A REMARKABLE WOMAN

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3309, 1 April 1926, Page 4

A REMARKABLE WOMAN

BUSS DAISY BATES SYDNEY, March 19. At Ooldea, on the east-west Australian trans-Continental railway, there lives one of the most remarkable women that Australia has produced— Miss Daisy Bates, self-appointed' protector of the aborigines in that area. Miss aßtes was at Ooldea many years before the trains ran there, for it is 26 years since she turned hdr 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 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 Kabbarli (grandmother) ,and neither advancing year nor enfeebled health, added to the entreaties of' her friends in th 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 burled 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 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 stretcher bed, covered with a fur

rug; a table stands piled with books, manuscripts, and native, curious, 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. 1 , . :

Miss 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 keepr of their own laws and the laws of the white people. The old mep 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 woman should see these things and live. She claims to bq 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 reclares, “to make the able-bodied blacks work or hunt, and J have never fed a loafer, but have always cared for the sick ana feeble, and for the'hungry children," From others it can be learnt how she has carried old natives bn her back from their camp to her own because ho one else would succour them, and has nursed them back to health; how her influence lias 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 aboriginals themselves.