Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the DesertDaisy Bates became an iconic figure during the years she spent on the border between Western Australia and South Australia. The Great White Queen of the Never-Never Lands reigned supreme over the groups of Aboriginal people who, attracted by the Transcontinental Railway, arrived from the desert country to the north. Bates craved to be seen as a woman of science through her earlier ethnographic work in Western Australia, but her exaggerated claims of wholesale cannibalism amongst the Aborigines, her belief in their inevitable extinction and her dismissive attitude to castes discredited her within the academic community. Only in recent times has the use of her ethnographic data in Native Title claims begun to rehabilitate her scientific reputation. In Daisy Bates: A Life, Western Australian historian Bob Reece tells her extraordinary story through her letters and published writings so that readers can gain some idea of her motivation and beliefs, and picture what kind of person she really was. |
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