Susanna De Vries - Desert Queen

This book is dedicated to Jim McJannett of Thursday Island,
Queensland, whose collection of Daisy Bates papers and
photographs, along with his encyclopaedic knowledge and
research skills, has been invaluable.

Map showing the places Daisy visited, including the railway that passed through Ooldea

A t one time in our not so distant past, the story of Daisy Bates was taught in every school in Australia. Arriving in Australia in 1883 with no money, family or friendsbut with extraordinary pretensionsthis remarkable Irish orphan somehow managed to marry three times, bear a child, live in Victorian formality in a tent in the outback and become a pioneer ethnographer and documenter of Aboriginal customs. Her initial research into West Australian tribal ceremonies, customs, languages and kinship systems, carried out at a time when the subjects of ethnology and anthropology were struggling to establish themselves as university disciplines, was extremely valuable. Her important work The Native Tribes of Western Australia was not published until 1985 (edited by anthropologist Isobel White), but her observations have underpinned much understanding of Aboriginal society and helped Aboriginal people regain their land.

Daisy Bates was an extraordinary and eccentric woman by any measure. In 2005 she was nominated as one of the worlds great female travel writers on the basis of her daring trek from the north east of Australia three thousand miles in a side saddle, escorting a mob of cattle south. Yet before this, she had of course travelled on her own the thousands of miles from Ireland by ship to an unknown continent on the other side of the world.

Marrying the first of her three husbands (none of whom she bothered to divorce), the Boer War soldier Breaker Morant, the pair would go on separately to make themselves legends. Spinning fanciful tales about their pasts they nevertheless lived more astonishing real lives, Morant ending up before a firing squad, and Daisy eventually taking herself, her tent and her young son to the bleak Nullabor Desert, all the while maintaining strict Victorian dress if not morals.

For sixteen years she lived alongside Australian Aborigines, befriending and studying them at the expense of her own health. Her restricted diet in a drought-ridden desert, without fresh vegetables, led to her lack of essential vitamins and minerals and the breakdown in her health. But her many references to Aboriginal cannibalism and her support for removing children from what she viewed as abusive conditions, especially once alcohol took its hold within Aboriginal societies, and her support for a widely held belief in the ultimate extinction of the Aborigines in Australia meant her reputation suffered.

One of the earliest authors to document Daisy Batess life was the journalist Ernestine Hill, who collaborated with Daisy Bates from 1932 to write the story of this fascinating woman. During this time Daisy Bates also opened some of her own history in My Natives and I, a series of articles published in the Adelaide Advertiser between 1936 and 1940. In both the accounts she gave Ernestine Hillwhose Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir of Daisy Bates, was published in 1973and in My Natives and I, Daisy Bates described how she arrived in Australia in 1883 as an orphan from Ireland, where she had grown up under the protection of an adoring father. According to Daisy, some time after her gentleman father died, she was cared for by the Outram family in Dorset, England, where she was attended on by servants, educated by a governess and taken on visits to Balmoral Castle.

Since My Natives and I, much of the writing about Daisy Batess childhood in Ireland has been based on her youthful fantasies and often repeats or embroiders the misinformation of previous biographies.

In 1971 Elizabeth Salter produced a biography of Daisy, Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen of the Never Never, yet she never visited Batess homeland of Ireland. Two decades later, Julia Blackburn, an English writer, published Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994), written in the narrative style known as faction: part-fact, part-fiction. She tried to discover the secrets of Daisy Batess mysterious past, but concentrated her research solely in Australia. So when I embarked on this new work, I realised I had to look for more documentary evidence about Daisy Bates, both in Ireland and Australia.

In the summer of 2005, I journeyed to Ireland to investigate what I could of Daisys past. I found Ireland in the midst of its sustained Celtic tiger economic boom, and Irish people proud of what they had accomplished. Records previously unavailable had now been computerised and much new information had emerged about Daisy, her family background and her formative years as a charity child at the Free Convent School in Roscrea. All of this casts new light on the extraordinary story of this remarkable woman.

Originally I intended to include a brief version of Daisys life in my collection of short biographies Great Pioneer Women of the Outback, but she simply didnt fit in with the wives who obediently accompanied their husbands to the outback. Daisy was different. She was indomitable, her own woman. She travelled thousands of kilometres on her own initiative, abandoned two husbands, while another disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and spent years of her life in arduous conditions studying Australias first inhabitants. She deserves an entire book to herself.

Daisy ODwyer