[Bates, Daisy M. (ed. White, Isobel), 1985, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, see Introduction: The life of Daisy Bates]

...

THE LIFE OF DAISY BATES

In order to understand Mrs Bates’s dedication to her research and to the Aborigines themselves, it is necessary to recount briefly her life history, even though this has been published several times already (see Bates 1938; Salter 1971; Hill 1973). However, important facts have recently become known, facts that may help to explain her withdrawal from white society and her abandonment of her husband and son.

She was born in October 1859[6] in County Tipperary. Her mother died when she was five years old, her father when she was in her teens. Nevertheless she was given a thorough secondary education and gained a familiarity with English literature and a good writing style. She also acquired fluency in French and German, thus developing a facility for learning languages.

Daisy May O’Dwyer herself wrote many years later that she came to Australia because of a threat of tuberculosis, though her survival until the age of ninety-one suggests that this threat never developed into a reality. With a free passage, she arrived at Townsville in the Almora in January 1883.[7] Her own account gives this date as 1884, but she had good reason to conceal her earlier arrival and we have no record of how she spent the rest of 1883. We find her as governess at Fanning Downs, a cattle station near Charters Towers in North Queensland, in early 1884, and in late 1884 as governess to the Bates family on a property near Nowra, 160 km south of Sydney. Soon John Bates, the eldest son, a drover, proposed to her and they were married at Nowra in February 1885. She almost certainly did not tell him then, or ever, that she was not free to marry because of a previous marriage celebrated only eleven months before.

The truth might never have been known had not a book appeared in 1979 about the legendary ‘Breaker’ Morant, the lieutenant who was court-martialled and executed in 1902 for killing prisoners during the Boer War. The book, In Search of Breaker Morant, by Margaret Carnegie and Frank Shields[8], proves beyond reasonable doubt that ‘The Breaker’ was the same man as Edwin Murrant, who migrated from England to Australia in 1883 and found a job as stockman on Fanning Downs Station, where he met a pretty governess, Daisy May O’Dwyer, and married her in Charters Towers on 13 March 1884. It is equally certain that the bride was later known as Mrs Daisy Bates. A month after the marriage, Murrant was charged with the larceny of some pigs and a saddle, but was discharged a week later. However, at this point the couple separated, apparently never to meet again. For the rest of her life, Daisy Bates kept her first marriage a closely guarded secret. There is not the slightest hint of it in any of her papers, nor in the biographies written by Salter and Hill. Even after a copy of the marriage entry had been reproduced in the Carnegie and Shields book, it took some time before an alert reader, the late Mr Alan Queale of Brisbane, noticed that the bride had the same maiden name and other characteristics (age, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.) as Mrs Daisy Bates, whose biography by Salter he had read previously. He investigated further in the official records of Queensland and New South Wales and was able to prove conclusively that the two brides were the same person. I have myself seen copies of the two marriage records her signatures are identical. For both marriages she described herself as ‘spinster’ and gave her age as 21[9], though she was 24 at the time of her first marriage.

An examination of the Queensland marriage laws at the time of the two marriages reveals that the first marriage was almost certainly valid, even though the bridegroom was a minor (Murrant was aged 19 at the time, but he gave his age as 21). I thought of the faint possibility that in the eleven months between the two marriages, Mrs Murrant might have obtained an annulment on the grounds of her husband’s age, but with the help of Mr Queale I ruled this out, since there seems to have been no machinery for annulment on these grounds in the Queensland laws and any case for annulment or divorce would have had to be presented to the Supreme Court of Queensland, with all the consequent delay and publicity. Mrs Bates was always one to defy convention many incidents in her later life prove this but committing bigamy is a little more than unconventional. It could have brought a jail sentence of many years. Discovery by officials was unlikely, as Queensland and New South Wales registers of marriages were (and still are) quite separate from each other. We do not know how many of the friends she had made in Townsville (including Bishop Stanton of North Queensland, said by Salter [1971, p. 13] to have been her guardian) knew about the first wedding. Discovery through personal recognition was a real danger, and yet Mrs Bates had the temerity to ride with her second husband on droving trips into Queensland.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’, applies to her twice over. Admittedly, she did not long repent the first disaster, but, according to her own account, she suffered acutely over the second and soon discovered how uncongenial John Bates was.[l0] Little more than a year after her second marriage she gave birth to a son, Arnold, and the couple thereafter spent little time together, her excuse being that he did not buy a property on which they could settle, but continued his droving life.

She travelled with her child to various parts of Australia, staying with friends in towns or on country properties[11], and, in 1894, left the seven-year-old boy in the care of the Bates family and went to England. There she worked for the well-known journalist, W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews and Borderland. In his office she learnt much of the craft of journalism and made many literary friends. In 1899, she returned to Australia, where she was to live for the rest of her life. She arrived in Perth with the intention of investigating allegations that the settlers were ill-treating the Aborigines of Australia. These allegations had been repeated in a number of letters to the Times of London over the previous years. On the voyage she met a Catholic priest, Dean Martelli, who talked with fervour about the work done by his Church for the Aborigines in Western Australia. This encounter seems to have begun her lifelong interest in the Australian Aborigines. She began her serious study soon after her arrival when she journeyed with her husband through much of the Northwest (inland from Roebourne, Port Hedland and Carnarvon) with the purpose of buying a property. She seized this opportunity to meet and observe many Aborigines, and to learn about them, from the station owners with whom she stayed. These particular settlers happened to be known for their good treatment of the Aborigines, so that her first impressions towards writing a report for the Times were favourable, in spite of contrary evidence revealed to her by Dean Martelli and Bishop Matthew Gibney (the Catholic bishop of Western Australia, who became a lifelong friend).[12]

Her next journey of discovery was with Bishop Gibney to Beagle Bay Trappist Mission, where she stayed for three months gaining considerable information about the Aborigines of the mission and its neighbourhood. After several months in Broome and Perth, she joined her husband at a station on Roebuck Plains, near Broome, and lived there for a year. It was during these sojourns in the Northwest that she gained much of the information which is published here in the sections dealing with that area.

She and her husband drove a mob of cattle many hundreds of miles south from Roebuck Plains to their newly acquired property in the Ophthalmia Range. She then made a final break with him and went to live in Perth, where she supported herself by journalism. The Western Mail sent her on a mission to the Peak Hill district, where she was also able to find new material about the local Aborigines. In April 1904 a letter appeared in the Times of London written by a man called Malcolmson, who claimed to have investigated the employment of Aborigines on pastoral stations in western Australia. He claimed that they were worse off than the American Negro slaves had been. In May 1904 the Times published Mrs Bates’s report which defended the settlers and branded as ridiculous Malcolmson’s comparison of Aborigines with Negro slaves. She found the behaviour of both the settlers and the Government to be exemplary, and even made excuses for those allegations she knew to be true. She had previously disagreed with Bishop Gibney about the chaining of Aboriginal prisoners and claimed that they preferred to be chained by the neck, rather than be handcuffed, because this left their hands free! She wrote (and apparently believed) that, ‘No State in the Commonwealth is doing more for its aboriginal population than this State’, a generalisation for which she lacked supporting evidence.[13] (Later, she became more critical of the treatment received by Aborigines.)

In May 1904 she became an employee of the State Government in the Department of the Registrar-General, Mr Malcolm Fraser, at a salary of eight shillings a day. Her task was to collect and write a compilation of the languages of the Aborigines of the State, but this was extended into other fields as she proceeded. At first, she merely read and collated the writings of previous investigators and also examined the main publications about Aborigines of the other States. Because she felt she had insufficient knowledge of the growing discipline of anthropology, she read whatever books on this subject she could find in the public libraries and among her friends.[14] After a year in Perth working in a government office, she set up her tent with the Aborigines on the Reserve at Maamba, about 10 km from the centre of Perth. This was her headquarters for two years. She then travelled to other Reserves in the Southwest of the State, making frequent visits to the Reserve at Katanning, north of Albany. In 1907-08, she journeyed as far east as Esperance and as far north as the Goldfields, everywhere meeting Aborigines and collecting information from them. In 1909 and 1910, she was back in an office in Perth sorting and writing up her material, and sending the results to England to be criticised by Andrew Lang and others.

In the meantime she had written several papers for learned journals[15] and many newspaper articles, and was popular in Perth as a speaker for various organisations. In 1910 she was allowed by her government employers to accept an invitation to join an anthropological expedition from Cambridge University, led by Radcliffe-Brown. Though she greeted this opportunity with enthusiasm, it was clear soon after work in the field began that Radcliffe-Brown and Daisy Bates were unable to co-operate, and they quickly developed a great disliking for each other.

E. L. Grant Watson tells us much about this. expedition in his autobiography (1946), and in his later book Journey Under the Southern Stars (1968). In the former many pages are devoted to his friendship with Radcliffe-Brown at Cambridge, his impression of Mrs Bates, their work and travels together, and the clash of wills that developed. His account explains much about her subsequent complaints against Radcliffe-Brown. Whether these were true or not, she certainly believed they were true. It is therefore worth quoting at length from Grant watson’s account (1946, pp. 83-9), beginning with some impressions of Radcliffe-Brown at Cambridge.

In spite of his having passed all examinations with distinction, and being a Scholar and Fellow of the College, there were many of the erudite who looked on him with suspicion. He was too dramatic a personality ... He often made wild statements, he was brilliantly informed on all subjects ... he had lived as a primitive autocrat, exercising a beneficent but completely authoritarian sway over the simple Andamanese ... It is true that he sometimes lapsed from his high standard, and was led by his inventive genius to fabricate the stories he told ... but I have every reason to believe that these extravagances ... never once found their way into his published work.

He was never vulgarly rude, but if he was not interested he did not pretend to be so. He made, in fact, no least effort towards people who seemed to him superfluous. They might talk to him . . . but his eye would be fixed on the distance, and no reply would be forthcoming.

In Grant Watson’s account of their interaction (pp. 105-6), we learn that Mrs Bates and Mr Brown got on well at first:

Brown was by no means averse to accepting a woman as a fellowmember. His modern outlook would not repudiate the possibility of women being able to co-operate with men in the field of anthropology, and he was quick to see that Mrs Bates was the possessor of a ‘priceless store of knowledge ... knowledge ... not in a condition that Brown considered easily available for the ends of science ... The contents of her mind, in his estimation, were somewhat similar to the contents of a well-stored sewing basket, after half a dozen kittens had been playing there undisturbed for a few days. At first he optimistically thought he might disentangle some of that rich medley, but in this he proved mistaken. She was made for his exasperation, as he for hers. This unfortunate coincidence they neither of them discovered in those early days, . . . in spite of there having occurred more than one of those symptomatic intervals when Brown’s eyes had become fixed on distance, and Mrs Bates had talked into the silence.

No wonder that soon after the expedition set off (p. 106):

‘A most extraordinary man,’ she confided to me. . . It was not many days before she added: ‘and no gentleman, I am sure’. . . unfortunately she considered herself capable of the leadership of the expedition. Brown was determined that such an issue should never be in question, and he well knew how to use his weapons of silence and aloofness ...

Owing to a difference of opinion, he abandoned her at Sandstone so that she had to take the train from there to Perth. The others proceeded to Bernier Island, where there was a lock hospita116 for male Aborigines suffering from venereal disease. She joined them later, but stayed mostly on the adjoining island, Dorre, where there was a similar institution for women.

Finally, Grant watson recounts (1946, p. 121)

The weeks progressed until, partly because Brown’s task was nearly accomplished and partly because of the growing tension between himself and Mrs Bates, he decided to leave the island.

He proceeded to the mainland and did a further six or eight months fieldwork amongst the Aborigines living on sheep and cattle stations, including a number who were Kariera speakers (whose kinship system has engendered many pages in anthropological literature), while Mrs Bates worked in the Peak Hill area before returning to Perth. It had not been a happy association, and it certainly left Mrs Bates in a bitter mood.17

There had been talk of Radcliffe-Brown and Mrs Bates writing a book of their findings, but this idea was abandoned because of the friction between them. However, Radcliffe-Brown had been shown some of her manuscript by Andrew Lang before he left England: He and Mrs Bates worked together in revising parts of it in the field and when he returned to England early in 1912 he had some, or all, of the manuscript of the book with him. In consequence, there are many comments by him on one copy of the manuscript, as well as comments by Andrew Lang on another copy. Radcliffe-Brown returned the manuscript to her later that year and she submitted it to the State Government for publication. It was then that she sustained the serious blow to her hopes, when the Premier stated that the Government could not afford to publish it. Many years later it was retyped by the secretary provided by the Commonwealth Government from 1936 to 1940, and then presented, along with her other papers, to the Commonwealth in exchange for a small pension of $$2 a week later increased to $$5 5s Od. Thus the manuscript reached the National Library.[18]

After the Western Australian Government finally terminated Mrs Bates’s employment and handed back her manuscript, she lived for a time on Rottnest Island, then used as a prison[l9] for Aborigines. There she was able to interview prisoners from many parts of the State as she had done with sick people on Dorre Island, thus adding to her store of knowledge. She then spent about a year near Eucla, gathering information about the people of the far Southeast of the State. She added this to the manuscript of her book, although some of the material from the Eucla district is in note form. From Eucla, she travelled further east to Fowlers Bay and then to Ooldea in South Australia. Since she returned only for short visits to Western Australia and not to live, she collected no more information relevant to this book. She died in Adelaide on 18 April 1951.

[footnotes]

[6] Salter (1971, p.2) gives this date as 1863, Hill (L973, p.16) as 1859, though neither was able to confirm the date by seeing a copy of a birth certificate. Salter tried but failed to get confirmation from Ireland, and used the evidence given by Mrs Bates for her marriage to John Bates and for the birth certificate of her son. Hill had the reminiscences of Mrs Bates herself in her later life, when she had begun to take pride in her advanced years and no longer felt the need to conceal her birth date. Recent research in Ireland has made it certain that she was born in 1859.

[7] For this information I am grateful to the late Mr Alan Queale, who found Daisy O’Dwyer’s name on the passenger list for the Almora, arriving in North Queensland in January 1883.

[8] In this work, Carnegie and Shields (1979) claim that Edwin Murrant, the horsebreaker, changed his name to Henry Morant and became known as ‘Breaker Morant’. On page 8 there is a facsimile of the marriage certificate (held in the Registrar’s Office in Brisbane), of the marriage of Murrant and Daisy May O’Dwyer. The office of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in Canberra has facsimiles of the two register entries with their signatures.

[9] Both Mrs Margaret Carnegie and the late Mr Alan Queale have been of the greatest help to me in further researches into this unconventional behaviour on the part of a woman who later became the upholder of propriety in sexual matters and often passed judgment on the morals of the Aborigines.

[10] Mrs Bates told Ernestine Hill that John Bates ‘. . . was an admirable man of the most generous nature and the highest integrity, an upright man in every way, whom everyone respected, and a magnificent rider. . .’ (Hill 1973, p.23). ‘. . . A good man in every way, and a superb rider! But I never could run in double harness, don’t you know? (Hill 1973, p.26).

However, one of the letters from Martin Carney, John Bates’s nephew, to Elizabeth Salter (dated 7 May 1969), tells how his uncle was dismissed from his first job for ill-treating an Aboriginal stockrider, and that Mr and Mrs Bates ‘eventually parted over the Aborigines as Jack hated them’ (Salter collection 6481 in the National Library). In another letter to Elizabeth Salter (dated 3 May 1969) a Mr J. H. Brewer, the son of the Perth family with whom Arnold Bates had boarded in the 1900s while attending Christian Brothers College, writes that Daisy Bates was a cultured person but that Jack was almost illiterate. He adds that ‘she hadn’t much time for husband or son’. (Salter collection 6481.)

[11] In the Salter collection (6481) a letter from Martin Carney, dated 7 May 1969, states that Mrs Bates stayed on these properties ‘as governess while John Bates went on droving’.

[12] Matthew Gibney was born in Ireland in 1835, became a priest and carne to Perth in 1863. On a visit to Victoria in 1880 he gave the last rites at Glenrowan to Ned Kelly (who recovered and was later executed) and to others of his gang, injured during a fight with police. He became Bishop of Perth in 18$7, but resigned in 1910 after an inquiry into his management of diocesan finances. He died in Perth in 1925. Throughout his time in Western Australia he was active in helping Aborigines and in promoting mission work amongst them. In the Bates collection, National Library (365/97/148), is a Christmas card (no year) from Bishop Gibney to Mrs Bates and to this is pinned his photograph (see plate).

[13] Salter (1971, pp.91, 111-12)

[14] Among the authors whose writing Mrs Bates lists as having read are: Charles Darwin, Matthew Flinders, E. Giles, L. Fison, T. H. Huxley, A. R. Wallace, J. D. Flower, Andrew Lang, R. Brough Smyth, J. Mathew, E. J. Eyre, J. P. Thomson, J. Bonwick, C. Brinton, J. C. Prichard, E. B. Tylor, A. W. Howitt, W. Baldwin Spencer, R. Helms, P. Topinard, R: Sadleir, T. Worsnop, P. Strzelecki, O. Schoetensach, K. Klaatsch, W.R. Smith, A. C. Gregory, C. S. Wake, John Fraser, James Frazer. Those dealing with the Aborigines of Western Australia are G. F. Moore, George Grey, Bishop Salvado, John Forrest, J. G. Withnell, ‘Yabaroo’, R. H. Mathews, E. M. Curr, and E. J. Eyre.

INTRODUCTION

[15] Papers in learned journals are: ‘The marriage laws and some customs of the West Australian Aborigines’ (1905a); ‘Notes on the topography of the northern portion of Western Australia’ (1905b); ‘Possibilities of tropical agriculture in the Northwest: Beagle Bay experiment’ (1901); ‘Efforts made by Western Australia towards the betterment of her Aborigines’ (1907); ‘Interesting fossil remains discovered in the .%lammoth Cave: a link with the dead past’ (1910). See bibliography for full details. 16 Aborigines who had contracted venereal disease or leprosy, or were suspected of having done so, were confined in hospitals equivalent to prisons from which they ,were prevented from escaping. They died there, away from family and country. However, Mrs Bates did not write of the cruelty involved until thirty years later, in The Passing of ‘the Aborigines (1938).

[17] For further discussion, see White (1981a).

[18] Carbon copies of the typed transcript lodged with the National Library are held bv the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide, and the J. S. Battye Library of West Australian History, Perth.

[19] Rottnest Island is a small island (11 x 4 km) about 32 km west of Perth. Dutch explorers named it because of the many small marsupials living on it, which they called ‘rats’. It is now a popular holiday resort. It was settled by farmers in 1830, but in 1839 it became a penal settlement for Aborigines from all over the colony. The penal settlement was given up soon after Mrs Bates’s visit in 1912.

[http://henrietta.slwa.wa.gov.au/record=b2195071~S2]

Author Bates, Daisy, 1859-1951.

Title My natives and I : incorporating The passing of the Aborigines : a lifetime spent among the natives of Australia / Daisy Bates ; edited by P.J. Bridge ; with an introduction by Bob Reece.

Imprint Carlisle, W.A. : Hesperian Press, c2004.

Details

Call # 305.89915 BAT

Phys. Description xli, 250 p. : ill., map, ports. ; 22 cm.

Series Aboriginal studies series ; no. 21

Note “My natives and I was first published in January, 1936 in The advertiser with syndication Australia wide. The passing of the Aborigines was first published by John Murray, London, 1938”—T.p. verso.

Bibliog. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subject Bates, Daisy, 1859-1951.

Anthropologists – Australia – Biography.

Aboriginal Australians – Social life and customs.

Aboriginal Australians – Social conditions.

Other Number 25549728

Alt Author Bates, Daisy, 1859-1951. Passing of the Aborigines : a lifetime spent among the natives of Australia.

Reece, Bob, 1940-

Bridge, Peter J. (Peter John), 1943-

Hesperian Press.

ISBN 085905313X (pbk.)