In 1934 she received the Order of the Commander of the British Empire, and in the following year in Adelaide she wrote a book, The Passing of the Aborigines, and also completed for the South Australian Government reports on the customs and lives of the aboriginal tribes. She spent the remainder of her life amongst the natives - chiefly at Ooldea Siding on the Trans-Continental Railway - except in 19 when ill-health brought her to Adelaide where she became matron of a returned soldiers' hospital. She then sold the pastoral properties left to her by her husband and travelled over the Nullarbor by camel buggy. This took her two years during which time she lived with the tribe. These charges, she found, were groundless.Ī few years later the Western Australian Government commissioned her to write a history of the Bibbulman tribe. She returned to Australia in 1899 to investigate for The Times charges that the aborigines in Western Australia were being ill-treated. Bates returned to London in 1894 and became a journalist. She married a drover, Jack Bates, and they had one son, born at Bathurst. She was presented to the Prince of Wales in the Nullarbor Plain in 1920 and to the Duke of Gloucester when he was Governor General.īorn Daisy O'Dwyer in Tipperary, Ireland, she came alone to Australia at the age of 20 because of a lung weakness. Bates met King George V and Queen Mary when they arrived in Perth on their way to open the first Commonwealth Parliament in 1901. Initiated into several tribes, she witnessed ceremonials taboo to aboriginal women. She clothed them and fed them at her own expense. She was their guide, counsellor, friend, and universal provider. She lived amongst them in a tent, went walkabout with them, and wrote books about them. She was 92 and had devoted 40 years of her life to helping the aborigines. "Kabbarli" (grandmother) to aborigines throughout Western Australia, South Australia, Central Australia, and the Northern Territory - died in her sleep in an Adelaide nursing home yesterday.
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