Daisy Bates: Grand dame of the desert.

Gray, Geoffrey

Daisy Bates: Grand dame of the desert

Bob Reece 2007

National Library of Australia, Canberra, vi+204pp, ISBN 9780642276544 (pbk)

In a paper published in Australian Aboriginal Studies, Bob Reece (2007:54) explains his purpose in writing about Daisy Bates:

 My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Bates
 as an ethnographer ... As an historian, I see it
 as my ultimate task to make available from
 her extensive correspondence sufficient of her
 own writings for people to make up their
 minds about her motivation and beliefs, and
 about what kind of person she really was.

He charts her early life in Ireland, arrival and work in Australia, her interest in Aboriginal peoples and her consequent development as a fieldworker (a self-taught anthropologist), and her final days working as a journalist in Adelaide. Reece makes the assertion that she was the first to undertake intensive participant/observer fieldwork, which became the template for modern anthropological fieldwork. (This is contested by the work of AC Haddon in the Tortes Strait in 1898, and Baldwin Spencer in Central Australia in the 1890s). She is described as not engaging in theory, just stating the facts as she witnessed them--empiricism at its most pure. In response to a criticism by JB Cleland that she was misled by informants who provided the answers that they thought she wanted, Reece defends her: it 'is hardly a convincing accusation against a highly experienced field worker who was perfectly aware of the hazard' (p.88). Her unsubstantiated arguments about the existence of wholesale cannibalism among the desert people seems to seriously undermine his defence.

Bates also claimed to be more knowledgeable about the people among whom she lived than they themselves. Bates reminded people that she was 'an initiated Manichmat who knew far more about their culture than they did themselves' (p.90), a not unusual rebuke from some anthropologists to criticism by Aboriginal persons. She reminds me of TGH Strehlow, who saw himself as the last of the Arrernte, a repository of all the old knowledge about them.

As for her ethnographic knowledge and its value today, outside of Native Title claims, as a source of ethnographic authority, I, like Reece, cannot make a judgment. Its use in Native Title cases is piecemeal and fragmentary. Her skills as a linguist were poor; again it is fragmentary material that is used in Native Title cases. It was described in the 1930s as 'information of scientific interest' that was 'disjointed, very incomplete and in its present form apt to be misleading' (p.103).

She was not a likeable person, prone to lying, exaggerating and self-promotion. Her hatred of people of mixed descent is particularly discomforting.

Reece has, however, achieved his aim: he has provided a book that enables us, the readers, to make up our minds about her motivation and beliefs, and what kind of person she was. For those interested in Daisy Bates, this is a good book to start with among the plethora of books on her.

REFERENCE

Reece, Bob 2007 '"You would have loved her for her lore": The letters of Daisy Bates', Australian Aboriginal Studies 2007/1:51-70.

Reviewed by Geoffrey Gray, AIATSI5 <Geoffrey. Gray@aiatsis.gov.au>