The Rise and Fall of Daisy O'Dwyer
2006; Aboriginal Studies Press; Volume: 2006; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0729-4352
Autores Tópico(s)Australian Indigenous Culture and History
ResumoA while ago I gave some thought to becoming a 'blogger' but in the event settled for the less ambitious project of an e-diary with occasional memoirs intended for an audience of family and friends. The editor of Australian Aboriginal Studies thought the following entry might be of interest to a wider circle of readers, and I shall be pleased if he is right. 11 January 2006 In the entry of 18 November I mentioned that I had lunch at Betty Meehan's place, with fellow guests Bob Reece and Isabel McBryde. Bob is a leading scholar in the field of Aboriginal colonial history and a few days previously at the National Library had presented a thought-provoking paper on Daisy Bates. After lunch Betty produced some witty pictures Rhys Jones had taken of her as a DB look-alike during her 1970s fieldwork at the Blyth River (see Figures 1 and 2 for two of them). [FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED] Daisy Bates died in 1951 at the age of 92. I don't know how much people know about her these days, but she was certainly a celebrity during the inter-war years. In 1919, after a long association with Aborigines in Western Australia, she set up a camp at a siding called Ooldea on the South Australian side of the Nullarbor Plain and stayed there for the next 16 years. In that vast emptiness the sight of an elderly lady outside her tent in full Edwardian uniform must have been a truly singular experience for travellers on the trans-continental railway. Arthur Mee (1938:xi), editor of The children's encyclopaedia which sanctified my own childhood, described the scene like this: On the fringe of the vast island continent of Australia live a few million white people; in the vast desert regions far from the coast live a few thousand black people, the remnant of the first inhabitants ... The race on the fringe stands for Civilization; the race in the interior stands for Barbarism. Between them a woman has lived in a little white tent for more than twenty years, watching over these people for the sake of the Flag, a woman alone, the solitary spectator of a vanishing race. She is Daisy Bates, CBE, one of the least known and one of the most romantic figures in the British Empire. [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] It seems that one reason why the native race was vanishing was that the women were eating their own babies. A caption in Daisy's handwriting appears beneath a 1908 photograph of eight young Aboriginal women of Western Australia: 'Every one of these women killed and ate her new-born child, sharing it with every other woman in her group'. Her book The passing of the Aborigines is replete with such statements; for example, 'When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the mother before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless of sex'. Even the worthy Arthur Mee (1938:xiii) lapses into cannibalistic mode: 'I shall never forget her writing to me', he says, 'that a woman she had had for tea had eaten her own child'. It comes as no surprise that Daisy was quoted 60 years later by Pauline Hanson as an authoritative source for her own slurs on Indigenous people. What inspired this noble lady to sacrifice so much of her life for people she believed to be compulsive baby-eaters? According to Mee it was the belief that, having brought to their land the Civilization that destroyed them, England owed them something. As they would not be around long enough to enjoy material compensation of any magnitude, the best that could be done was to ensure that they died off peacefully. 'Smooth the dying pillow' thus became the pious prescription for a Christian nation; and to minimise the mess left to clean up after the funeral, every effort should be made to 'keep the dreaded half-caste menace from our great continent' (Bates 1938:243). Daisy rejoiced that no fruits of miscegenation were ever begotten in any of the camps she presided over (1938:243). …
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