[Salter, Elizabeth, 1971, Daisy Bates: ‘The Great White Queen of the Never-Never’, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, Chapter 4]
CHAPTER 4
It Never Really Worked
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Tasmania in 1893 was “an island of whites that had been an island of blacks”. Since most of Daisy’s contacts stemmed from Bishop Stanton, her host was the Bishop of Hobart, a man with a wide circle of friends whose families dated back to the first free settlers who braved the hell of Van Diemen’s Land in 1816.
The “witty lady with the vivacious personality and the beautiful Irish eyes” remembered by Constance Vickers, a child of one of these families, was an immediate success. Invitations poured in, amongst them one from the MacKinnons of Dalness, in Evandale. The family consisted of old Mrs MacKinnon, her widower son Donald, and her two grandchildren. Daisy, content to sit at the feet of a pioneer, listened to the “grim histories” of the early days when Dalness was built by convict labour and Jessie MacKinnon furnished it by milking her own cows, churning her own butter and walking the seventeen miles to and from Launceston to sell her dairy produce. When she had wanted a garden she dug it herself, even preferring to cook her own meals rather than to trust the convict labour, filthy with lice and ready to “rob the gibbet of its chains” in order to get money far the rum that was still the currency of the colony.
This was one side of the story. At Dalness was a portrait of Truganini, the last survivor in Tasmania of the first Tasmanians, who died at Hobart in 1876 at the age of seventy-three.
Although, Daisy said, “it was neither tactful nor kindly to ask too many questions”, the bishop, a compassionate man with an interest in anthropology, told her the tale of extinction of Truganini and her race: the virtual extermination of this population of some 1,200 Aborigines in “The Black War” which began in 1804 with an unprovoked massacre by the military of a group of men, women and children who were hunting kangaroos. Between 1831 and 1835 some two hundred survivors of the “war” were exiled (for their protection) to Flinders Island in Bass Strait where most of them sank into apathy and soon died. Those who lingered on—forty-four of them by 1847—were taken to Oyster Cove, near Hobart, where the race, except for a colony of hybrids on another island in Bass Strait, died out.
Daisy left Tasmania with the story of two women, one black and the other white, implanted in her memory. Old Jessie MacKinnon was to be “one of the guiding forces” of her future. Truganini was the symbol of doom, representing nature’s inexorable law. Regardless of right and wrong, the whites had survived and the blacks succumbed.
In the meantime Daisy was young enough to enjoy the admiration she not only gave but received. That “quiet fine man”, Donald MacKinnon, showed his feeling for her by allowing her to ride his dead wife’s Arab mare, unmounted since her death. He walked with her through his wooded grasslands while she chanted her version of an old poem:
With stumbling feet did onward press, To thy lone mountain home, Dalness.
“In your case it should be dancing, not stumbling,” he corrected her.
Donald MacKinnon was with her on a trip to Ben Nevis in search of the elusive Tasmanian Devil. Their hosts were the Talbots of Malahide, and to reach Ben Nevis they had to cross the River Esk. Daisy, whose horse “plunged in up to his neck”, led the way chanting “The joybells are ringing in gay Malahide” in her “best reckless Irish”. The party captured a “Devil” and Daisy an admirer. When she left, Donald gave her his copy of Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World. As they had both agreed that it was “the most beautiful book ever published”, he decided upon it as a worthy tribute. From Jessie MacKinnon she received A Golden Treasury of Verse. Daisy kept both books with her until the end of her life when she sent the Golden Treasury, but not the Drummond, back to the family.
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