A REMARKABLE WOMAN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3018, 1 April 1926, Page 2

A REMARKABLE WOMAN.

MISS DAISY BATES,

GUARDIAN OF ABORIGINES

TWENTY-SIX YEARS’ WORK,

Sydney, March 19. At Ooldea, on the east-west Australian trans-Continental [railway there lives one of the most remarkaide women that Australia has produced —Miss Daisy Bates, self-ap-pointed protector of the aborigines in that area. Miss Bates was at Ooldea many years before the trains ran there, for it is 26 years since she turned her back on the crowded cities and went into the wilderness to labour for the natives. No other woman or man lias such an extensive knowledge of the aborigines as she has, and from time to time she sends vivid sketches, stories, and articles to various Australian newspapers and periodicals as proof of this knowledge. For 26 years she has clung to her self-appointed task of uplifting and tending the blacks to whom she is known as Ivabbarli (grandmother), and neither advancing years nor enfeebled health, added to the entreaties of her friends in the cities, will attract her from her work. Half a mile north of Ooldea she has marked out a spot for her grave, and there she hopes to be buried some day in aboriginal fashion.

A recent visitor describes Miss Bates’ living quarters. “She is camped, he says, “in a hollow of the red sandhills in the direction of that historic soak, which from time to time immemorial has been a meeting place for the aboriginal tribes and the scene of their mystic ceremonies. Among the mulga and acacia two white tents peep out. . . . Her living tent contains a steteher bed, covered with a fur rug; a table stands piled with books, maps, manuscripts, and native curios, and in a corner lies a big square box containing other manuscripts.” She obtains her provisions from a goods train that traverses the line twice a week, and water is obtainable from a pipe line from the soak to the railway station. Miss Bates explains that her idea throughout hgs been to make the natives keep their own laws, to segregate them from low whites, and to set such an example to them in her own simple, clean life that they see in her a keeper of their own laws and the laws of the white poeple. The old men believe that she is a reincarnation of an ancestral aborigine because of her knowledge of native laws, customs and ceremonies. She has seen all their most secret and sacred rites. It is the native law that no women should see these things and live. She claims to be the only woman, white or black, who has seen all the stages of the initiation of a boy ~to manhood. “I have always used my influence,” she declares, “to make the able-bodied blacks work or hunt, and I have never fed a loafer, but have always cared for the sick and feeble, and for the hungry children.” From others it can be learnt how she has carried old natives on her back from their camp to her own because no one else would succour them, and lias nursed them back to health; how her influence has kept the native camps free from molestation; and the strange reluctance on the part of the Governments to enlist her aid, in an official capacity, for the work. She has mastered not only 188 aboriginal dialects, but the aboriginal themselves.