About Daisy Mae Bates:
Dates: 1861 - April 18, 1951
Occupation: social worker, writer
Known for: work with Australian Aborigines
Also known as: Daisy Bates, Daisy O'Dwyer Hunt Bates, Daisy May O'Dwyer, Kabbarli ("grandmother")
Background, Family:
- born in Tipperary, Ireland
- mother died when she was young
- raised by the family of Sir Frances Outram
Marriage, Children:
- husband: John Bates
- son: Arthur Hamilton Bates (born 1886)
Daisy Mae Bates Biography:
Daisy Mae Bates was born in Ireland, and emigrated to Australia in 1884. After one brief marriage, she married again. Losing most of her own money, she left her husband and son and returned to Britain, telling her husband she would return when he'd established a stable home. She worked as a journalist for five years.
When Daisy Bates returned to Australia in 1899, she was commissioned by The Times to write an expose of white treatment of Aborigines. She originally traveled through the North West with her son and husband, but soon found a school and home for her son and separated from her husband.
It was expected that she'd write about cruel treatment of the aborigines, but instead, she found incompetence and poor management and documented that. She continued to live among the Aborigines after she'd finished her reports, and the government in Western Australia appointed her Protector of Aborigines, commissioned to travel among the aborigines and investigate their problems. She was accepted as a friend, observing and recording and serving but not trying to convert them or "modernize" them.
Daisy Mae Bates lived for many of those years in a tent. Ernestine Hill, a journalist, helped bring her story to public attention, and Bates was made a commander of the British Empire in 1933. Bates was unable to earn enough by writing for newspapers, and after a brief stay in Adelaide, she returned with her typewriter to her tent life.
Daisy Mae Bates was able to study many of the customs and ceremonies of the Aborigines, including some from which women were normally excluded. In 1938, she published a book based on her experiences and notes.
The title of her 1938 book, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia, indicates her perspective: that the aboriginal culture was bound to be destroyed by the encounter with European culture. However, she believed in non-interference in that culture while it continued, including by missionaries. She returned to Adelaide until 1941, when she returned to living in a tent in Ooldea until 1945.
