page_title: Daisy Bates (author)
section_title: Western Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Daisy Bates (author) / Involvement with Australian Aboriginal people / Western Australia
context_page_description: Daisy May Bates, CBE was an Irish-Australian journalist, welfare worker and lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society. Some Aboriginal people referred to Bates by the courtesy name Kabbarli "grandmother".
context_section_description: On her return voyage she met Father Dean Martelli, a Roman Catholic priest who had worked with Aborigines and who gave her an insight into the conditions they faced. She found a school and home for her son in Perth, invested some of her money in property as a security for her old age, bought note books and supplies and left for the state's remote north-west to gather information on Aborigines and the effects of white settlement.
  She wrote articles about conditions around Port Hedland and other areas for geographical society journals, local newspapers and The Times. This experience kindled her lifelong interest in the lives and welfare of Aboriginal people in Western and South Australia.
  Based at the Beagle Bay Mission near Broome, Bates, now thirty-six, began her life's work. Her accounts, among the first attempts at a serious study of Aboriginal culture, were published in the Journal of Agriculture and later by anthropological and geographical societies in Australia and overseas.
  While at the mission she also compiled a local dictionary of several dialects, comprising some two thousand words and sentences, as well as notes on legends and myths. In April 1902 Bates, accompanied by her son and her husband, set out on a droving trip from Broome to Perth. It provided good material for her articles but after spending six months in the saddle and travelling four thousand kilometres, Bates knew that her marriage was over.
  Following her final separation from Bates in 1902, she spent most of the rest of her life in outback Western and South Australia, studying and working for the remote Aboriginal tribes, who were being decimated by the incursions of European settlement and the introduction of modern technology, western culture and exotic diseases.
  In 1904, the Registrar General of Western Australia, Malcolm Fraser, appointed her to research Aboriginal customs, languages and dialects, a task which took nearly seven years to compile and arrange the data. Many of her papers were read at Geographical and Royal Society meetings.
  In 1910–11 she accompanied anthropologist A. R. Brown (later Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown) and writer and biologist E. L. Grant Watson on a Cambridge ethnological expedition to inquire into Western Australian marriage customs. She was appointed a "Travelling Protector" with a special commission to conduct inquiries into all native conditions and problems, such as employment on stations, guardianship and the morality of native and half-caste women in towns and mining camps.
  Legend has it that Bates later came into conflict with Radcliffe-Brown because she sent him her manuscript report of the expedition. Much to Bates's chagrin, it was not returned for many years and when it came back it was heavily annotated with Radcliffe-Brown's critical remarks. The conflict culminated in a famous incident at a symposium, where Bates accused Radcliffe-Brown of plagiarism—Bates was scheduled to speak after Radcliffe-Brown had presented his paper, but when she rose it was only to compliment him sarcastically on his presentation of her work, after which she resumed her seat.
caption: Bates and a group of Aboriginal women, circa 1911
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