Daisy Bates (research for the novel I've been meaning to write for 25 years)

The novel will be called One of Two People. It will be (it is) my white whale. A quarter of a century has passed with no progress. Maybe someone will bequest or leave or grant me money somehow, somewhere, sometime to do this, but since this is Australia, I doubt it. 

‘I am two people. One I like, and the other I do not know.’
Daisy Bates
 
Daisy Bates, or Kabbarli (grandmother) as her ‘natives’ called her, is best remembered as an eccentric Edwardian, done up in a white blouse, stiff collar and ribbon tie; a dark skirt, sailor hat and flyveil. Bates always maintained a ‘fastidious toilet … to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it when Victoria was Queen’. Most people would visualise her waiting for the train at Ooldea Siding, or back at Yooldilya gabbi (Ooldea Soak), bringing her warmth, charity and strong, healing hands to the local Wirangu people. The inimitable Bates lived alone in a tent with her collection of Dickens novels, in this inhospitable chunk of desert, 190 kilometres north of Fowler’s Bay, from 1919 until 1935. Many of us might not realise that Daisy May O’ Dwyer, once-time wife of the almost-as-infamous Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, was just as comfortable walking the streets of Adelaide as trawling the desert for young Aboriginal girls to mother.

Bates, like many of the grand figures of Australian history (read Percy Grainger), was a mass of contradictions: conservative Edwardian and bigamist; ethnographer and shonky journalist (in 1908 she met a group of Aboriginal women in the Murchison district, every one of which, she claimed ‘… killed and ate her newborn baby, sharing it with every other woman in her group’); inspiring (an outback proto-feminist) but, in the end, sad; loving, but impossible to love.

In her day, Bates was a major national figure. She was almost as well-known as Don Bradman (who also came to live in Adelaide in the mid-thirties) and Phar Lap, Squizzy Taylor and Billy Hughes. Bates was the original Geraldine Cox, running a one-woman mission for a people who were, in her opinion, destined for extinction. Whereas Cox’s Sunrise Children’s Village is all about creating futures, Bates’ work was more about soothing the fatal wound of history.

Bates was brought to Adelaide by the travel writer and novelist Ernestine Hill (best known for her 1941 novel about Matthew Flinders, My Love Must Wait) who had persuaded The Advertiser’s managing editor, Russell Dumas, to offer Bates money to write a series of features about her desert experiences. Hill would be employed to help her. Bates was more than happy to oblige. She had come to believe that she’d gathered as much material about the desert Aborigines as she could. Also, the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) had set up in Ooldea Soak in 1933 and stolen at least some of her thunder. With typical temerity she explained, ‘[The mission’s] coming has brought my work of investigation to a dead end. Of course, I encourage my natives to go to the mission and stay there … one must play the game, you know.’

Bates was soon set up in The Advertiser’s offices in King William Street. A local journalist described the scene: ‘She had a glass-lined cubby about ten by eight … Mrs Hill had the air of a nurse maid, utterly unable to control her charge … she did not seem to have the right feeling for Mrs Bates.’

Hill was being paid to ‘assist’ Bates, but it is now generally accepted that she had much more than a secretarial role in helping prepare the features that were published as ‘My Natives and I’. Bates was 76 years old, with failing eyes, a ‘sallow and thin’ face and hoarse whisper. Still, Hill later claimed, ‘I was careful, and she would have wished it, that all the material … was exclusively hers.’

The grand dame of Adelaide was soon making up for a lifetime in the desert. Of an evening she would walk to her room at the ‘South Australian’ on North Terrace, where she was the in-house celebrity. Hill later wrote of this period: ‘The house phones at the South Australian were carolling all day, flowers, letters, notes to be delivered … she was the friend of the world, inviting it to dinner, luncheon and tea. Greeting a dozen at a time she mustered them all to the dining room at the bang of a gong.’

Bates was invited across the road to Government House (but turned down the invitation) and went on a shopping spree on the proceeds of her writing. After years of tent life, the temptations of the city were too much. Just before Christmas 1935 she worked her way along Rundle Street’s department stores. Her young companion on that day, Josephine Wylde (daughter of an Advertiser editor), said that ‘she flitted from counter to counter … collecting things she thought we would like as she went. My mother worried that she may not realise how much she was spending … but she sailed on majestically: “It might be my last Christmas and I am enjoying it with children.”’

It seems she loved children. Her own son, Arnold Bates, was born in 1886. At the time, she was bigamously married to Jack Bates. Arnold fought in World War I and later moved to New Zealand. When Daisy attempted to contact him in 1949, he wanted nothing to do with her. Arnold realised he had always come a distant second to his mother’s ‘natives’.

Such was Daisy’s mindset, and determination. She had been a self-declared ethnographer since 1904, when she began collecting Aboriginal vocabularies for the WA Registrar-General. It’s likely this is where she first learnt of the plight of indigenous Australians: exploited by station owners, living in poor conditions, far from decent health and education services. Perhaps not all that different from today. Bates often expressed her opinion of well-meaning government agencies and missionary societies. ‘The most that can be said of these efforts is that the native exists, or, perhaps the better would be, suffers, a little longer; his ultimate disappearance is only a matter of time.’ This statement must be taken in the context of the time. It’s not that Bates wanted them gone (after all, she devoted her life to their welfare), but she always believed that there was ‘no way of protecting the Stone Age from the twentieth century.’

By January 1937, with her bank account overdrawn, and intending to research a new book, Bates moved to Pyap, near Loxton. She’d recently sent her collected articles to a London publisher, but on the way the plane had crashed into the sea. The bags were salvaged and the articles forwarded to John Murray, who eventually published them as The Passing of the Aborigines. Although out-of-print today (for obvious reasons), after appearing in 1938 this book was read and admired throughout the world, affirming Bates’ reputation as the authority on Australian Aborigines (although many disputed this).

After years in the Riverland, and a mental and physical breakdown, Bates was hospitalised in Trent Hospital, South Terrace (St Andrew’s) in 1945. The old wanderlust soon kicked in and this time she went to live at Streaky Bay, hoping that she might run into some of her old wards.

A friend, Beatrice Raine, invited her back to Adelaide in 1948 to share a house in the Hills. Bates was almost ninety but showed no signs of slowing. Upon her return to the city, she tried to contact her son in New Zealand. She had always carried a picture of him as a seven-year-old. When he refused to talk to her, Bates told a friend that ‘he must have lost his memory’. This, she convinced herself, was the only way to explain his rejection. But, according to a journalist who met Arnold Bates, he had no feeling for her or her ‘legend’ at all.

By 1949 Bates had become the grand old dame of Adelaide again. She still dressed in her Edwardian finest, parading along King William Street. Cars would slow to look and kids would ask mums, ‘Is that Mrs Bates?’ On a good day, an Adelaidean might see the Don and Daisy in a single afternoon. Bates would often get lost, confused, and ask for directions. She’d wander onto roads and have to be helped, but no man or woman alive was about to tell Daisy she should be home beside the wireless.

One day she stood outside Government House, demanding to see the Governor. To save everyone embarrassment, a local policewoman, Alvis Brooks, convinced her that her car was the Governor’s own limousine, and Bates allowed her to drive her home. 

Over the following 18 months, Daisy moved to Torrens Park, and then St Margaret’s Convalescent Home at Semaphore and, finally, to a private hospital at Prospect where, on 19 April 1951, almost blind from sand blight, small, weak, but still proudly defiant and mentally sharp, she died. She was buried at North Road Cemetery with a sprig of desert pea on her coffin.

It’s worth a visit: row 15S, plot 255B. Ironically, Daisy is hemmed in by the suburbs, nearby car yards and back yards full of washing flapping in the breeze. But, of course, she’s not. She’s still in her tent, reading David Copperfield, fixing cuts and grazes, helping her Aborigines. And for what other reason than a deep well of compassion and love? Sometimes, in our struggle to understand this complex woman, we lose track of this one simple truth.

Tom Playford paid tribute to her, but didn’t think her worth a state funeral. Although born in County Tipperary, Ireland, Kabbarli made the desert, and the streets Adelaide, her home. For this, we should all be grateful.