[Salter, Elizabeth, 1971, Daisy Bates: “The Great White Queen of the Never-Never”, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, Chapter 17]
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Radcliffe-Brown
“Daisy was made for Brown’s exasperation and he for hers.” —E. L. Grant Watson: But to What Purpose?
In a matter of months it became evident that a work relationship between them was out of the question. “Anarchy Brown”, as he was known at Cambridge, was, at the time of his arrival in Australia in 1910, an astonishingly good-looking and gifted young man in his late twenties whose reputation fluctuated between the “bit of a superman” that he was to his assistant, Grant Watson, and a “fabricator of stories”, regarded with distrust by his more cautious colleagues. By this time his political views had been modified from anarchy to socialism, but he was still far from the nationalism that dominated the thinking of his contemporaries. As strongly individualistic as Daisy herself, he carried a sense of style into the detail of ordinary life. His dress was that of a Paris “savant”. He had even thought out the best posture for sleep.
It was after his triumphal return from the Andaman Islands that he was offered the leadership of the expedition. He had gone alone into a dangerous situation and shown so little fear that the islanders had regarded him as a god and allowed him to gather invaluable data on their social organization. Anxious to repeat his success in what was still considered, anthropologically speaking, the uncharted territory of North-west Australia, he read Spencer and Gillen and dazzled the impressionable Grant Watson, a newly qualified zoologist, with tales of the Aborigines.
Later writers were to agree with Daisy that collaboration with him was difficult.
Towards women, whether they were students or colleagues, he showed a condescension that was to gall more than one among the now distinguished women anthropologists.
Ruth Benedict, in her letters to her colleague Margaret Mead, quoted in Margaret Mead’s The Way of an Anthropologist, describes him as “impenetrably wrapped in his own conceit”.
“I don’t think Brown is fighting for good work over bad, but for work done by disciples over against work done by non disciples,” she wrote. Hortense Powdermaker, one of these disciples, made the more cautious comment that he seemed to need to be worshipped. Margaret Mead was more forthright:
“Brown identifies himself with every idea he has ever voiced and any disagreement, tacit or uttered, with his ideas, he takes as a slap in the face.”
All three women conceded the personal magnetism to which the young Grant Watson succumbed. Where Brown led, Grant Watson was prepared to follow. The two young men became a unit from which Daisy, a woman and a strong-willed one at that, found herself excluded.
At first all went smoothly. It was not in Daisy’s nature to worship, but her letters to Mathew show that she was prepared to learn. She arranged to have an extra desk put in her office so she and Brown could work together on her material; she noted his comments and made the necessary corrections.
In the field it was another matter. Here she was on familiar ground. Experience asserted itself and she was less prepared to follow. Brown, on the other hand, would tolerate no question of his leadership.
Two very different people, they were alike in that they were both egotists with a declared ambition: Brown to occupy the first Australian Chair in Anthropology; Daisy to publish her book. To realize their ambitions, each needed the other. That Brown was successful and Daisy was not, was due, in part, to the generosity of her nature. By giving him access to her material, she was acting in her own as well as his interests. But that the expedition received recognition throughout Australia was very largely due to the power of her prestige.
By 1910 this was considerable. “The epoch-making work Mrs Bates has done amongst the aborigines,” wrote the Western Mail, “the interest she has created in those quaint, lovable and primitive people to whom, when all is said and done, Australia really belongs, entitles her to rank among the women who have accomplished great things in this age.”
Daisy transferred the accolades to her leader, telling the press that she “greatly appreciated the opportunity of cooperating with Mr Brown”. She admitted that “these further investigations must mean considerable amplification of the work I have been doing”, and thereby established their relationship as master and pupil.
Brown appeared to accept such homage as his due. In neither of his two long press interviews is there a mention of her name. What he failed to do, the journalists did for her.
“The interview with the leader of the expedition, A. R. Brown,” said the Mirror, “will have been read with great interest, all the more so because of its confirmation of the facts and views set out by Daisy Bates in her lecture in the Perth Town Hall on the curious class divisions existing amongst the Australian aborigines.”
There is no doubt at all that Brown could have managed without Daisy. As an anthropologist he was brilliant and his ability to pioneer his work had been proved. But to finance his expedition was another matter.
Discovering that it lacked funds, Daisy contacted her old friend and admirer Sam McKay. According to her own account she rang him from her office “and in ten minutes a £1,000 was mine.” This, she said, she handed over to Brown.
One of her newspaper cuttings, however, gives rise to a minor mystery.
It seemed that McKay had already donated the amount to the Aboriginal cause. The cheque was in the keeping of pastoralist Sir Edward Wittenoom, “whose attention had been directed towards the Cambridge expedition”.
Since Daisy herself had kept the cutting, the inference is that it was she who contacted Wittenoom. To add to the confusion was Brown’s story to Grant Watson that McKay had handed him the cheque after a lecture he gave in Perth.
Putting the facts together, the most likely interpretation seems to be that Daisy knew of McKay’s donation and took him along to hear Brown’s lecture so that he would allow the money to be used for the expedition. McKay was impressed enough to write out another cheque there and then. But, as the paragraph pointed out, it was to cover the amount already placed in the keeping of Sir Edward Wittenoom.
As so often happened when she looked back over the years, Daisy’s memory took a short cut. But there seems little doubt that it was she who was instrumental in procuring the thousand pounds—a gesture that she was, in later years, to bitterly regret.
Brown showed his gratitude by asking that she be attached to the expedition for a further six months. Since this was what Daisy wanted most at the time, she considered herself rewarded. He agreed also to continue his revision of her material although, he told Grant Watson, this was becoming more and more difficult.
To Brown, Daisy was an enthusiast rather than an anthropologist. Her book was the work of an amateur. To the man who carried method into every facet of his life, her mind resembled “a well stored sewing basket after half a dozen kittens had been playing there undisturbed”. As his own researches continued, to put her book in order represented a waste of time—the one thing he feared. That he continued to do so is apparent from her complaints about the “mutilated manuscript” handed back to her. But by then their relationship had deteriorated beyond hope of any mutual achievement.
Their differences remained a private matter. The press notices that heralded their departure reported Daisy as “anticipating the journey with intense eagerness”. As a woman in an all-male scientific expedition she continued to be the focus of interest.
“So far as can be called to mind,” wrote the West Australian, “the instance is unique, except perhaps for Eve’s sojourn in the wilderness.”
“Her exceptional and unique knowledge of the natives as well as the mysterious influence she holds over them . . . will be of invaluable assistance to her companions,” purred the Mirror.
There was one dissenting note in the applause, in a cutting kept no doubt to show the kind of opposition that Daisy was up against. It was a paragraph under the heading of “Larks”. What paper it came from is unknown: “Any reader who wants to hear Carr Boyd’s opinion of Daisy Bates’s proposed exploratory trip into nigger infested mulga, first plug your ears with anti-septicised cotton wool and then ask Garr to write it on a slate. N.B. Please disinfect the slate before handing it back.”
On 14th October 1910, two days before her forty-seventh birthday, she set out for Bunbury. There she met the two men and all three continued by steamer for Geraldton, where Louis Olsen, the cook, was engaged. Hiring horses, they rode to Sandstone, pitching camp some miles out of the town near an Aboriginal camp.
Some seven or eight groups had collected for the initiation ceremony which the three “ghosts” were allowed to watch. Work was progressing well until a police raid disturbed it by scattering the natives in all directions.
Just over a month before their arrival, on 11th September to be exact, what were known as the “Darlot murders” had taken place near Laverton. In her report to the Chief Protector, Daisy explained that the murders were spearings demanded by tribal law because of “wrong” marriages. The Chief Protector remained unconvinced and decreed that “Justice be done according to the white man’s laws.”
As a result, their camp was searched by white troopers. “Some ten or twelve white Australians came riding through the camp, firing off their revolvers at the native dogs, and shouting and swearing in quite a cinematograph manner,” Grant Watson wrote.
Brown was angry. Refusing to budge from his tent door, behind which he had hidden two of the so-called “murderers”, he informed the constable that if it were any satisfaction to him, the work of the expedition in that area was ruined. They had no alternative but to cross to the Lock hospitals on Bernier and Dorre Islands. Here the groups were well represented and there would be no fear of interruption.
Daisy approved of his stand but not of his decision to leave. She argued the point. If they waited, she said, the natives would return. Brown listened without reply, his eyes fixed on distance, as was his habit when wishful of putting an end to a conversation. Daisy’s arguments trailed off into silence. She confided in Grant Watson that Brown was indeed a very strange young man and “no gentleman”.
The next day Brown informed her that plans for departure had been made. If she still wished to stay behind, she was free to do so. “And so it was that we went our way,” Grant Watson wrote, “leaving Mrs Bates to follow how and when she would. . . . [she] did not like to yield and I do not think she supposed that Brown would be so ungallant as to leave her, but he contended that if women claimed the privileges of men, they should be treated as men in like circumstances would be treated.”
It was a difficult moment for Brown’s young disciple. Daisy had put herself out for him more than once. He genuinely liked her, admiring her “guiding spirit that was not a missionary spirit but one of charity and compassion”. The obvious affinity between the county Irish lady with her “neat and dapper appearance” and the “stone age men and women who accepted her with trust and appreciation”, struck him as an odd example of symbiosis.
But his loyalties remained with Brown. The party split up. The two men left for Bernier Island, Daisy remained at Sandstone.
This was the first open breach between them. Again, Daisy gave no hint of it, writing cheerfully enough to the Chief Protector that “Brown and Watson have left. I am to follow on Thursday’s train.”
She was later to claim that she had in fact chosen this particular train in order to travel down with the men captured in the raid. Her reports, she said, prevented the death sentence from being passed on them.
If so, she was to pay dearly for her magnanimity. Her journey became a nightmare that began at Carnarvon. From here she was to take the boat to Bernier Island, but she found out, on her arrival, that Henrietta, the captain, was sleeping off a drunken spree from which no power on earth could wake him.
Daisy was forced to wait. The town, filled with squatters celebrating the yearly race meeting, was as disorderly as Broome and offered no accommodation at all. For one night, at least, she had to sleep on a table top. When it did sail, the Shark ran into the tail of a “cockeye bob” and the lugger heaved its way over stormtossed seas, taking a record thirty-five hours in the process. She arrived seasick and exhausted, blaming Brown for her vicissitudes.
In the meantime the two men were well established in their tents, basking in tropical sun on the sandhills of Bernier Island. In his first novel, Where Bonds Are Loosed, Grant Watson described the conditions under which they lived.
The island, about eighteen miles long and never more than a mile in width, was hot by day but cooled by sea breezes at night. Tent life, however, was prevented from being idyllic by the ants, persistent enough to devour underpants or even toenails. To keep them at bay, their nests had to be dug out and filled with hot ashes.
The hospital itself consisted of three walls of tarred canvas and a corrugated iron roof. In its ten beds were “broken and helpless pieces of humanity who lay still all day and looked out across the bleak expanse of sand dunes under which they were destined to be buried.” The scientists carried out their investigations in an atmosphere heavy with death and crackling with tensions. Between the doctor—a young man “more interested in spirochetes than in suffering men”—and the stockman, a vendetta was being fought. They had been seen to stalk each other across the dunes, rifles cocked.
Shortly after Daisy’s arrival on 11th December, they crossed to Dorre Island to celebrate Christmas in retreat from a tornado. This time Daisy experienced the full force of a “cockeye bob”. The women convalescents were tumbled along the sand dunes. The hospital roof was torn away. Her tent was cut to ribbons and she sent an urgent request for a new one.
In the meantime, she wrote, she had been given hospitality by the “devoted medical staff, so much loved by the patients”.
Nothing provides a clearer indication of her change of attitude over the years than her contrasting reports on these “Lock” hospitals, the Government’s misguided attempt to put an end to the venereal disease that was spreading with frightening rapidity among the ranks of the Aborigines.
Acting in their capacity of Protectors, police officers were empowered to examine women as well as men for signs of the affliction. After enduring this humiliation, sufferers were then neck-chained and transported by camel buggy to Carnarvon. Their bodies were very often rotten with sores, suppurating and fly-blown, and many died before they reached the shore hospital at Carnarvon. Those who survived were shipped to Bernier and Dorre, the men to the first, women to the second. In his novel, Grant Watson has left us a horrifying account of this method of transportation as he saw it:
“All the hatches were open, and in the shallow hold were standing some forty natives, pressed close together, their heads just coming above the level of the deck. They looked miserable and suffering pieces of humanity and from their close packed bodies came a pungent odour which permeated the whole boat.”
“The horrors of Dorre and Bernier unnerve me yet,” Daisy wrote in The Passing of the Aborigines. “. . . To question the poor shuddering souls of these doomed exiles was slow work and saddening. Through unaccustomed frequent hot baths, their withered sensitive skins, never cleansed in their natural state save by grease and fresh air, became like tissue paper and parted horribly from the flesh.
“There was no ray of brightness, no gleam of hope.
“In death itself they could find no sanctuary, for they believed that their souls, when they left the poor broken bodies, would be orphaned in a strange ground.”
So she could write when, after twenty-five years, she looked back on the islands. By then she was “thinking black”. But at the time when she stayed on Bernier and Dorre she was still the Government representative, whose duty it was to write objective reports for the benefit of the Chief Protector.
“The work is extremely satisfactory,” she told him, “the women being generally very willing to afford all the information required of them. I have visited the camps of the outpatients several times and found the occupants pretty contented with their position.” At the Carnarvon hospital, “All looked cheerful and happy.”
The only hint she gave of the misery she was later to describe was by her request to act as “postman” or message-bearer between islands.
The Aboriginal had no written language. His “letters” were bamburu, short sticks on which were carved pictorial messages. When Daisy crossed from Dorre Island to the mainland, she carried some of these with her.
“I think these little messages and my reports of the sick natives and their friends will bring kindlier thoughts about the Islands, which to many of them do not now seem so far away nor so gruesome,” she wrote.
Although Brown had extended her period of service, he had also taken the precaution of dividing the work, and Daisy was free to come and go as she pleased. Permission to carry the bamburu was granted, but at the same time she received a stern warning about the limitations by which she must abide in handing out rations.
No bills would be honoured, the Chief Protector warned, except for the list already authorized. She pleaded the case for greater liberality as her “little presents” promoted goodwill. Besides, “one woman on the ration is old and deaf, another is blind. Some have their sans and husbands on the Islands.” Wherever possible, she assured him, “those who can work come into town daily and wash, or chop wood.”
Her appeals were ignored. The warnings grew sterner. But as compensation for official disapproval was the growing affection of her black friends.
“All those whom I had previously met amongst them rushed over to the buggy to greet me. The diseased natives and their women do not avoid me,” she reported with pride.
On 14th April 1911, six months to the day after their departure, Daisy returned to Perth. On the strength of McKay’s donation Brown went north again, this time with two men, his destination “inland from Carnarvon”. Daisy returned to her old camp in the Murchison Bush. The decision to split up had restored her good spirits. She was reported as “brimming over with enthusiasm”; and that, “notwithstanding the loss of weight of something like a stone, she had nothing to say concerning the privations and hardships which must have been endured but spoke only of the work that Mr Brown and she had done and of what it was hoped to do.... As a student of the aboriginal races of the State, Mrs Bates has perhaps no compeer, and yet she herself acknowledges that she has still so much to learn in the matter.”
The pupil was still paying homage to the master. In view of . their differences, this showed a magnanimity that the master did not show towards his pupil. He did, however, utilize a press interview to make known his hope that “the Australian Government would follow Canada’s example and establish a department of Ethnology.”
“For that work,” he pointed out, “[the Canadians] have made a grant of over £800 a year.” This left Australia as “practically the only place which has not a department of that kind”.
The Government took the hint but was slow to realize it. It was more than a decade later before a Chair of Anthropology was created at Sydney University. It was offered to Radcliffe-Brown.
Daisy’s explanation for her return to the bush had nothing to do with ethnology. “The dear people, I simply love them,” she said. “They are just simple children and I would do anything in the world I could to help them.”
Her life resumed a now familiar pattern. She moved from camp to camp, filled in her vocabularies, recorded fragments of legends, noted customs, nursed the sick and comforted the bereaved.
About her book her mind was at rest. One copy remained with Andrew Lang in England. The other was with RadcliffeBrown. Publication had been promised. The raw material that she had taken down by word of mouth would emerge in the pattern of scholarship. Recognition would be hers.
In twelve short months her hopes dissolved. In July 1912 Andrew Lang died. A Labour Party was in power and Brown was on the high seas, on his way back to England and without her MS.
In a letter to Mathew, dated 5th September 1912, Daisy filled in the unhappy details:
Dr. Andrew Lang had a copy of the book in typed MS. and Macmillans say they have only received portions of it from Dr. Lang’s executors. The late Government handed over the only copy I had to Brown and that was mutilated beyond recovery. The present Government has relieved Brown of the responsibility of publishing the book, returns it to me, but will not pay for its publication. . . . Mr Fraser had promised free copies of the book to several hundred contributors on the assumption that it was to be published by the Government. Mr. Brown could not fulfil these promises if the book was to be published by the Cambridge Press ... and so the Government released Mr. Brown from his undertaking and has given me the MS., but the mutilated portions are useless.... I told Mr. Fraser I feared the whole thing would have to be rewritten and his reply was “Oh Lud!”
There was more to the story. Perhaps in defence of his “mutilations”, Brown had showed her a letter written to him by Andrew Lang in which Lang had said that “a red pencil would be needed in [Daisy’s] long and wandering work”. Outraged, she had written at once to Lang, who broke off relations with Brown but did not deny the charge. After Lang’s death Professor Marett of Oxford agreed to take over the job of revision and Daisy decided to take her chance on a separate publication. Brown agreed not to use her material but the manuscript he returned was still in the process of revision and the one in England incomplete.
Her chances of publication were, literally, in ribbons, and Daisy’s final comment to Mathew shows that even her apparently invincible optimism had suffered defeat.
“I had hoped to have been able to go home, but alas! That is another disappointment and as there are so many others I won’t dwell any more upon them.”
Instead she replaced one ambition with another.
The expedition had deprived her of academic laurels but had led to success of a different kind. Her bitter disappointment at the hands of the whites coincided with her total acceptance by the blacks. She understood their needs. As an official representative she could fulfil them.
The first woman to be included in an Australian scientific expedition should be eligible as the first woman Chief Protector of Aborigines.
To achieve such a position she would be up against the prejudice of men who regarded leadership as their right. Daisy decided that her job was to convince them that she would be no rival in their field; that they needed a woman as a doctor needed a nurse.
“The virus of research” remained her chief preoccupation but, though she did not know it, the story of her book had reached its sad and tattered conclusion.
The story of “the life that was service” had begun.
