natives. They loved their and my King's son. His kindliness and Total Courtesy during the two or three hours at Ooldea Siding made Court of even the most recently arrived cannibal groups amongst them. [38]

Bitterly anti-Labor in Australian politics, she wrote to Cleland in December 1931 on the eve of the Federal elections dreading the possibility of the 'frightful Scullin Theodore Combine being returned' and describing how the Catholic Commissioner of Railways for South Australia had distributed 'relief gangs' of fettlers between Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie in order to maximise the Labor vote. [39]

In late 1938, while living in her tent at Pyap on the Murray River, Bates became aware from the Advertiser's headlines (all that she could then read) of the storm clouds gathering in Europe. Reflecting on the possible replication there of the stateless, anarchic condition of the Aborigines, she wrote to her London publisher, John Murray:

These are such delicate times for us and our Empire ' as I lie awake at night I think of the awful havoc that would ensue if by any dreadful circumstances Russia German and Italy would lose their Dictators. None to take their place at the crucial moment and the people of the respective countries reverted to 'Australian Aboriginal mob'. All my known Native Australia had no chiefs, no 'heads', 'local groups;' or 'mobs' only and so they died out. It is a frightening thought ' such hordes of mobs let loose in Europe. May God spare us all. [40]

In the spirit of assisting the dictators, she had offered the F'hrer an alternative to his policy of lebensraum. She suggested that he send his surplus population to Australia where they would intermarry with the Anglo Celtic population and become loyal citizens of the British Empire, just as her neighbouring German-descended orchardists at Pyap had done. It would be interesting to know what the Commonwealth Censor made of the letter and whether it was ever received in Berlin. We have only her account of it in her letter to John Murray:

They [the orchardists] are so loyal and desirous of having King and Empire impressed on their children at school and I know all their efforts and so (and this is John Murray's secret only) I wrote a friendly letter to Herr Hitler telling him of my arrival here for rest and quiet and then finding that they were the 4^th and 5^th generation of George Fife Angas's [German] settlers of the 30s of last century. I showed him their hardworking lives, their intermarriage with British, and the fine community spirit among all that helps every endeavour for the good of all and so on and I mentioned how 'mixable' the intermarriages so happily proved ' (I think I wanted him to see the tragedy of these fine settlers if anything came to a head - but I confined my letter to my friendship with them all, and our mutual confidence and respect towards each other). The letter cannot harm anyone or anything and I felt I must write and did so. I sent it by the Italy-German Air Mail. It may be censored but I had to send it, and let Herr Hitler see if he can what larger and greater work can be started by him, to help his surplus numbers ' . [41]

 

In the event, she did not blame the Dictators for the war. In February 1940 she wrote again to John Murray:

Two things I hope ' that Gladstone who gave Home Rule for a vote and Ramsay Macdonald that left our seas and our rivers undefended, but locked his own back door tightly[,] are both beside each other in Limbo, each outspeaking the other. They deserve all the worst ' both are answerable for my findings since this ghastly war began ' . [42]

Earlier letters from Ooldea reveal how she herself exercised dictatorial authority. To Cleland she wrote in December 1924 of her planned Christmas party for the Aboriginal women and girls. She welcomed unwanted clothes and dress jewellery from Adelaide friends as well as textile remnants from John Martin's department store for her 'dress up' parties:

Thanks ever so much for your little glory parcel. I've been having quite a big 'Breakfast Party' with clothes and jewels today ' over thirty guests and all the women and children with new gowns and pearl necklaces. I've been working at high pressure for some time to have all the gowns ready. Yet even today I had to make two more. We had a delightful time, and I really wouldn't exchange my Xmas Party for the best in Adelaide ' it is such pure joy and I don't have to cast up my eyes and say 'Mission Wong'gi' [mission prayers]. [43]

While she could be bountiful within her limited means, there were times when the modest supply of flour, tea and sugar she provided would be withdrawn as punishment if her rules were broken. In September 1931 she told Fitzherbert that the entire Aboriginal camp, men, women and children, had been 'sent to Coventry' until four stolen inma (ritual objects) which had been taken to Tarcoola were returned. [44] Regarding these as her personal property, rather than items held as custodian, she thought nothing of sending them off to curio collectors and museums regardless of their ritual importance. On one occasion, she even had to quell a small rebellion against her authority by an Aboriginal man from the desert who called himself 'King of Ooldea'. On another, she complained how exposure to civilization had altered the demeanour towards her of two girls whom she had known since they were babies:

The mothers of both died of disease and the children have just come back from the Kalgoorlie district where they were taken by their fathers some year or more ago. Contact with any civilization deteriorates them but in the Kalgoorlie area they must have seen many specially ugly things. They have all come back rather impudent and overbearing. They had Govt. rations at Kalgoorlie and now sit down on the doorstep of every white woman's house at the Siding. I cannot get the white women to see the danger of this. I've tried many times when I've noticed native men go in and out of the white women's houses while the fettlers are away. Labour [working class] women, like their men, have their own peculiar psychology!

To Crouch and others, she described her everyday life and happenings. When he wanted to send her presents in return for Aboriginal artefacts (she would not accept any payment), she described the cramped conditions in her tent:

don't please send me anything. Why? My tent is so small, 8 x 10 and so crowded that I haven't room for a [illeg.] more than the necessaries plus my MSS. and letters and Dickens. I have two big tables in my tent, both covered with my MS. papers etc. etc. and I've just room on one of them to put down my writing pad or my typewriter or my little breakfast tray. All three couldn't be placed on the table at one time, only one of them. My floor space within my tent is 7 x 4 so you see how cramped my little home is. Books, papers etc. sent me are scanned and distributed to the Siding and even the boughshed I erected for the 'extras' is packed. In it I keep (when it comes) precious rain water, and my store supplies, bandagings etc. for native ailments. My tent chair folds up and is put outside when I need the floor space. Now, I don't mind all this, only at times when I mislay something I go perfectly distracted until I find it. I really have a place for everything - calico pockets round my table ' but now and then a sudden willy willy finds my papers MS. unweighted for the moment, and the there is a terrific scramble ... . [45]

She told him of the intense heat of the desert and her ways of dealing with it:

We had 110' yesterday (6^th) and today there is raging north[erly] and it is already 100' (9 a.m.). In a February like this we've had 126', that has been the highest I've experienced here. My tent faces north and south and is open at both ends and everything has to be battened down with heavy stones - even paper etc. The curious thing about this drought is the absence of clouds. All January there was a glassy sky without a cloud and this month the same so far. The sun rises and sets in the sort of haze that the dirt laden atmosphere keeps suspended. No ordinary rain can break through that atmosphere. I've seen rain falling from a cloud near the horizon during last year and just stopping short as if it were suspended in mid air. It had reached the upper dust filled air and become absorbed in it. A very interesting sight if it were not so aggravating ' I make a lemon drink ' a slice of lemon, a pinch of salt and sugar to taste and water that has been boiled. My drink is not cold or cool but it is really refreshing and one need not take great drinks of it ' . [46]

She told Cleland about the other little mishaps that occurred. In January 1925 she described how she had employed an old-fashioned cure for dysentery:

Just now there isn't a native here - all are at Barton (about 38 miles or so east of here) or somewhere along the line. They went away on New Year's Day and on New Year's Night I lay laid myself down with chill, which became rheumatic fever and ended up with acute dysentery! And of course there wasn't a native to send up for a fettler's wife! I was in bed five days drinking water and then two fettlers' wives, not seeing me pass for my mail, ventured down and I was able to wire for some champagne ' the only thing that stops the dysentery. I've only had three such attacks since 1899 and have used the same remedy. I sipped it for forty-eight hours (2 pints in all) and then a vile headache came but the dysentery completely stopped. [47]

By early 1931 Bates was making increasing references to her failing health and the arrangement she had made with Commonwealth Railways to have her lunch in the 'Trans' dining car each day. In September of that year she wrote to Fitzherbert:

 

Thank you for your kind inquiries about my health. As long as I was strong and well I did not see my privations ' my own comfort always came secondary ' but now I want an ordered home life, attendance and leisure with ease to collate and collate. I actually see my life in this tent for the first time, and I don't like it now. Its lack of everything appals me, but only because my health has gone for the moment and I must have all personal things and my tent absolutely clean and sweet and nice, and the effort to accomplish this ' but I must not grumble or 'grouse' so please don't take heed of the above. [48]

X X X

The problem with Bates' letters is that for the most part they cannot be checked against the testimony of other people who witnessed the events she described. For example, just how much practical assistance in the way of nutrition and health care she was able to give the Aborigines, first at Eucla and Fowler's Bay and then at Ooldea and Wynbring, is open to question. Laurel Randell, who was a nurse at Port Augusta Hospital where Daisy was admitted in early 1945 after a physical and mental breakdown at Wynbring Siding, recalled to Salter in 1969:

I never heard anything that made us feel she was doing anything practical to help the aborigines. Matron questioned her closely about her nursing knowledge and told us later that in her opinion, Daisy did not know the first [thing] even about Home Nursing. The only 'nursing' thing I can recall Daisy telling me, was how she'd take a long stick, and scrape away the filth from under and around the sick as they lay in their wurlies with flu or measles or whatever. Perhaps she took them water to drink. I suppose anyone would think of that. She knew just as much about cooking ' the 'puddings' she created sounded weird and wonderful. Rightly or wrongly we nurses formed the opinion that she was an old fraud. We were rather resentful of her reputation of being the Saviour of the Aborigines, because we knew of the work being done by two selfless women at the local Mission. They, with their humility, patched dresses, got no recognition at all, while Daisy got V.I.P. treatment always ' . [49]

As it happens, we have Bates' own description of one of those 'weird and wonderful' puddings. In late December 1944 she had written to an Adelaide woman friend from Wynbring about the Christmas treat she was preparing for about twenty Aboriginal children whose parents she had known earlier at Ooldea:

How glad and happy this has made me. I am going to make them a 'plum pudding'. (There won't be a 'plum' within cooee but there will be thousands of things.) Your darling little parcel is going holus bolus (when I've squashed it all in indiscriminately with a rail bolt) into the pudding ' which won't be boiled, as the ground work is Weeties or Crispies, and there will be condensed milk and mix and stewed peaches and boiled currants and pennies wrapped in paper for the nice children (some whose mothers were wee children in those years), and I have a great big wide two gallon tin dish; and cooked apples will be squashed up, and the top (when stiffened by heat or resting) will have a lovely topping of condensed milk (sweetened) and I must have it stiff enough to slice it into as many slices as there are guests ' . [50]

Bates rightly protested that she was never a cook and the food that she provided to the Aborigines at Ooldea seems to have been mostly damper and porridge. Her medical interventions were no more sophisticated, as with her claim that in the 1920s she had found a cure for gonorrheoa:

A poor native was himself in shame of it [she reminisced in November 1944] and I only used cod liver oil inwardly and outwardly. My own idea and because I feared the poor man would commit suicide in his shame. [51]

Nevertheless, all this hardly made her an 'old fraud'. She did what she could at a time when the desert people had none else to turn to.

It was only in her correspondence with Ernestine Hill during these later years that Bates revealed herself as someone capable of normal loving emotions. Forty years older than Hill, she had first met the freelance journalist at Ooldea in 1933 and this led to their close collaboration on the newspaper series, 'My Natives And I'. Although Hill's writing projects subsequently took her away from Adelaide, Bates became more conscious in later years of the invaluable assistance Hill had provided in 1935 and which she had never publicly acknowledged. 'I want to see you', she wrote to Hill from Streaky Bay in October 1946, 'and tell you how I want to serve you. I took so much from you dear friend and gave nothing back because I was filled with the joy of talking with you all after my sixteen years of 'blacks only''. [52] What Bates felt about husband Jack and son Arnold (whom she last saw in 1902 and 1919 respectively) she took to Kooran'nup with her.

 

Bates' letters do not answer the question of why she remained in the desert, long after she had ceased her most important ethnographical work. Elizabeth Polkinghorne, who worked as her secretary in Adelaide, told the journalist Elizabeth Riddell in October 1988:

The real clue to Daisy is that she would NOT compete. She was the complete autocrat ' with a will of iron and an inflexibility that was positively awesome. For her to be able to come to terms with society in general she would have had to compete, to give and take, to compromise, to fight for her opinions to be accepted and sometimes to be forced into tactical retreats and sometimes to be defeated. In short she would have had to learn to co-exist with her equals. And she couldn't! It was not in her make-up. She had to be Queen Victoria or nothing ' She found the only possible solution. Queen of the 'blacks'. No interference, because no-one cared enough about them ' Just imagine her daily life in her tent in the Nullarbor plain. This was her court. To her came the erring native, the critic, the disobeyer on hands and knees, to beg forgiveness. She would tolerate nothing but complete subservience before, with royal graciousness, she would allow the light of her countenance and the benefits of her good works to shine again on the transgressor ' . [53]

There is a superficial attraction (or should I say repellence) in this image of Daisy Bates as the tented autocrat, the self-appointed 'Saviour of the Aborigines' who was more interested in exercising absolute authority than anything else. However, it fails to do justice to her achievement as an ethnographer, as an indefatigable recorder of what could be salvaged of the traditional culture. This was her life's mission from the time when, as she put it, 'I was bitten with the virus of research'.

Bates' letters tell us little about what the Aborigines themselves thought about her at the time. Did those 'dreadful cannibals' as she liked to call them, have 'a special place in their poor savage hearts' for her? There is no way of knowing. In later years, some who had known her as children would indicate her eccentricity by holding a finger meaningfully to their heads. Others would refer to her as 'Daidj Bate mamu', attesting to the memory of her magical powers. Still others (as we have seen in the recent documentary film, Kabbarli), have condemned her out of hand for her attitude to half-castes. Those who have been involved in the native title process, however, might see her as someone who has given them back something of their lost past.