The Irishness of Daisy Bates.(Biography)

"I'M AS IRISH as Patrick's pig," Daisy Bates told the Adelaide News in January 1941, "but Australia has been my new home since I first landed in the West." Having spent the first twenty or so years of her life in Ireland, practically all of it in Roscrea, north Tipperary, she nurtured for the rest of her days a strong sense of her Irish identity. While it is true that in Australia from 1883 she concealed her Catholic orphan convent school background, passing herself off as a member of the Protestant Irish gentry, she remained quintessentially Irish.

This was expressed in her greatest strength (and perhaps weakness) which was talk, good Irish talk, and plenty of it. She was intelligent, well-read, witty, and had strong opinions on everything. She also loved talk for the sake and sound of it, as the Irish do. How ironic, and even tragic, then, that she should have spent so many years of her life in the desert mainly with Aborigines who, at best, could speak no more than a few words and phrases of English. The secret, perhaps, is that they could always be counted on never to contradict or challenge her.

Letters (and she wrote thousands of them during those years) became the substitute for normal conversation, the personal ones always being directed to people she believed were sympathetic to her late Victorian, "west British" imperial view of the world. Significantly, she kept none of her correspondence with her Roscrea family, which would have revealed her modest Catholic origins and "blown" her elaborate cover in Australia.

That Daisy Bates was Irish is not always appreciated by the steadily declining number of Australians for whom her name still means something. She did not present herself publicly as being so and her accent was upper-class English with the slightest Irish burr. In other words, she was one of those Irish people who like to be mistaken as English and then say, as she no doubt did, "But I'm Irish, doncherknow?" The Irish have suffered from a cultural cringe towards the English for much longer than Australians have done and it can still be detected in parts of Dublin.

Visiting Daisy Bates for the first time at her tent near Ooldea Siding in South Australia in June 1932, the enterprising journalist Ernestine Hill took a few days to solve the puzzle of this genteel, refined and well-read woman dressed in the anachronistic fashion of the late Victorian era and inspired by its imperial ideology but living in a tiny tent on the edge of the Nullarbor with only a few "cannibal" natives for company:

 
   She was Irish, it suddenly dawned on me. That 
   explained everything, the idealism, the self 
   sacrifice, the prejudice and pride, her fearlessness 
   "agin the government", all her intuitions and 
   inhibitions, her delight in folk-lore, her perpetual 
   adoration of royalty, and at the same time her 
   lifetime loyalty to the lost cause of a lost people 
   with all their sins and sorrows in her always loving 
   heart and mind. 

Sitting on kerosene boxes outside her tent during the long warm evenings, Daisy regaled the younger woman with stories about her youth in Ireland: about riding to hounds with the local Protestant gentry; about a doting father who taught her to ride ("Head and heart up, Daisy, hands and heels down!"), who introduced her to the novels of Dickens and Thackeray and took her to meet his friends at the exclusive Kildare Street Club in Dublin; about an eccentric magistrate grandfather who had to be carried drunk and protesting to bed every other night; about a grand Anglo-Irish family who "adopted" her and took her on the Grand Tour of the continent, together with their own children and a German governess, and how her dear father rescued her now and again in France or Belgium, taking her out to dinner and reading more Dickens to her. All this and more Ernestine Hill used to colour her feature articles about Daisy--and further embroidered when she came to write her brilliant but unreliable memoir in the early 1970s.