Daisy Bates

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daisy Bates (1921)

Daisy May Bates CBE (born October 16, 1859 in Roscrea in County Tipperary , Ireland , † April 18, 1951 in Adelaide , South Australia , Australia ) was an Irish-born Australian journalist.

Her life was remarkable for the time, as she lived alone as a white woman in the barren Nullarbor desert among Aborigines. She was the only female person who received a salary from an Australian colonial government to study Aboriginal life . In her honor and for her commitment, she was called Kabbarli (German: grandmother ) by the Aborigines in her language .

Private life

Daisy Bates was the daughter of James Edward O'Dwyer and Marguarette, née Hunt. Her mother died of tuberculosis on December 20, 1862 . Daisy had an unprotected childhood and grew up with relatives in Roscrea. At the age of 23, she went to Australia to heal because it was believed that she might have contracted tuberculosis. There she lived in Townsville and later with friends of the family who had previously immigrated. She found work in a cattle breeding station as a governess .

On March 13, 1884, she married Breaker Morant, but the marriage failed after a short time. She then went to New South Wales and married John (Jack) Bates on February 17, 1885. Later that year, she married Ernest C. Baglehole, a seaman and drover, on June 10, 1885 at St Stephen's Anglican Church near Sydney . On August 26, 1886, their son Arnold Hamilton Bates was born in Bathurst , New South Wales. The marriage did not last because of long periods of separation; she returned to England in February 1894, where she found a job as a journalist and stayed for five years.

Living with Aborigines

After returning to Australia in 1899, she went to an Aboriginal mission station on Beagle Bay , north of Broome . There she was interested in the relationships and ways of life of the Aborigines and collected vocabulary, observed their rituals and customs.

Daisy Bates was commissioned by the government of Western Australia to study the anthropology of the Aboriginal tribes and to compile data on their languages, myths, religion and relationships.

In an important study in 1905, she showed that the same rules of marriage apply to the northern and southern tribes. By 1910 she had completed her written statements about the Aborigines, but they were lost. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown , who was conducting a study of the Northwestern Aborigines, accepted them into his expedition team based on their experiences. In this measure, however, she primarily devoted herself to the well-being of the indigenous population, the fate and health of those Aborigines who had to live in exile separated from men on Bernier Island and women on Dorre Island . She stated that this concern was what the Aborigines called her Kabbarli , the grandmother, in their language .

Daisy Bates in a group of Aboriginal women (around 1911)

In 1912 Bates lived for the first time in inhospitable, isolated camps among the Mirning Aborigines near Eucla in the Nullarbor Desert, for which she became known and was invited to lectures in the eastern cities of Australia. To get to the cities, she crossed the southern Nullarbor Desert for a distance of about 400 kilometers in a small cart pulled by camels.

In 1915 she returned to the Mirning area on the eastern border near Yalata . In 1918 she failed with her request to get support and money for medicine from the government of South Australia. Even so, she stayed for 16 years in Ooldea , a water filling station on the Australian Railway that crosses Australia. Aborigines had settled there. The travelers were able to see for themselves their remarkable work for the benefit of the Aborigines.

In 1932 she befriended the writer Ernestine Hill , who helped her to publish her autobiography My Natives and I in various newspapers. In order to keep her findings in writing, the government paid her a salary in 1936. She left 99 files in the Commonwealth National Library. Daisy Bates wrote 270 articles in magazines. In 1938 she published The Passing of the Aborigines . In 1945 she was forced to go to Adelaide because of her health .

After her death in a retirement home, she was buried in Adelaide's North Road Cemetery .

Her life found expression in the opera The Young Kabbarli , written by Lady Casey and with music by Margaret Sutherland.

literature

  • Julia Blackburn: Daisy Bates in the Desert . Berlin. Berlin-Verlag 1995. ISBN 3-8270-0145-5
  • Joachim Specht: The Lady in the Bush . Bayreuth: Verlag der Nation 1994. ISBN 3-373-00431-4
  • Sussanna De Vries: Desert Queen: The many lives and loves of Daisy Bates. Pymble 2008, NSW Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 9780732282431
  • Bob Reece: Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert. Canberra 2008, ACT National Library of Australia. ISBN 9780642276544

Web links

Commons : Daisy Bates  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. womenaustralia.info : Daisy May Bates , in English, accessed on March 28, 2012
  2. In the joint authority file (GND) of the German National Library , the year of birth is given as 1859 (see authority data / GND below); in other sources such as B. The Australian Women's Register , on the other hand, is given as 1863 as the year of birth. However, this information contradicts the year of her mother's death, 1862.
  3. a b adb.ed.au : RVS Wright: In: Australian Dictionary of Biography: Bates, Daisy May (1863–1951) , in English, accessed on March 28, 20121
  4. Your private life is presented in other sources in a slightly different form.