A REMARKABLE WOMAN.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 5 April 1926, Page 10

A REMARKABLE WOMAN.

GUARDIAN OF ABORIGINES, At Ooldea on the east-west Australian trans-Continental railway there lives one of the most remarkable women that Australia has produced— Daisy Bates, self-appoiuted 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 this wilderness to labour for the natives. No other woman or man has 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 newspapeis and periodicals as proof of this knowledge. For 20 years she has clung to her self-appointed task of uplifting and tending the blacks, to whom she is known as ICabbarli (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 his toric soak, which from time immemorial has been a meeting place for the aboriginal tribes and the scene of their mystic ceremonies. Among the inulga and acacia two white tents peep out. Her living tent contains a stretcher bed, covered with a fur rug; a table stands piled witTT booksi, 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. Misa Bates explains that her idea throughout has. 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 the keeper of their own laws and the law's of' the white people. The old men believe that she is a reincarnation of an ancestral aborigine because of her knowledge of native law's, customs and sacred rites. It is the native law that .no woman 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 w'ork or hunt, and I have never fed a loafer, but have always cared for the sick and feeble, a.nd •for the hungry children. ’ ’ From others it can be learnt how she has carried old natives on her back from their camp to her ow-n because no one else would succour them; and has nursed them back to health; how her influence has kept the native camps free from molestation; and the stra.nge reluctance on the part of the Governments to en,list her aid, in an official capacity, for the W'ork. She has mastered not only 188 aboriginal dialects, but the aborigines themselves.