Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert

Published by the National Library of Australia. The complex and enigmatic Daisy Bates is the subject of the third work in the Library's An Australian Life series and, in part, draws on material contained in the 90 boxes that Bates donated to the Library in 1941. Bates is well known for the years between 1900 and 1945 soent as "The Great White Queen of the Never-Never Lands" in the Western Australian desert, where she reigned supreme over the Aboriginal people who arrived from the desert to the north. Bates craved to be seen as a woman of science for her ethnographic studies, but her claims of cannibalism among desert Aboriginal people and her belief in the inevitable extinction of Aboriginal people were much maligned by academic anthropologists. In Daisy A Life, historian Bob Reece does not try to rehabilitate Bates' scholarly reputation, as that is already happening; rather he tells her story through her letters and published writings so that readers can gain some idea of her motivation and beliefs and of what kind of person she really was.