Title: Daisy Bates
Description: For more than fifty years Daisy Bates was Kabbarli (grandmother) to the Australian aborigines who cause she championed and whose primitive camp grounds she shared. Renouncing husband and child and the narrow provincialism of colonial Australian life, she devoted her inexhaustible energies to caring for a virtually prehistoric people, living alone in an untamed, surrealistically beautiful - and desolate - land. A high-spirited, romantic, and thoroughly paradocical personality, she was at once the perfect Victorian lady and a truly liberated woman. Idealistic, uncompromising, she defied every convention of her day, a defiance epitomized in her lifelong struggle for recognition as a pioneering anthropologist and for appointment to the post of Protector of the Aboriginie. Always impeccably outfitted in long, sweeping skirts and white gloves, she was a respected and beloved "magic woman" to the aborigines, who revealed to her tribal secrets that were taboo to their own women. To government officals and established anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, with whom she clashed continually, her unpreccedendted demands and unorthodox opinions were a constant irritant. And to the colonial community who read her newspaper articles and attended her lectures, to the occasional traveler who may have glimpsed the elderly lady in strange, old-fashioned clothing as the transcontintental express paused to gasp for water at the remote and lonely Ooldea siding, she was an object of wonder and speculation. Now this vivid and compassionate biography bring the remarkable story of Daisy Bates to vibrant life. Meticulously documents from Daisy's own extensive articles, books and journals, it portrays a colorful life of romance and adventure, brilliantly evoking the dynamic, eccentric, and indomitable woman who was capable of both pragmatism and poetry - and who became a legend in her own time. -- Inside cover.
Subjects: Aboriginal Australians
People: Daisy Bates (1861-1951)