The Passing of the Aborigines

A Lifetime spent among the Natives of Australia

DAISY BATES:  "As the years passed, I was more and more convinced that it was impossible
to leave these people, to be deaf to their appeal for human kindliness,
and of the hopelessness of any movement except one of help and comfort to
the individual, and personal example. So savage and so simple, so much
astray and so utterly helpless were they, that somehow they became my
responsibility. All along the thousand miles of railway, there was no
other sanctuary, no half-way house, as it were, between the white man's
traffic and the native intelligence, five thousand years behind."

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Daisy Bates has neither sought fame nor found it. She has made no money
by her long life's work. Through all these years she has been alone, cut
off from the world, with only these strange, backward, hopeless people to
give her a little human society now and then. There is in her life
something of the spirit of service that moved Florence Nightingale, and
something of the spirit of sacrifice that filled the heart of Father
Damien. She would not put it so, for she has loved her life and made a
joy of her labour, but it is right that tribute should be paid to Mrs.
Daisy Bates. 

She went out to her Aborigines in the first years of this century. She
found them decreasing in numbers with the coming of the white man, their
root-foods ploughed up, the tracks to their water-holes disappearing. She
wrote a history of them which still remains in manuscript. When the
century was ten years old she went out to two islands on a Commission to
study the hospital treatment of these poor people, and while there she
set up a post office so that the patients could communicate with their
families on the mainland. One of the first services she rendered to them
was to conduct a mail with notched sticks, conveying messages to their
friends. She had forty patients on her hands and pulled every one
through. She kept them tranquil and cheerful in their bush shelters, sat
by their sick beds listening to their tribal stories, joined with them in
praying to their totems when they wanted rain. They had never known
anyone like her. They named her Kabbarli, grandmother.