Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines

by Julia Blackburn

Book Overview

In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this "eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman"... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679744460
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating adventure!

Daisy Bates appears to be delusional at times in recounting her adventures with the Aboriginese but this is still one of the most fascinating reads I've had in a long time! If you were to separate her tales from the fact that she lived on her own among the indigenous peoples of Australia during a time when it was shocking for a woman to do so, there would still be an incredible story of courage and perserverance. This is an account worth reading!

A contrarian's view of Daisy Bates in the Desert.

Daisy Bates, a controversial woman who has attained almost mythical status in Australia, was an inveterate liar, constitutionally incapable of seeing herself in the world as it really was. Instead, she created a better world in her own mind and assumed that everyone else recognized her world as real. As Julia Blackburn reconstructs what she believes to have been Daisy's life in Australia's western desert, and her seemingly futile efforts to protect and preserve the aborigines and their culture, she presents a plausible personality with whom the reader can, to a great extent, identify. Blackburn is successful in making Daisy's dream world seem like an understandable response to the privations and hardships she faced in her early life alone. In Part I, Blackburn describes what Daisy has said about her life, and follows it with what Blackburn has discovered to be the truth as a result of her documented research. In Part II, she allows Daisy, as she understands her, to speak to the reader herself, and we "live" with her in the desert for many years, watching as her original dedication becomes a mission and then a mania, and her insecurity grows into delusion and eventually paranoia. A woman who seems to have accomplished nothing of lasting significance, Daisy might have achieved some of her goals if she had only bent a little. Part III tells of Daisy's life after she leaves the desert. Blackburn brings Daisy's Australian desert camp to life--the blinding sun, the heat of day and cold of night, the ghostly arrivals and departures of the shy aborigines, the birds and animals who were often Daisy's only company, and the changes wrought by the railroads, settlement, missionaries, and unfeeling governmental bureaucrats. Though she presents Daisy sympathetically, she is not Daisy's apologist, offering no defense, other than Daisy's own personality, for her extreme and solitary viewpoint. Unlike other readers, I found this a very poignant story of a woman who, at the end of a life of the utmost privation and dedication to saving a culture, realizes with sadness that it has all been for naught. Clearly, she never had a clue that most of her failure was her own fault. Mary Whipple

Very intriguing book

In spite of the two star review already posted on this book, I found it to be a great book. Really well written...lovely prose...insightful...made me want to know more about Daisy and so I went into research in greater depth. I think this book would make an excellent study for any women's literature course.