In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. She left a detailed record of her life in her letters, her published articles, her book The Passing of the Aborigines, and in notes scribbled on paper bags, old railway timetables, and even scraps of newspaper. But very little of what this strange woman tells about herself is true. For her there were no boundaries separating experience from imagination; she inhabited a world filled with events that could not have taken place, with people she had never met. In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Mrs. Bates says she was most happy. There are meetings with the aborigines and whites who knew her or about her, and slowly the facts of her …
In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. She left a detailed record of her life in her letters, her published articles, her book The Passing of the Aborigines, and in notes scribbled on paper bags, old railway timetables, and even scraps of newspaper. But very little of what this strange woman tells about herself is true. For her there were no boundaries separating experience from imagination; she inhabited a world filled with events that could not have taken place, with people she had never met. In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Mrs. Bates says she was most happy. There are meetings with the aborigines and whites who knew her or about her, and slowly the facts of her life are allowed to emerge. But what makes this book so extraordinary is the way that, almost imperceptibly, the author fuses her own imagination and experience with that of Daisy Bates, until she seems to be recalling this other life as if it were her own, until she is able to bring us the feeling of sitting in a tent near a railway line, staring out across a red desert, where the boundary between experience and imagination disappears. This magical, absorbing new book by the acclaimed author of The Emperor's Last Island confirms Julia Blackburn as one of Britain's most original and talented writers. - Jacket flap.
Review of 'Daisy Bates in the Desert' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
There are people who did worse things to the First People of Australia - but what she did was bad enough. Her sensationalising portrayals of the people who looked after her during her self-exile in the desert reinforced all the popular prejudices about them. She used them to prop up her own fragile ego.
Blackburn does her best to make an interesting story emerge from the mish-mash of lies, half-truths and concealments that Bates left behind her. It reads well, but leaves the real life ungraspable.
