DAISY BATES
“A remarkable and eccentric woman …”
A remarkable and eccentric woman in the spheres of journalism and anthropology, Daisy Bates, left her tracks all over the outback regions of West Australia.
In an age before women’s liberation was a fad, Daisy Bates cast off her shackles in an era of strict Victorian standards, exerting her wilful personality over a straight-laced society that did not quite know how to categorise her individualistic behaviour.
With typical flair and high spirits, the little Irish lady, liberated and rebellious, defiantly forged for herself a reputation among the leading lights of politics, anthropology and academia, although for all her years she was only a tiny woman, always dressed impeccably in long sweeping skirts and white gloves: a living contradiction in conservatism and unbridled eccentricity, ending her life as a J.P., Protector of Aborigines and C.B.E.
She was born Daisy O’Dwyer at Tipperary, Ireland, on October 16, 1863. Or so she claimed.
She was a staunch Protestant, with an ancestor, William O’Dwyer, who she said had been appointed the Baron of Kilnamagh by Edward III, she claimed during pretentious moments.
Some researchers have said Daisy was really born in 1859. Her Mother died when quite young and her Father, James, who Daisy once described as “a gentleman,” was, in fact, an alcoholic who abandoned his children and embarked for America with a girl friend, dying en route.
Parentless, little Daisy O’Dwyer was placed in an orphanage where she was surprisingly well educated, developing a wonderful sense of humour, a gift for languages, plus a self-confidence that enabled her to converse comfortably, and convincingly, with royalty and social dignitaries of her day.
She further claimed to be of ultra-conservative background, saying her family was connected with the practice of law, and a grandfather, a magistrate, she implied, while dividing his time between the courts and pubs, exercised a firm influence over young Daisy O’Dwyer, especially in formulating her unorthodox opinions and attitudes.
A friend once said Daisy “could charm the swans off a pond.”
Frustrated, young Daisy came to be diagnosed as having a spot on her lungs, and a warmer climate was advised.
“So,” she later wrote, “was Australia brought on to my life’s map.”
As a young woman, Daisy O’Dwyer received an invitation from a family friend, Bishop Stanton, of North Queensland, to visit him in Australia, her writings state.
In 1884 she sailed on the “Almora” for Townsville, about 320 kilometres north of the Tropic of Capricorn, in Queensland.
Life in North Queensland for an Ango-Irish lass of minor aristocratic stock was a series of social gatherings that necessitated riding long overland journeys on horseback, tackling snakes, crocodiles, and other potential dangers.
She was informed, however, that a “gently brought up young lady” could not go adventuring around a foriegn land by herself.
Although the young Irish woman insisted on riding sidesaddle in the manner considered respectable, her tempestuous spirit still enabled her to take part in station work, such as mustering wild brumbies and wheeling scrub cattle.
Records show that she possibly married poet-horseman Harry (“Breaker”) Morant – or Harry Morant (aka Edwin Murrant) – on March 13, 1884; the union lasted only a short time and Daisy reputedly threw Morant out because he failed to pay for the wedding and stole a pig and a saddle. Significantly, they were never divorced. Morant’s biographer, Nick Bleszynski, suggests that Daisy 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.
Once acclimatised, Daisy decided to travel south on Cobb and Co. coaches for much of the way, preferring to ride up on the box seat with the driver than being squashed up inside with “odoriferous Chinese (and) inebriated squatters.”
Her new life in Australia brought wider horizons.
She noted: “There is that sort of primitiveness … that makes one eager to tackle primitive conditions.”
Daisy was not at this point in any way alluding to Aboriginal people who were fated to become a dominant part of her life, thoughts and work.
In fact, at this period, in a letter, she described the Aboriginal folk as: “The queerest looking mortals, with their long, lean legs and arms, without an atom of flesh on them, more like spiders than anything human.”
In need of money, Daisy obtained employment as a governess on a dairy farm, south of Sydney, and it was at this time, in 1884, that the Irish girl met a “wild colonial boy”, Jack Bates, an unlettered stockman whose reckless life style mightily appealed to her.
Together, the “wild Irish girl” and the untalkative bushman, rode through the countryside, becoming acquainted.
To the young, naive lass, Jack Bates seemed a heroic figure, one who bravely tackled the rigours and dangers of outback living, facing fire and flood and outwitting the Aborigines who crept stealthily about his night camp.
The couple unwisely married on February 17, 1885.
Quickly becoming pregnant, a distressed Daisy told the doctor: “But I don’t want a baby.”
Aggravating her further was a creeping knowledge that her brave, adventurous husband showed no interest in settling down to domesticated bliss; he continued his life as a drover, leaving her alone for lengthy periods.
Their son, Arnold Bates, was born at Bathurst, New South Wales, on August 26, 1886.
The event appeared to mark the end of their marriage, for she later wrote: “I had rather a hard time of it with baby … Jack never came near me after that.”
In February, 1884, leaving her 8-year-old son in a boarding school, and with no realistic prospects of a reconciliation with her itinerant husband, the “witty lady with the vivacious personality and … beautiful Irish eyes” boarded the sailing ship, “Macquarie,” for a nostalgic return to England.
How she endured the separation from both her husband and son was not recorded in her diary or letters.
Acquiring a position as a journalist, Daisy absorbed herself in the round of social activities, pounding a typewriter until her finger tips were raw and needed to be bandaged with rags.
During this period she encountered many of the celebrities of the day.
She instantly disliked Cecil Rhodes because there was “something juggernauty about a man with a heavy jowl.”
The famed socialist-cum-author, George Bernard Shaw, she described as “rough, unwashed looking, sandy-haired Irishman … the genesis of all the rebellious gatherings that have taken place in England.”
In August, 1899, Daisy booked her passage on the “Stuttgart”, bound for West Australia.
Waiting for her at the Fremantle wharf was her estranged husband, Jack Bates.
She viewed him thus: “His mind (was) so little exercised that to follow a thought sent him to sleep. His … form and features … had become loose and flabby and common.”
She assessed her son as “dirty, unmothered, neglected (and) incongruous.”
In Perth, while Daisy fraternised with the social elite, husband Jack resignedly returned to the North West.
Seeing a new horizon ahead, shortly the “English lady journalist,” as the Perth press called her, caught a coastal steamer bound for Cossack to rejoin her spouse.
Here, and further north, probably for the first time, she saw pregnant Aboriginal women being forced to dive for the pearlers, men chained by the ankles and neck working in the terrible heat, as well as the bodies of dead absconders, still wearing chains, lying beside dried out creeks in the bush country.
These sights affected her so deeply she devoted the next fifty years of her life to the dwindling Aboriginal tribal people, fascinated by their customs, rituals and mythology. The Aborigines called her “Karrarli,” meaning “grand-mother.”
She likened the experience to “watching the doings and listening to the conversation of early mankind.”
From 1899-1900 she was at the Trappist mission, Beagle Bay, north of Broome in the north-west of West Australia.
In 1904, she was appointed by the West Australian government to research the tribes of the State.
Additionally, Bates was the only female member of an anthropological expedition led by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown to study the social structure and habits of Aboriginal people of north-west Australia in 1910. Daisy eventually discarded the egotistical Englishman, regarding him as arrogant and something of an academic parasite who plundered her research and presented it as his own.
For more than twenty years Bates camped at several locations in South Australia and West Australia: Eucla, 1912-1914; near Yalata, 1915-1918; and near Ooldea, 1918-1934.
Every day she felt compelled to persist with her attempt to document the Aborigines’ dialect and mythology, even as the desert sand infiltrated her eyes to dim her sight.
“There are still hundreds and hundreds of words that I have to write down because if I do not do it they will be gone for ever. I hate to think of words being lost like that, cut away from the things they are tied to, evaporating into silence,” she wrote.
Later, she described one of the Aboriginal women who, she says bluntly, was “a prostitute along the line and … when she gave birth to a half-caste she killed him and ate him.”
Daisy’s exposure of cannibalism among Australian Aborigines was often disregarded by her male colleagues in anthropological circles; it was then (and is now) a taboo subject that is often dishonestly suppressed as it does not suit the concocted image of “the noble savage” so readily propagated among academics and contemporary part-European “Aboriginals.”
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Aboriginal welfare work on January 1, 1934. She was also a member of the British Royal Anthropological Institute and the Australasian Anthropological Institute, much to the chagrin of some male colleagues in a fiercely competitive area of academia.
In 1902, aged 39 years, accompanying her husband, Daisy took part in a 1,126 km droving trip, tailing 770 head of cattle between Roebuck Plains and Peak Hill Station, on the Murchison River, doing the distance on horseback, riding sidesaddle.
In September 1919 Daisy Bates settled down to full time welfare work at Ooldea, in South Australia, and was a few months later appointed a Justice of the Peace, being the only woman to hold such a commission in two Australian States at the same time.
At Ooldea, Daisy Bates pitched a rough tent which became her home for the next sixteen years. During that time she waged a “one woman war” to keep the Aborigines away from the railway line and its “civilisation”. She never tried to teach or convert them. She believed them to be a dying race and wanted them to stay unchanged.
“Woman’s World” publication referred to her as “The Great White Queen of the Never-Never”.
Later Daisy Bates defiantly wrote that during her time at Ooldea “no more half-caste children were born, nor was any half-cast ever begotten in any of my camps.”
When once again away from the desert, Daisy Bates set up her tent at the Maamba Reserve, in Cannington, at the foot of the Darling Ranges (near Perth), and calmly invited the swarthy inhabitants – many drunken derelicts – to join her for a cup of tea.
To keep her billy boiling, she wrote articles on the mysteries of the Aboriginal world in “The West Australian” and the “Western Mail” newspapers.
During her fascinating life, Daisy was described by friends and peers as “courageous … untruthful … determined … bigoted … charming … rude … intelligent … egocentric … arrogant … generous … eccentric … intolerant … kind … frustrating.”
Daisy May Bates J.P., C.B.E., died at Prospect, Adelaide (South Australia), on April 18, 1951, aged ninety-two.
-B.J.C.
Foot Note: The drover, Jack Bates, husband of Daisy, is understood to have died in 1935 at Mullewa, in West Australia, aged 78 years, and is said to be buried in an unmarked grave in the Mullewa Cemetery.
