[Linganth] Re : Daisy Bates and Aborigine dialects

[Timothy Mason]

Claire Bowern wrote:

>I have no first-hand knowledge of the quality of her Southern Western
>Australian work (although from what I've seen and heard secondhand it's
>not looked on favourably). I have copies of some of her wordlists from the
>Kimberley region and they are (to put it nicely) more than a little
>pathetic. Badly transcribed, full of basic errors in meaning, forms
>assigned to the wrong language, etc etc. Her ethnological accounts of the
>Western Kimberley show evidence of an overactive immagination.
>
>  
>
Thank you for this - it chimes pretty much with what I had deduced from 
reading her book.

>Her claims of baby-eating have been the subject of much controversy and 
>are (as far as I know) unsubstantiated. I would be very wary indeed of 
>using Bates' work without corroboration from other sources.
>  
>
I am interested in Bates from the outside, as it were. Although 
establishment anthropologists never, so far as I can gather, showed a 
great deal of interest, a Daisy Bates myth hovers at the edges of 
Australian consciousness. She is seen as a romantic figure, a feminine 
hero squashed by the male establishment. I have been astonished that 
such a reading of her life and works could arise, for from the evidence 
of her autobiography alone, she seems just as easily read as a dangerous 
psychotic whose wild fantasies may well have fuelled the movement to 
remove Aborigine children from their mothers.

>There are books on Daisy Bates which address these issues, but I'm 
>blanking on details at the moment.
>
>  
>
The only books I have been able to dig up are Julia Blackburn's "Daisy 
Bates in the Desert", which is much too impressionistic for my purposes, 
and Elizabeth Salter's biography, which sees her as "a remarkable 
woman". I haven't yet been able to get hold of the latter, but sense 
that it may be overly hagiographic.

Thank you again

Timothy Mason
Université de Paris 8
http://perso.club-internet.fr/tmason/index.htm