FORTY YEARS AMONG AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 6, 4 August 1939, Page 37

FORTY YEARS AMONG AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

THE PASSING OF THE ABORIGINES: By Daisy Bates, C.B.E. With a Foreword by Sir Géorge Murray and an Introduction by Arthur Mee. John Murray, London. 758 pp., with a Map and 17 Illustrations. It is possible to over-praise this book as literature, not possible to be too enthusiastic about it as a human document. Why Mrs. Bates lived such a life is almost as hard to understand as how she did it; but she did, and this is the incredible story. Some women have gone into the wilderness as missionaries, some in pursuit of scientific knowledge. A few have gone to escape from civilisation or from the memory of experiences that have been more bitter than loneliness. But Mrs. Bates is in none of these groups. She went to live with the aborigines because she was sorry for them, knew that they were doomed, and decided te do what one woman could to smooth their downward path. She lived with them for forty years, sharing her food with them, her goods, and finally her whole fortune; and she left them only when age made it impossible for her any longer to camp in the wilderness with safety. Then she returned to civilisation to plead for them in print. How well she does it can’t be indicated in the brief space of this review, but it can be said that she writes as she has lived, simply, sincerely, without ostentation or affected modesty, and that her story is as truly a great Australian book as she is herself a great Australian woman-great in her goodness, her endurance, her achievement. Necessarily, too, her story is a record of deep anthropological interest, but. that is incidental and not fundamental. She is herself the real record, the life and the book.