Daisy Bates by Elizabeth Salter

Daisy Bates

“The Great White Queen of the Never Never”

by Elizabeth Salter

Angus and Robertson, 1973, ISBN 0207122717, black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, some markings to inside covers, price-clipped dustjacket shows some edge and shelf wear with some rubbing, bumping, chipping and tearing, closed tears to edges (see photographs)

“Daisy Bates spent her life caring for the Aborigines in the far outback of Western and South Australia.  For sixteen years, from 1919 to 1935, she lived alone in her tent on the Nullabor Plain, a spectacle of wonder in her formal old-fashioned clothes to passengers on the Trans-Continental express as it paused to gasp for water at Ooldea Siding.
Though she related some of her experiences in The Passing of the Aborigines the full story of her life has never been told until now: and a surprising story it is in Elizabeth Salter’s vivid and compassionate biography.
It encompasses her early years as Daisy O’Dwyer in Ireland; her first visit to Australia and her romantic but unfortunate marriage to a drover; her escape to journalism in London, where she worked, somewhat sceptically, for W. T. Stead on the spiritualist newspaper Borderland and met (in the flesh) Rhodes, Jameson and G.B. Shaw; and her return to Australia to travel with a Catholic bishop to the remote Beagle Bay mission in Western Australia and so to take up her life’s work.”