[Salter, Elizabeth, 1971, Daisy Bates: “The Great White Queen of the Never-Never”, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, Chapter 9]
CHAPTER NINE
Reunion in the West
...
The Governor had planned a celebration that was to be worthy of the new century and the Colony’s new affluence. The country’s future as a Commonwealth was already decided upon. The twentieth century promised great things. The Governor’s reception would include those men and women who were to shape the destiny of the West. Chief among them was the Premier, Sir John Forrest.
Nothing would have persuaded Daisy to miss such an occasion. While Jack went to sleep over his glass of beer, she talked to the twenty-stone giant who had forged his own path towards leadership. 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 realizing his dream of a pipeline to bring water across three hundred and thirty miles to the thirsty diggers of Kalgoorlie.
Nor was he interested only in the community of whites. As a boy he had played with the Bibbulmun children and been accepted as a member of the tribe. Like his friend Matthew Gibney he deplored their fate. Only the Federal duties that were to monopolize his energies after the birth of the Commonwealth prevented him from taking more action on their behalf. When Daisy talked to him he was already planning his new Aboriginal Protection Act, to come into being five years later.
As Martelli said, Forrest had made rueful acknowledgement of the decline in the numbers of the black Australians. Conscious of the need to record their language and customs before it was too late, he discussed the possibility with Daisy. According to a letter she wrote to the Commonwealth Government many years later, it was Forrest who encouraged her to take up this work and even gave her some initial instruction in such matters as social and marriage laws. But he was equally aware of the difficulties of assimilation. The black people were his trusted friends who had proved their loyalty and earned his gratitude. About their chances of survival he was as pessimistic as any other man of his generation.
...
