I made my toilet to a chorus of impatient twittering. It was a fastidious toilet, for throughout my life I have adhered to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it, when Victoria was queen—a neat white blouse, stuff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coast, stout and serviceable, trim shows and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil, and, for my excursions to the camps, always a dust-coat and a sunshade. Not until I was in meticulous order would I emerge from my ten, dressed for the day. My first greeting was for the birds.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 198
Her stretcher bed was neat with ‘roo-skin rug and bush net, the linen Isabelline from poor water but spotlessly clean. On the same floor a goat-skin mat was spread. An iron stand with an enamel dish held soap and towel, hung on a nail above it a hand-mirror four-by-four, inches not feet, reflecting the face, no more—no time for vanity. The table in the corner was four-by-four feet, half of it cleared for dining, crockery in a stack, cutlery two of each, tea-set and salt and pepper twins. The other half was a leaning tower of Manila folders of rough manuscript, litter of letters, pens, ink a portable typewriter seldom used and then by the hunt-and-peck system with two fingers—she called it a ‘gigglywinks’…
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 109
‘I made friends with a needle as a very small child at grandma’s knee,’ she told me. ‘I can do the most minute embroideries, but I can’t use a machine, and I couldn’t make myself a pair of drawers to save my life. We weren’t supposed to know such things.’
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 111
As I dream, the red glow of those fires of fancy grows hard and cold and yellow, regular as the street-lights of a city, and the ranges beyond them are lost in the shadow—even as the last of their people. Of the songs that rang to the stars in the far-off time there is no echo. The black man survived the coming of the white for little more than one lifetime. When Captain Stirling landed on the coast in 1829, he computed the aboriginal population of what he had marked out as the metropolitan area at 1,500 natives. In 1907 we buried Joobaitch, last of the Perth tribe.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. xviii
[Translating the Lord’s Prayer]
‘Which art in Heaven’—‘Sky sit down’ — ’Kalbi nyinnin.’
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 154
‘These moonless nights’, she wrote, ‘when the stars are at their brightest and even Magellan’s Clouds take on a warmth and a shimmer from their glittering neighbours; when you look up into the worlds on worlds in myriads and try to realise that the earth in which you are but the tiniest atom, is one of the smallest of these twinkling planets. On such nights it is good to wander over these great distances in company with the aborigines and listen and hear their wonderful legends of this and that star… and wander with them along the ‘Yaggin’ (moon) road that was made when the moon was human.
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 163
As the other countries of other continents excelled in their own arts, skills, accomplishments, graces, beyond the essentials of living—writers, philosophers, sculptors, musicians, painters—so in Australia, explorers in bark canoes, song-and-dance men, the carving of stone tools, fur and feather craft, murals on cliffs. Those of the south coast were the star-gazers.
Daisy Bates, in a unique line of research, was to find and translate a new mythology of the Southern Hemisphere, close kindred to the Greek and in imagery and in allegory related to all others. She was to find totemic signs of a second zodiac in the moving planets and fixed stars, deities of earth now in heaven, all the camps and countries, cult-heroes and tribes on perpetual walkabout in the map of the night skies. Out of the silence she has saved for us the visions seen, the stories told around the campfires of the Stone Age to a thousand generations, setting down in her written word snatches of songs from the first singers on earth.
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 83
A bright particular star in constant orbit, even in the silent bush, she could hold court in a blacks’ camp or in Federal Government House.
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 16
In the starry nights we climbed the rickety ladder to the withered branch of a bench she called he observatory, to travel the Road of the Dreaming, Dhoogoor Yuara, where all the stars were mustering in to the heavenly waterholes and the Milky Way, the River that Never Dries. At Ooldea she added and completed many major legends from south-central deserts, sitting aloft for a patient hour or two with a few of the Old People sprawled below outside the break-wind. They drew maps with a stick in the sand of Aboriginal constellations, the totemic zodiacal signs, the fixed stars and pilgrim planets—grand march of the skies at night with all the tribes on the move in the glittering dust of nebulae following their cult heroes akin to the Greek gods… Kata, Heads…
Jupiter and Venus, morning and evening star, were Maalu and Kulbir, red and grey Kangaroos, a night between them on the same path. The black void in the Milky Way is Kallaia, Emu, his head in the Coal Sack, as we say, his long neck, wings, legs in the dark lanes of the Greek zodiac, between Aquila and Lyra his nebulous tail. Through all their lives the Emu totem men must never look at him…
Southern Cross is Walja-jinna, the Eaglehawk’s Track, with Dhurding, the Pointers, his Club, near by. Never point at Magellan’s Clouds, Murgaru, O-imbu, the Right-handed and Left-handed Brothers who snatch away the dead. Kogolongo is Mars, Black Cockatoo with red feather in his tail. Altair is Kangga Ngoonju, Crow Mother, with Delphinius, her Crow boys—Vega in Lura is Gibbera, Turkey—Aquarius is Bailgu, the Brush Fence—Antares the Fire Carrier, War-roo-boordina -- and Rigel is Kara the Red-backed Spider at Orion’s right foot.
Orion is N-yeeru-na the Hunter, the giant, the coward of the skies. His impotence and shame are the Awful Example and the moral of the man-corroborees. Night after night through eternity he chases the giggling girls of the Pleiades, little desert devils of the Mingari girls, to be defied, waylaid and kept forever at bay by Kambu-gudha, their elder sister, the V in Taurus, who laughs him to scorn—they double and dodge, throwing the dust into his eyes, mocking him in their jests and songs, sparkling mockery at his rage.
N-yeeru-na, Hunter of Women, but a hunter baffled and shamed by women, in the man-making ceremonies is one of the first great morality plays, an Aboriginal ballet of all the brightest stars in the southern skies. It was for Men Only. If a woman sees it she will die. In the initiation corroborees Kambu-gudha and the Mingari were acted by young men and boys.
N-yeeru-na dances, his body reddened by lust and fire. In feathers, red-ochre, knotted hair-belt and whitened pubic tassel, the red fire of Betelgeuse his club in his left hand, he beckons and waves to the Mingari girls to come to his camp. Returning home from gathering food, they huddle together and refuse. N-yeeru-na stamps and tramples, he strides them down, his gestures and dances angry and obscene. In fear of him they trip and fall, and tremble, hiding under their gnarled dragon humps, spinning like a swarm of bees in silver clouds of pollen to confuse him - in the brilliant Australian skies at night the Pleiades are many more than seven. Nearer comes N-yeeru-na, threatening, snatching—the girls run—
But Kambu-gudha, elder sister, stands naked before him, her feet and legs wide apart, he left foot Aldebaran filled with fire magic; kicking up a dazzle of light to blind him. She dares him with her yamstick quivering fire, exciting him and flaunting, showing contempt in calling a line of puppies between them - -the faint wavy line of stars between Orion and V in Taurus. Soon he is jeered and laughed at by all the neighbouring stars and constellations—Jurr-jurr, Night Owl, Canopus, in his hollow chuckle, Weerloo the Curlew screaming, Rigel, Kara the Red-backed Spider viciously stinging his prancing feet, Maalu and Kanyala, the Pointers, pointing derision, till Babba the Dingo, Horn of the Bull, flings himself at N-yeeru-na, savagely springs upon him and swings now east, now west, by his pubic tassel, till Beera, the comical old Moon, mocks at his shame and failure and all the camps in the sky are ringing with ribald laughter.
Kambu-gudha wins! N-yeeru-na’s fire grows dim, his guts are gone, his manhood and his fame as a mighty hunter. Pale and wan, he limps away to the west with all the Mingari women, screaming their triumph and scorn, hunting him. His name is shame.
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 123
In her scattered volumes of notes, hastily taken, repeated in many versions from different tribes and in different dialects, one is astounded to find new literatures unfold, unknown mythologies, undreamed philosophies, a Southern Hemisphere of thought, imageries of the world’s first poets akin to those of earliest Egypt, ancient Greece.
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973
She noted that ‘the natives live in an atmosphere of superstition, with unseen forces always at work among them.’ She decided to exploit this fact, and it was then that she invented the native term of Kallower. She let it be known that she was a mirrunroojandu, a magic woman who had been one of the twenty-two wives of Leberr, a ‘dreamtime’ father.
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 97
I pretended that my native name was Kallower, and that I was a mirruroo-jandu, or magic woman who had been one of the twenty-two wives of Leeberr, a patriarchal or ‘dreamtime’ father. After that, the way was clear.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 24
As a jangg’a, or white skin, she was believed to have come from their dreamtime and so was expected to know and to respect their laws… Among the Bibbulums she was a tondarrup, which the classfication of ‘father’s sister’, which might be roughly interpreted as a kind of tribal aunt. She would have known at which fire she might sit, and the people by whom she would be joined.
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 94
Everywhere I heard the plaint—’Jangga meenya bomunggur’ (The smell of the white man is killing us).
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 80
At Ooldea, not wishing to interfere in their associations with the white people, who were always kind to them, I could do no more than think for them with my ‘black-fellow’s mind’, dispensing my Kabbarli wisdom for what it was worth from the knowledge gained through half a lifetime, and my Kabbarli comfort to the very limit of my means and my physical endurance.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 207
As I turned one long board face upwards, Yalli-yalla reverently touched it, then placed his hand upon my breast and then on his own. It was the curlew totem of his fathers that he had never seen since his own young manhood. He knew that the spirit of all totems was within my breast.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 241
The believed that below the surface of the ground, and at the bottom of the sea, was a country called Jimbin, home of the spirit babies of the unborn, and the young of all the totems. In Jimbin there was never a shadow of trouble or strife or toil, or death, only the happy laughter of the little people at play. Sometimes these spirit babies were to be seen by the jalnga-gnooroo—the witch-doctors—in the dancing spray and sunlight of the beaches, under the guardianship of old Koolibal, the mother-turtle, or tumbling and somersaulting in the blue waters with Pajjalburra, the porpoise.
When the time came for the ngargalulla to be a human baby, it appears not to its mother, but to its father.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 26
Here in the bright, still evenings, I studied the skies, astronomy being an old love of mine, and compiled my aboriginal mythologies, many of them as poetic and beautiful as are the starry mythologies of the Greeks.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 190
There is no hope of protecting the Stone Age from the twentieth century! When the native’s little group area is gone, he loses the will to live, and when the will to live is gone, he dies.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 68
Here there is nothing young that was not long since old. Here there is no germinating potency of nature. The mystery, beauty and freedom of these boundless plains will repel one whose artistic sense demands a more genial scene for its gratification.
There is a solemnity for some, a weirdness for others in this hushed immensity.
There is little travel along these desolate tracks. The mailman, ever anxious about horse feed and water, oddments of humanity [who] pass through on their way to fortune or defeat.
The air is so sensitive that the crack of a whip, the slow tread of the camels and the noise of the lumbering, broad-wheeled wagons can be heard for miles. Sometimes there are no signs to indicate that living things have ever drawn breath in this desolate and treeless plain. The solemn all embracing silence… is so impressive that one feels as if the moment of breaking will usher in some catastrophe. Even the echoes seem to be dead.
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 160
the mornings were spent in wondering from camp to camp, attending to the bodily needs of the scattered flock. I knew every bush, every pool, every granite boulder, but its age-old prehistoric name, with its legends and dream-time secrets, and its gradual inevitable change. There was no loneliness. One lived with the trees, the rocks, the hills and the valleys, the verdure and the strange living things within and about them. My meals and meditations in the silence and sunlight, the small joys and tiny events of my solitary walks, have been more to me than the voices of the multitude, and the ever-open book of Nature has taught me more of wisdom than is compassed in the libraries of men.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 116
Nullarbor was named by the surveyor Delisser from the Latin, nullus arbor, for the great plain is utterly treeless, covered with salt-bush and blue-bush and other low and inconspicuous herbage. The natives believes it to be the abode of a mighty magic snake called Ganba or Jeedarra which ate any human that entered his territory… According to the natives, the blow-holes are the gates through which Ganba passes to his sea home.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 132
Sunsets blaze and fade, and blaze again in these great empty wilds, and dawn sets her diadem over them. The light loitering winds carry delicate perfumes hither and thither, but all these places that once echoed with song or war-cry are now left to the birds and animals whose forebears witnessed the arrival of the humans, and who themselves are now witnessing their passing.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 143
By the time she had returned to Perth, Daisy was a devotee of the new State that she called the ‘plain sister’ of the Commonwealth.
‘As one become more familiar with its gaunt gum tree, its apparently miserable attempts at water courses and rivers, its huge plains of sand and scrub, a certain harmony grows on one,’ she wrote. There was ‘the fascination of ugliness in the bush scenery of the West as there is in certain types of manhood.’
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 111
In Forrest, as in Sir Henry Parkes, Daisy saw the embodiment of her ideal. She spoke the same language, shared the same loyalty. Forrest talked of the ‘crimson thread of kinship with the mother country.’ He regarded the Empire as a ‘symbol of triumph of freedom, justice, civilisation and progress.’ She respected him as an explorer who had dared to follow in Eyre’s footsteps and to walk the waterless plain from Eucla to Fowler’s Bay, thankful to quench his thirst with the blood of a hawk. She admired him as a man of vision, who, with the help of engineer O’Connor, was realising his dream of a pipeline to bring water across three hundred and thirty miles to the thirsty diggers of Kalgoorlie.
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 70
My old-fashioned remedies were particularly successful, making me rejoice that I was of Ireland, where bone-setters and wise women could cure all and sundry.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 233
Anthropology can be given its due place, though in the break-down of all their old tribal laws through contact with civilisation it is scarcely necessary. What they need most is the governance and fatherhood of the Empire-makers, men of the sterling British type that brought India and Africa into our Commonwealth of Nations—a Havelock, a Raffles, a Lugard, a Nicholson, a Lawrence of Arabia.
Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 238
She was Irish, it suddenly dawned on me. That explained everything, the idealism, endurance, self-sacrifice, the prejudice and pride, her fearlessness ‘agin the government’ and her wilfulness ‘nohow contrariwise;, all her intuitions and inhibitions, her delight in folk-lore, her perpetual adoration of royalty, and at the same time the life-long loyalty to the lost cause of a lost people with all their sins and sorrows in her always loving heart and mind.
Ernestine Hill Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir Of Daisy Bates Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 106
‘I am two people, one I like and the other I do not know,’ she observed. And again, ‘A thing of patches am I—here an exaltation of duty, there a love of fun and frolic and again of melancholy.’
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 164
‘In order to prevent the untidiness that goes to mind and soul if neglected, I have my travelling glass straight forninst me on my table. I’ve never yet sat down untidy to any meal tho’ I have not even a native visitor. Tired, exhausted with heat and failing health though I may be, I look at myself about to sit down untidily and I am up and repairing the damage.’
She admitted to another ‘rather quaint practice.’ When the urge was strong to establish contact with her ‘kind’, ‘I dine with H.R.H. Lord and Lady Forster, or Sir Francis and Lady Newdegate and a few other whose photographs I have the honour and pleasure to possess and I talk or am silent with full thoughts and it does me good and it helps to keep my poise and my self respect.’
Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, p. 212