[Reece, Bob, 2007, Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert, National Library of Australia, Canberra, Chapter 2]
CHAPTER TWO
The Virus of Research, 1904-1912
On 3 May 1904, a new phase of Daisy’s life began when she was employed on a junior clerk’s salary of 8 shillings per day by Western Australia’s Registrar-General, Malcolm Fraser, to collect Aboriginal vocabularies. Exactly how she came by this job is not clear.
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One of her first tasks was to advise Dr Walter Roth, the Queensland Chief Protector of Aborigines who had been commissioned by an embarrassed Western Australian Government to report on the condition of the state’s Aboriginal population, on the itinerary he should adopt. This she did, devising an inland route so that he would form a broad impression of conditions in the North-West and Kimberley regions. She also offered to accompany him on this tour. Instead, however, it was decided but the Government that he should take a coastal route, which in her view put him in the hands of ‘just the wrong kind of informants’ instead of the station owners to whom he should have been talking.
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