Daisy May Bates, CBE[1] (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. She was known among the native people as "Kabbarli" (i.e. /kaparli/, a kin term found in a number of Australian languages which means "grandmother" or "granddaughter"[2]).
Daisy Bates was born Margaret Dwyer in County Tipperary, Ireland in 1859. Her mother, Bridget (née Hunt), died of tuberculosis in 1862. Her father married Mary Dillon in 1864 and died en route to the United States, so she was raised in Roscrea by relatives, and educated at the National School in that town.
County Tipperary is a county in Ireland. It is located in the province of Munster. The county is named after the town of Tipperary, and was established in the early thirteenth century, shortly after the Norman invasion of Ireland. The population of the county was 159,553 at the 2016 census. The largest towns are Clonmel, Nenagh and Thurles.
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections do not have symptoms, in which case it is known as latent tuberculosis. About 10% of latent infections progress to active disease which, if left untreated, kills about half of those affected. The classic symptoms of active TB are a chronic cough with blood-containing sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. It was historically called "consumption" due to the weight loss. Infection of other organs can cause a wide range of symptoms.
Roscrea is a historical market town in County Tipperary, Ireland. In 2016 the town had a population of 5,446. The town is one of the oldest in Ireland which developed around the ancient monastery of Saint Crónán of Roscrea, parts of which remain preserved today.
Emigration and life in Australia
In November 1882, Dwyer—who by then had changed her first name to Daisy May—emigrated to Australia aboard the RMSAlmora as part of a Queensland government assisted immigration scheme. Some accounts (based on Dwyer's own claims) say that she left Ireland for "health reasons", but biographer Julia Blackburn discovered that after getting her first job as a governess in Dublin at age 18, there was a scandal, presumably sexual in nature, which resulted in the young man of the house taking his own life.[citation needed] This story has never been verified, but if true, could have spurred Dwyer to leave Ireland and reinvent her history, setting a pattern for the rest of her life.[3] It was not until long after her death that the truth about her early life emerged,[4] and even her recent biographers have produced differing accounts of her life and work.[5]
Julia Blackburn is a British author of both fiction and non-fiction. She is the daughter of poet Thomas Blackburn and artist Rosalie de Meric.
A governess is a woman employed to teach and train children in a private household. In contrast to a nanny, she concentrates on teaching children instead of meeting their physical needs. Her charges are of school age rather than babies.
Dwyer settled first at Townsville, Queensland allegedly staying first at the home of the Bishop of North Queensland and later with family friends who had migrated earlier. Dwyer had travelled with Ernest C. Baglehole and James C. Hann, amongst others, on the later stage of her journey.[citation needed] Both Baglehole and Hann had boarded at Batavia for the journey to Australia. Hann's family, through William Hann's donation of £1000, had been very generous to the construction of St James Church of England some few years before Bishop Stanton had arrived at Townsville. She subsequently found employment as a governess on Fanning Downs Station.
In Australia, a station is a large landholding used for producing livestock, predominantly cattle or sheep, that need an extensive range of grazing land. It corresponds to American ranches that operate under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 on public lands. The owner of a station is called a pastoralist or a grazier.
Records show that she married poet and horseman Breaker Morant (Harry Morant aka Edwin Murrant) on 13 March 1884 in Charters Towers; the union lasted only a short time and Dwyer reputedly threw Morant out because he failed to pay for the wedding and stole some livestock.[6] Significantly, they were never divorced. Morant biographer Nick Bleszynski suggests that Dwyer played a more important role in Morant's life than has been previously thought, and that it was she who convinced him to change his name from Edwin Murrant to Harry Harbord Morant.[citation needed]
Harry "Breaker" Harbord Morant, probably born Edwin Henry Murrant, was an Anglo-Australian drover, horseman, bush poet and military officer, who was convicted and executed for murder during the Second Anglo-Boer War.
Charters Towers is a town in northern Queensland, Australia. It is 134 kilometres (83 mi) inland (south-west) from Townsville on the Flinders Highway. In 2016 the population was 8,120 people. During the last quarter of the 19th century the town boomed as the rich gold deposits under the city were developed. After becoming uneconomic in the 20th century, profitable mining operations have commenced once again.
After parting ways with Morant, Dwyer moved to New South Wales. She said that she became engaged to Philip Gipps but he died before they could marry, though no records support this. She then met John (Jack) Bates—like Morant, a bushman and drover—and they married on 17 February 1885. Their only child, Arnold Hamilton Bates, was born in Bathurst, New South Wales on 26 August 1886. The marriage was not a happy one, probably because Jack's work kept him away from home for long periods.
New South Wales is a state on the east coast of Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria to the south, and South Australia to the west. Its coast borders the Tasman Sea to the east. The Australian Capital Territory is an enclave within the state. New South Wales' state capital is Sydney, which is also Australia's most populous city. In March 2018, the population of New South Wales was over 7.9 million, making it Australia's most populous state. Just under two-thirds of the state's population, 5.1 million, live in the Greater Sydney area. Inhabitants of New South Wales are referred to as New South Welshmen.
A drover in Australia is a person, typically an experienced stockman, who moves livestock, usually sheep, cattle, and horses "on the hoof" over long distances. Reasons for droving may include: delivering animals to a new owner's property, taking animals to market, or moving animals during a drought in search of better feed and/or water or in search of a yard to work on the livestock. The drovers who covered very long distances to open up new country were known as "overlanders".
Bathurst is a regional city in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. It is about 200 kilometres (120 mi) west-northwest of Sydney and is the seat of the Bathurst Regional Council. Bathurst is the oldest inland settlement in Australia and had a population of approximately 35,000 as at the 2016 Census.
She also found time to marry Baglehole, her emigration voyage shipmate,[citation needed] in 1885 at St Stephen's Anglican Church, Newtown, Sydney. Although he is shown as being a seaman, he was the son of a wealthy London family and had become a ship's officer after completing an apprenticeship and this might have been an attraction for Daisy.[citation needed] The polygamous nature of these marriages was kept secret during Bates's lifetime.
In February 1894, Bates returned to England, leaving Arnold in a Catholic boarding school and telling Jack that she would only return when he had a home established for her. She arrived in England penniless, but eventually 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, and enjoyed an active intellectual life among London's well-connected and bohemian literary and political milieu. However, after she left Stead's employment in 1896, it is unclear how she supported herself until 1899, when she embarked for Western Australia after Jack wrote to say that he was looking for a property there.[7]
Bates's involvement with the Aboriginal Australians was not as a missionary, doctor or teacher. The foreword of her book written by Alan Moorehead 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." Alan Moorehead also said, "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."
At about 1899 a letter was published 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 make full investigations and report the results to them. Her offer was accepted and she sailed back to Australia in August 1899. 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 also famed for her strict lifelong adherence to Edwardian fashion, including boots, gloves and a veil.
Bates set up camps to feed, clothe and nurse the transient population, 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.
Bates was convinced that the Australian Aborigines were a dying race and that her mission was to record as much as she could about them before they disappeared. She dismissed people of part Aboriginal descent as worthless although is erroneously[citation needed] quoted as writing in the Perth Sunday Times on 12 June 1921[8], "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."[9]
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 school and home for her son in Perth, invested some of her money in property as a security for her old age, bought note books and 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. This experience kindled her lifelong interest in the lives and welfare of Aboriginal people in Western and South Australia.
Based at the Beagle Bay Mission near Broome, Bates, now thirty-six, began 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 also compiled a local dictionary of several dialects, comprising some two thousand words and sentences, as well as 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 but after spending six months in the saddle and travelling four thousand kilometres, 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, studying and working for the remote Aboriginal tribes, who were being decimated by the incursions of European settlement and the introduction of modern technology, western culture and exotic diseases.
In 1904, the Registrar General of Western Australia, Malcolm Fraser,[10] appointed her to research Aboriginal customs, languages and dialects, a task which took nearly seven years to compile and arrange the data. Many of her papers were read at Geographical and Royal Society meetings.
Bates and a group of Aboriginal women, circa 1911
In 1910–11 she accompanied anthropologist A. R. Brown (later Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown) and writer and biologist E. L. Grant Watson on a Cambridge ethnological expedition to inquire into Western Australian marriage customs. She was appointed a "Travelling Protector" with a special commission to conduct inquiries into all native conditions and problems, such as employment on stations, guardianship and the morality of native and half-caste women in towns and mining camps.
Legend has it that Bates later came into conflict with Radcliffe-Brown because she sent him her manuscript report of the expedition. Much to Bates's chagrin, it was not returned for many years and when it came back it was heavily annotated with Radcliffe-Brown's critical remarks. The conflict culminated in a famous incident at a symposium, where Bates accused Radcliffe-Brown of plagiarism—Bates was scheduled to speak after Radcliffe-Brown had presented his paper, but when she rose it was only to compliment him sarcastically on his presentation of her work, after which she resumed her seat.
A "Protector of Aborigines"
After 1912, despite having earlier been appointed as Travelling Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, her application to become the Northern Territory's Protector of Aborigines was rejected on basis of her gender, Bates continued her work on her own, financing it by selling her cattle station.
The same year she became the first woman ever to be appointed Honorary Protector of Aborigines at Eucla. During the sixteen months she spent there, Bates changed from a semi-professional scientist and ethnologist to a staunch friend and protector of the Aborigines, deciding to live among them and look after them, and to observe and record their lives and lifestyle.
Bates stayed at Eucla until 1914, when she travelled to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney to attend the Science Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Science. Before returning to the desert, she gave lectures in Adelaide which aroused the interests of several women's organisations.
During her years at Ooldea she financed the supplies she bought for the Aborigines from the sale of her property. To maintain her income she wrote numerous articles and papers for newspapers, magazines and learned societies. Through journalist and author Ernestine Hill, Bates's work was introduced to the general public, although much of the publicity tended to focus on her sensational stories of cannibalism.
In August 1933 the Commonwealth Government invited Bates to Canberra to advise on Aboriginal affairs. The next year she was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by King George V. More important to Bates was the opportunity to put her work in print.
South Australia
She left Ooldea and went to Adelaide where, with the help of Ernestine Hill, she produced a series of articles for leading Australian newspapers, titled My Natives and I.
Aged seventy-one, she still walked every day to her office at The Advertiser building. Later the Commonwealth Government paid her a stipend of $4 a week to assist her in putting all her papers and notes in order and prepare her manuscript. But with no other income it was impossible for her to remain in Adelaide so she moved to the village settlement of Pyap on the Murray River where she pitched her tent and set up her typewriter.
In 1941 she went back to her tent life at Wynbring Siding, east of Ooldea, and she remained there on and off until her health forced her back to Adelaide in 1945.
In 1948 she tried, through the Australian Army, to contact her son Arnold, who by then was serving in France. Later, in 1949, she contacted the Army again, through the RSL, in an effort to communicate with him. Arnold was living in New Zealand but refused to have anything to do with his mother.
Daisy Bates died on 18 April 1951, aged 91. She is buried at Adelaide's North Road Cemetery.
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film directed by Phillip Noyce based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is loosely based on a true story concerning the author's mother Molly, as well as two other mixed-race Aboriginal girls, Daisy Kadibil and Grace, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, Western Australia, to return to their Aboriginal families, after being placed there in 1931. The film follows the Aboriginal girls as they walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being pursued by white law enforcement authorities and an Aboriginal tracker.
Ernestine Hill was an Australian journalist, travel writer and novelist.
Ooldea is a tiny settlement in South Australia. It is on the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain, 863 km (536 mi) west of Port Augusta on the Trans-Australian Railway. Ooldea is 143 km (89 mi) from the bitumen Eyre Highway.
The Maralinga Tjarutja is the corporation representing the traditional Anangu owners of the remote western areas of South Australia known as the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. It is one of the four regions local government areas of South Australia classified an Aboriginal Council (AC) and not incorporated within a local government area. This indigenous Australian people whose historic rights over the area have been officially recognised belongs to the southern branch of the Pitjantjatjara people. They have a community centre at Oak Valley, 520 miles NW of Ceduna, and close historical and kinship links with the Yalata 350km south, and the Pila Nguru centre of Tjuntjuntjara 370km to their west.
Wilfrid Henry Douglas ("Wilf") was a missionary, linguist and translator, and carried out important early work on many indigenous Australian languages.
The office of the Protector of Aborigines was established pursuant to a recommendation contained in the Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, of the House of Commons. On 31 January 1838, Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies sent Governor Gipps the report.
The history of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Western Australia has been dated as existing for 50-70 thousand years before European contact. This article only deals with documented history from non indigenous sources since European settlement in Perth.
Half-Caste Act was the common name given to Acts of Parliament passed in Victoria and Western Australia in 1886. They became the model for legislation of Aboriginal communities throughout Australia, such as the Aboriginal Protection and restriction of the sale of opium act 1897 in Queensland.
Fay Gale AO was an Australian cultural geographer and an emeritus professor. She was a passionate advocate of equal opportunity for women and for Aboriginal people.
William Harris (1867–1931) was an early Western Australian leader for Aboriginal civil rights.
The Young Kabbarli is a one-act chamber opera written in 1964 by the Australian composer Margaret Sutherland; it is her only work in the operatic genre. The libretto was by Maie Casey, based on poetry by Judith Wright and Shaw Neilson.
Dorre Island is one of three islands that make up the Bernier and Dorre Island Nature Reserve in the Shark Bay World Heritage area in Western Australia. The island is named after Peter Dorre, the pilot of a Dutch vessel, the Eendracht, in 1616.
Daisy Bates at Ooldea is a painting by Australian artist Sidney Nolan, completed in Sydney in 1950 after Nolan, his wife Cynthia and stepdaughter Jinx visited the small South Australian settlement of Ooldea during their travels in Central Australia. The painting shows Irish Australian anthropologist Daisy Bates (1859–1951) standing alone in stark, barren landscape. Bates became famous for spending most of her later years living among Aboriginal tribes in the outback, including sixteen years at Ooldea.
The Rufus River Massacre was a massacre of Aboriginals that took place in 1841 along the Rufus River near Wentworth, Australia. It was the result of six months of guerrilla warfare by the local Aboriginal people (Maraura), who blocked an overlander route through their land. The original cause of much of the trouble with the Aboriginal groups was the Europeans engaging in sexual relations with the women without giving the food and clothing promised first. That initiated an escalating cycle of conflicts, which eventually included the Aboriginal groups stealing thousands of European sheep.
The Ngalea or Ngalia were an indigenous Australian people of the Western Desert cultural bloc resident in land extending from Western Australia to the west of South Australia. They are not to be confused with the Ngalia of the Northern Territory.
The Arabana, also known as the Ngarabana, are an indigenous Australian people of South Australia.
The Kokatha, also known as the Kokatha Mula, are an indigenous Australian people of the state of South Australia. They speak the Kokatha language, close to or a dialect of the Western Desert language.
The Antakirinja, otherwise spelt Antakarinya, and alternatively spoken of as the Ngonde, are an indigenous Australian people of South Australia.
The Wirangu are an indigenous Australian people of the Western coastal region of South Australia.
↑ Glass, A. and D. Hackett, (2003) Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra to English Dictionary Alice Springs, IAD Press. ISBN1-86465-053-2, p39
↑ Reece, Bob (18 October 2009). "The Irishness of Daisy Bates"(PDF). Australian-Irish Heritage Association. Retrieved 19 June 2018. Was her departure hastened by a young man of good family committing suicide on her account? We shall never know.
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