Daisy Bates's 16 years with Aboriginals at Ooldea in South Australia from 1918 adds to her enigma
Daisy Bates lived in a tent among the Aboriginals at Ooldea, wearing her strict Edwardian fashion.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Daisy Bates, who spent 16 years from 1918 camped at Ooldea, a former permanent waterhole on the edge of the Nullabor Plain, 863 km west of Port Augusta on the trans-Australian railway, was a controversial and eccentric figure in her dealings with Aboriginal people.
Bates represents the paradox of sympathy and an Imperial attitude of racial superiority towards Aboriginals. She was an anthropologist as well as a welfare worker. She collected vocabularies and recorded data on Aboriginal language, myths, religion and kinship laws. But she also predicted Aboriginals would die out and that white Australians should help ease their passing. More distressing were Bates’ descriptions of Aboriginal women and children as child killers and cannibals (quoted in Pauline Hanson’s 1997 parliamentary speech).
Bates was also seen as “The Protector of Aborigines” for her welfare work that gained fame from three visits by British royalty. She didn’t try to teach or convert Aboriginals. She fought against the policy to assimilate them into white Australian society and resisted the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men.
She lived in a tent among the Aboriginals at Ooldea, wearing her strict Edwardian fashion.
Bates, who learned her journalism with the Review of Reviews in the UK, wrote 270 newspaper articles about Aboriginal life. Writer Ernestine Hill helped Bates return to Adelaide to write her autobiography My Natives and I and episodes for a later book The Passing of the Aborigines.
Bates found a stipend from the Australian government to prepare her papers for the national collection insufficient, so she lived in a tent at Pyap, near Loxton, on the River Murray, before moving to the Nullabor in 1941.
Old age and failing health forced her back to Adelaide where she died in an old people’s home at Prospect in 1951.
Born in Ireland, Bates came to Australian originally in 1884, after an unstable childhood and suspected tuberculosis, and lived briefly in Townsville as a guest of Anglican bishop George Stanton. Soon after, she married Harry “Breaker” Morant – the first of three husbands in two years. She left a son behind in returning in 1894 to England where she worked on the Review of Reviews.
Back in Australia in 1899, Bates became interested in an allegation in The Times about atrocities against Aboriginals in north-west Australia, north of Broome.
She continued inquiries among Aboriginals in 1901 when she rejoined her husband on the cattle station at Roebuck Plains, where tribes from Broome district were camped. She looked into roots in kinship, collected vocabularies and saw sacred and secret rituals. These interests estranged her from her husband, and she left him after a harrowing ride overlanding cattle from Broome to Perth in 1902.
In 1904, the Western Australian government appointed Bates to research Aboriginal tribes. Her 1905 paper on marriage laws showed how the four-section system for northern tribes equated to those to the south. In 1910, she turned herself to welfare, moved by the sick and elderly Aboriginals’ enforced exiles on the islands of Bernier (males) and Dorré (females).
In 1912, she set up the first of her harsh isolated camps at Eucla among remnants of the Mirning tribe on the fringe of the Nullarbor Plain. She was invited to the 1914 meetings in eastern capitals of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. To attend, she crossed 402km over the southern Nullarbor Plain in a small cart pulled by camels.
She returned in 1915 to the Mirning's area, near Yalata. In 1918, during a brief time in Adelaide, she failed to get a protectorship and money for medical work from the South Australian government. She left for her 16 years at Ooldea.