Daisy Bates (Australia) - Involvement With Australian Aboriginal People

Involvement With Australian Aboriginal People

At about this time 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. Living in a tent in small settlements from Western Australia to the edges of the Nullarbor Plain, notably at Ooldea in South Australia, she researched and wrote millions of words on the subject. She was also famed for her strict lifelong adherence to Edwardian fashion, including boots, gloves and a veil.

She also worked tirelessly for Aboriginal welfare, setting up camps to feed, clothe and nurse the transient population, drawing on her own income to meet the needs of the aged. She fought against the policy of having native people assimilated into white Australian society and resisted the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men. 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.

In spite of her fascination with their way of life, 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 and wrote in the Perth Sunday Times on 12 June 1921, '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.'