115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked

Introduction to Lingthusiasm

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today we're getting enthusiastic about the complicated legacy of linguistic data collected by problematic people with This Guy Sucked. But first, This Guy

Collaboration with This Guy Sucked

0:32Sucked is a history podcast who reached out to us about doing a shared episode. – So we had a look, and we were like, well, we clearly share an approach to accessible podcasting that nonetheless has scholarly rigor in it. But we were like, wait, This Guy Sucked is for professional haters, and we're just really enthusiastic about things. – Claire Orban, who hosts the show, was like, look, I am also very enthusiastic. – about hating things. – And this is how we learned that there are sort of two meanings for enthusiastic. One is high energy, and another is high positivity. Normally on enthusiasm,

1:08we're both. – But this was a chance for me to revisit a topic where maybe I don't feel both. – How was life as a temporary hater? – It was very cathartic, actually. This episode is a bit more fast and loose than I usually am, and I discovered that I use the extended form of BS more when I'm really fired up. So This Guy Sucked is a fun and unique way to approach history. – And what did this person do that you hated so much? – Daisy Bates left one of the most important and extensive archives we now have of Australian

1:41Indigenous languages from the early 20th century. But it only exists because of her particularly bad attitudes towards Indigenous people, even by the standards of that colonial era, which were also pretty bad. So just a heads up going into this one.

Content Advisory

1:54– There's your content advisory. Our most recent bonus episode was about a less problematic woman from the 20th century, Margaret Godlove, who secretly wrote a whole bunch of definitions for colour words with our very unproblematic guest, lexicographer Corey Stamper. It's the second half of the interview that we did with Corey Stamper as a main episode last month. So if you listened to that first half and you want to know the answer to the spoiler, this is your chance. – For access to this and over 100 other bonus episodes, head to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm.

2:27– Welcome to This Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters

Introduction to This Guy Sucked

2:42and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. But today, we are here to do a super special mashup collaborative episode thing. Woo-hoo!

Meet Lauren and Claire

3:13– Yay.

Meet Lauren and Claire

3:13– Who are you? What are we doing? – Hi, Claire. My name is Lauren. I am a co-host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. This is really fun for me because normally we just do yay enthusiasm and like hating is a new vibe for me. So let's see how it goes. – Yeah. I mean, I think we try to be enthusiastic about the hating a little bit in the sense that like we're doing it for justice, right? Like the goal is we're not just being mean. We're

3:45doing it to try to rewrite someone's history back into the historical narrative or to try to sort of be clear about harms that are caused by people that we in some way or another hold up as good or useful or important. We'll just like to make sure that the record is balanced. – Excellent. As long as it's pedagogically informed and academically rigorous hating, it sounds great. – It sure is. And the way I do that is by having other people who are experts on to tell me the stuff.

4:16Before we started, we wanted to make some acknowledgements though, and I'll let you take this away. – Thanks, Claire. I want to acknowledge that this recording is taking place for me on the lands of

Acknowledgement of Land

4:28the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Those lands were never ceded and the Kulin peoples live across the area that we now know as Melbourne and its outer surrounds today. I want to pay my respects to any Indigenous people listening. To be completely honest, you can look at the content notes for this episode. It's going to involve a lot of coloniser bullshit. So, just as a heads up on that, my acknowledgement to any other Indigenous people who have been subjected to colonisation

5:00who are listening to this episode as well because, man, these people are maniacs. I do also want to let you know that almost all of the story has nothing to do with Melbourne or Victoria or Kulin country. A lot of what we're talking about today has taken place in Western Australia and a lot in South Australia and the Northern Territory. That's important because Australia is incredibly diverse in terms of Indigenous peoples and their cultures and their languages. It is the longest continuing culture in the world. We have records back to

5:3360,000 years ago. At the time of settlers arriving and white people coming to Australia, there were over 400 distinct language groups. An incredibly diverse country. I'm going to be talking about a different part of it to where I'm from today. This is a very important thing. We don't always do things like land acknowledgements on the show, but it is a very important thing for particularly the person that we're talking about. So there is a particular approach being taken here that we

6:05wanted to make sure we were really thoughtful about from the jump so that you know that we're thinking about these things as we're making it. I'm trying to be a little bit better, at least on my show. I think you guys do this better than we do, but I'm trying to be better on TGS about being more open about the back end and how we approach and think about and formulate the show.

Daisy Bates' Life and Work

6:28I think you guys do a really excellent job of that. And I encourage everyone listening to this, if you want the opposite side of this coin and enthusiasm and really, really thoughtful scholarship, to go listen to Lingthusiasm because they're really great. And I'm very excited about this episode because I have been listening to Lauren's show and Gretchen's show for a while. So it's really cool to do this. Well, I'm really excited because doing this let me know about your show and I've since been listening and I love academically informed content. I'm not a historian, as you've

7:02correctly identified for me. I am a linguist and I'm not even a linguist who mostly works in Australia. A lot of my research is either with English or other languages or a lot of my work has been with Tibetan languages in Nepal, which is a whole other historical and social context. But this person I want to talk about today, should we get into it? Yeah, please. She's pretty wild. I came to her in... There are some academics who just finish a PhD and wander

7:36straight into a research fellowship or a tenure track job. Not me. I can hear in your laughter, Claire, that that was not you. I was working at a store. It took me about a year, a year and a half to get my first research fellowship. And in that year and a half, I had these colleagues who kept trying to find work for me, but they were always these like, I've got 40 hours of research project here. I've got one day as a research officer. And I'm so grateful to all of those colleagues for keeping me employed and housed.

8:09Shout out to them. In this great period of uncertainty. And one of these colleagues was Nick Teberger at the University of Melbourne, who was like, I have this big project. I've got these pages and pages of PDFs I've just scanned. And I need as many people as I can to help me check that the scans look okay, that everything's there, that they're properly labeled and named. And these are over 20,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts and 4,000 pages of typed word lists. And these were all this massive survey

Daisy Bates' Linguistic Work

8:45of Indigenous languages of Western, Southern, and Central Australia that were collected in the early 1900s. And they were collected by or kind of managed by this lady named Daisy Bates. And I was just like, what is this project? And what was this woman doing in the early 1900s? This is an astonishing amount of data, all of these Indigenous languages. For some of these languages, that's the only record we have left of them. And it was just astonishing. I'd never heard of

9:19Daisy Bates. I didn't know this massive collection of data existed. It had just sat in the National Library of Australia for years. People knew it was there. But until Nick had this big project to digitize it in a project called Digital Daisy Bates, it had just sat there. Uh-huh. Probably should at this point say, if the name Daisy Bates rings a bell and you're American, we're talking about different Daisies.

9:45Oh, yeah. To be clear, there are two Daisy Bates when you Google Daisy Bates. We're not talking about the civil rights activist. We're not. She rocks. Okay, good. Because I was just like, I don't know if she sucks. I don't have time to go down that rabbit hole. She seems great. Yeah. On this show, I think I'm happy to come out and say we're openly pro-desegregation of Arkansas schools in the mid-century American period. We like integration and we like Daisy Bates. So good Daisy Bates. But the one that we're talking about is not that one. That one was not moonlighting as an Irish-Australian

10:21linguist. Very busy. Irish-Australian linguist 50 years earlier. Ah, yes. Also, we haven't gotten there quite yet, but it's going to my previous thesis that I have engaged with a little bit on the show, which is that white people in Australia in the late 19th, early 20th century were up to some stuff across the board. We will talk a little bit about why the social context permitted, in fact, encouraged that kind

10:51of behavior. I probably sound terrible now because I'm just like, this amazing collection, some of the only recorded information we have about some of these languages and some speakers. She also spent 30 years living in the desert and living alongside especially the Anangal community in the middle of South Australia, literally giving them her own food, the clothes that she had. At this point, I always feel like I'm kind of losing the plot a little bit where it's just like, is this really a guy who sucks? Just like coming on here to like hate on Mother Teresa

11:26energy. And at one point when I was kind of preparing for this, because I did this work like well over a decade ago now, and I was like, maybe she's not that bad. Maybe I just made up that I thought she was terrible. And then I went back and was like, oh no, no, it's fine. We can talk about her. She was pretty terrible. I mean, I've got some crazy news for you, which is that Mother Teresa, also kind of bad, as it turns out. Okay, great. Great. I should have seen that coming. Wild news. Everyone on this show turns out to be a little bit bad. But this is part of it,

12:00actually. And so I'm glad that you brought that up early, that part of it is like, the contributions are why we know about people. Often the methods by which they make those contributions or the other people in their lives or the way they position themselves while making those contributions don't necessarily take away from the contributions themselves, but they need to be added into the record when we think about how all of this knowledge is generated, right? And who is at the center of its generation is actually quite important to understanding the story of that

12:36knowledge. When we think about Daisy Bates, if people are not familiar with her, which many people will not be. Most Australians even. I think she had a real moment in the 1970s. And since then, she's just been kind of, for good reason, actually, just let be. She was born in 1859 in Ireland. The problem with detangling her history is that there's a lot of like, she was born Margaret Dwyer. By the time she came to

13:06Australia, she was Daisy Mae O'Dwyer. Her Wikipedia page is a thing of beauty because it tells her story as she tells it. And then down the bottom, there's a whole section of like where the bullshit is. Thank you to the Wikipedia editor who did that. I'm just going to tell a version of her story and not worry too much about the inconsistencies because I used to think they were important that she was like, such a liar. And I actually don't think it's that important anymore. So. I mean, it also kind of goes to something we talk about on the show a lot, which is that

13:39part of the difficulty of understanding people's legacies is that they engage in these myth-making practices while they're alive. Oh, she was so good at that. So part of the difficulty is the fact that their legacy is in part self-made. Yeah. So yeah, it's totally okay to be like, we're going to go with what we've got, but who knows if it's real. Yeah. So at age 23 in like the 1880s, she lies and says she's 21 so she can meet the criteria for this. Irish people come to Australia for free because they're trying to bring over all these

14:11working class white people to create the white Australia that they think should be created. She works in Queensland and New South Wales as a governess. While she's there, she just like gets married three different times. Never divorces, which apparently was pretty common. Like people would just get married again because divorce was so hard to come by. Sure. So she marries her first marriage and for Australians, this will be wild. This is like the surprise crossover you did not expect. In 1884, she marries Breaker Morant,

14:46who is a kind of mythologized Australian hero poet who actually did war crimes in the Boer War and was one of the last Australians to be executed by the British. Sure. Absolute. That guy sucks for sure. But they got married briefly. He didn't pay for the marriage license and like shirked off on her. So that marriage ended. And then in 1885, she marries Jack Bates, hence Daisy Bates. At some

15:19point, that marriage isn't going well because she like expected a lot of him and he was just a dude driving horses and driving cattle and would disappear. Classic Australian stuff. Just classic, classic Australian stuff. At some point, they're like not really together and an old flame named Ernest C. Bagel Hall comes to Sydney. Sorry? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For real. His name is Bagel Hall. For a long time, I was really distressed that that marriage didn't survive and it wasn't known

15:50as the Bagel Hall collection. She could have been Daisy Bagel Hall. She could have been Daisy Bagel Hall. It appears that like he's a guy she knew from Ireland, maybe. And he was in Sydney because he was working on the ships and they like kind of had a relationship for a while. Daisy burnt all of her correspondence and all of her diaries shortly before her death. So piecing all of this together and whether she felt like any of these marriages were like more real or if she was just, this was just the way one kind of led a more

16:25casually promiscuous life in the 1880s. It's very hard to say, but she was definitely bigamous, trigamous, I guess you could be trigamous. Polygamous. Sure. She's apparently like a very charming mega flirt. Yeah. Everyone talks about her being very charismatic. I think that charisma links through to her later life. Yeah. With Jack, she had a son. She didn't seem that into being a mom, apparently. She had a baby and she's like, well, no one told me that was going to hurt and like swore off sex for the rest of

17:00her life, according to her narrative. Look, I'm saying, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. I have not given birth, but I understand the implications of this and I get if that's what someone chooses to do afterwards. Yeah. If you didn't have a heads up on that, like, golly golly. She didn't seem that into her son. She like sent him off to boarding school and to live with her extended family. Like, he doesn't appear in the story that much. I think it's an oversimplification to just be like, she wasn't maternal. There was something wrong with her. But like, she really didn't

17:34seem to be into parenting. In the 1890s, like, 1894, so like her son was like primary school age. Her relationship wasn't working out. She went to London. She was like, I have to go home. I'm feeling homesick. Like, became a Fleet Street journalist. For a while, she was working on this, like, newspaper about psychics and mediums. And she's like, not a fan. Look, she and I agree on that. She doesn't seem to be super into the woo-woo. Like, she seems like quite a rationalist.

18:07Yeah. But she gets this really great apprenticeship in journalism and writing for public audiences. And then this is where the relationship between reality and not reality becomes a lot harder to pin down. In 1899, she comes back to Australia. She comes to Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia, saying that she has a commission from the Times of London to write a story about how Indigenous Australians are being ill-treated. This does not appear to be true. It's possible

18:39that she talked to someone at the Times who said, sure, you can send a letter to the editor if you want. And then by the time she got to Australia, this had evolved into a full-blown story. From here on out, she starts talking about Jack as her late husband. He is not dead. She's just like, I mentally divorced him. He's dead to me. A conscious uncoupling. Isn't that what people were calling that for a little while? The Gwyneth Paltrow? Yeah. It's like a very powerful manifestation of, she's like, no, he's my late husband.

19:12The other two never get mentioned again in her lifetime. In fact, it wasn't until historians started looking in the 1970s that they put together the Breaker Morant story. So she's very circumspect about her life unless it suits her story. She's like a great self-publicist. We're going to see that a lot for the rest of this. So what is the context of what Australia, what like settler and Indigenous relationships,

19:43what is this looking like at this moment when she comes back and is like, I'm here to do my, to write?

Settler and Indigenous Relationships

19:50Right. So in 1899, Australia is two years off becoming a federated commonwealth where we still have the British head of state as our head of state. And we have a governor general who acts for the king. It's so cringe to even say it out loud. I lived in New Zealand for a year and I still do not understand what the deal is over there. Technically, the king is not meant to interfere in the running of Australia, but like there was some extreme bullshit in the 1970s where some dudes who sucked definitely had some real interference

20:24in our government. So we are a couple of years off being federated. The West, a little bit like the US, I guessed, where like the East Coast was, the colonies were established there first and then white occupation. It didn't quite go across the country because across the country, right in the middle, there's like a great big bit known as the nullabor because there is null, arbor, no trees. It's just very hard to impose a Western way of living on that part of Australia. So there were some

21:01train lines that were built to get people east to west, but in general, kind of sea travel was the way to get around the country. They created a whole new legal illusion to allow white people to feel okay about occupying Australia. So they invented this thing called terra nullius, where they're like, there aren't people living here. And when everyone was like, what about all those people living here? They were like, they're not people people because they're not doing the kind of agriculture or

21:36house building that we do. So because they're different, they're not right. And that will just allow us to take the land because we're using it in like a good European way. And that wasn't overturned as a legal framework until the second half of the 20th century, like well into the 1980s. Yeah. If I'm thinking about my understanding of terra nullius, it's a way of thinking that a land that is uncultivated in the concept of like Western cultivation of land is therefore unoccupied land.

22:14And so it like really relates or ties the relationship of peoples to like their use of space. And this is something we see repeatedly in history, but it's a really like immensely harmful thing because it enables you to say some people aren't people or like you've said, they're not people in the right way. Yeah. And you get this doctrine that allows people to be treated closer to like animals or like just features of a landscape, which you are now trying to cultivate rather than human beings with rights

22:45and dignity and desires and agency. Yeah. And like the academic part of me wants to, well, actually them with like, there are really great examples of very elaborate, like aquaculture. Of course. Like eel traps and Bruce Pascoe has done a lot of work on like traditional grain farming that doesn't look anything like Western grain farming because they're very different grains. But like it wasn't about proving that they were really occupying the land because that wasn't the point. The point was to create this nonsense framework.

23:17Yeah. What happens when you push back against that is implicitly you are saying that there is something of worth that you need to argue with to begin with, right? To be like, well, they are actually occupying the land in the European way. We don't need to acknowledge the argument in the first place. Indigenous Australians weren't even counted as people until 1967 when we had a referendum. So they couldn't get passports. They couldn't vote. They couldn't do all the things that everyone else living in the country could. And so when I say Daisy Bates was outraged about how

23:54they were being treated, there was like this straight up abuse and neglect. There were also a lot of Aboriginal people essentially in slavery adjacent conditions. You know, they were working for people where they wouldn't really be being paid. So there were lots of really dire circumstances. It's not that she wanted them to be able to live rich and free lives. It's that she straight up thought and wrote in her book, like, this is a dying race and we are just kind of being nice to them

24:31while what she saw as the inevitable played out. And so her work in the 1910s and the 1900s with – it seems like the government was already sending out this survey for people to collect words from different languages. Like, it was already being sent out to pastoralists and police stations. But it seems like she was the one who collated it all and would often – this is the one bit that I find really relatable about her. She'd get these surveys back and she's like, this person did a

25:01terrible job. Like, they're missing a whole bunch of words. This is sloppy work. And she'd travel around Western Australia, pinning people down, finishing the forms, collecting data for herself to build this really comprehensive – I mean, relatively comprehensive. It would actually just be better if we had let people continue to speak their languages. Sure. But then again, the, like, self-aggrandizing and the strong personal narrative where she would talk about being able to speak over a hundred different languages. And it's just like, I am skeptical.

25:35Yeah, I don't know about that. Especially because part of this is she's sort of a self-styled anthropologist, self-styled linguist person. And that's not to say that one can't learn lots of things without, like, specific extensive training, but – In her defense, anthropology didn't actually, like, super technically exist, certainly in Australia, and certainly not in a way that women were allowed into that academic community. There's a really great book by Eleanor Hogan where she talks a little bit about the ethnomania of this era. And it really ties into this, like, empire nonsense where

26:12people were just trying to collect everything for the empire, and that included people and their customs and their languages. So, she was really a person of her time. The fact that it was a little bit odd that she was a woman. Normally, this was men doing this work. After that time with the Western Australian government, she moved to Udela, which no one's ever heard of it. It's literally not a place anymore. It was like a stop on the train line across from east to west. And she lived there for

26:46over 16 years with the Anangal people who kind of lived near the sightings because their way of life had been completely disrupted by the train bringing Western practices, bringing in Western foods that upset their natural ecology, draining the water soak that was nearby so there wasn't fresh water that people could access easily. And then you had this train that kind of brought these people through

27:17for them to trade with. And so, by 1919, she's, like, in her 50s. She's there until her 70s. People start then, like, bringing her in for care and heading out. She kind of leaves again, and she never really settles down well into her 80s. Eleanor Hogan has this amazing book. It's one of the more recent publications about Daisy Bates, where she looks at her relationship with a travelling journalist named Ernestine Hill, who seems pretty cool. She was kind of travelling around in

27:52the 1930s. She came to Udala to talk to Daisy Bates and kind of published a couple of articles about Daisy Bates' time in the desert, in that community. A thing she regrets is that she published this story that Daisy Bates had about cannibalism among Indigenous Australians, which, like, again, I kind of thought, like, oh, maybe she just said that one time. But no, she, like, went on about

28:22it all the time, which is not only unsubstantiated, but, like, seems pretty actively refuted by evidence at the time. Like, this is why I think Daisy Bates sucks specifically, because lots of people weren't great, but lots of people at the time were just like, we don't think this is true. There was very little evidence. One time she, like, sent some bones to the South Australia Museum, and they're like, this is a cat. She sent us cat bones. Like, chill lady. But this narrative of cannibal natives is,

28:59like, such a classic bullshit trope. There's a really great book by Larissa Berendt, who's an Indigenous lawyer and scholar looking at this narrative of cannibalism in a different context in Queensland. But I think it's part of this recurring trope of using it to make other cultures scarier and othering them. Yeah, absolutely. We have lots of examples of this, actually, like, particularly in spaces where there is, like, rapid colonial expansion. We see cannibalism

29:33being used. For example, in our Christopher Columbus episode, we talk about cannibalism as this trope that's being used against people in the Americas. And what's actually happening in these spaces is more often we see much more intense violence and, like, things like torture coming from the colonizing side against the Indigenous people, right? Like, the things that they're being accused of doing more often are closer to things that are being done to them in this moment. And it's a way, I think you're totally right, of othering people and saying, well,

30:06they're doing something we find unconscionable in order to distract from the fact that we are, in fact, doing something unconscionable to them, right? Yeah. It's just, like, such a bingo card. Yeah. I mean, it really is. Also, everything you've said about Daisy Bates so far reminds me of an episode that I highly recommend people listen to, actually, in conjunction with this, which was with Rhiannon Garth Jones on late 19th, early 20th century Orientalists in places like Iran and Iraq, where they're doing the same thing. They're like, oh, we're paying attention

30:38to the art, to the language. We're translating their poetry to show that they are this backwards place. And we're taking this and we're sending it back to the imperial core. We're sending it back to, like, the governments that we work for or the journals that we work for in, in these cases, the UK at this point, or Ireland, where saying, like, we're sending this back there in order to then justify, actually, the actions that are being taken in these spaces, these, like,

31:09incredibly violent things that are happening there. There's one of these women named Gertrude Bell in Iran who's doing almost the same thing that Daisy Bates is doing, which I find fascinating, that they're both women who are like, okay, well, I'm going to go far away from home where I can be this thing that I couldn't necessarily be back there and be a girl boss in the wild. And, like, Gertrude Bell, for example, was doing the same thing in Iran, where she's like, well, I live out in the desert with these people, and I really understand their way of life. And you're like...

31:41And I think it's really important that they are women for this narrative. Like, so she was given a most excellent order of the British Empire, a CBE, in 1934, for this incredibly paternalistic, but, like, it's the maternal spin of, like, this woman in the desert looking after her. She talks about her natives. Yes. Use a term that got used at the time that doesn't get used in Australia as much. Mm-hmm. And, like, the thing I haven't stressed enough, possibly, is whatever image you've had of her, you have to... She's actually this, like, incredibly tiny

32:18woman dressed as Mary Poppins. Like, she's in full Edwardian governess gear, and she never gives this up. And I think, like, she really understood the power of the personal brand before celebrity was a thing. Like, clearly an incredibly strong and resilient woman, like, out in incredibly hot, arid conditions, in full Edwardian bonnet corset. Like, that was not comfortable. But there was something really compelling to people about this woman, and this, like, tension between this incredibly

32:53edge of civilisation, as it was conceptualised, place, but while completely from another era and completely refined and all this decorum. And you're able to be photographed, for example, in this case, like, around people who are dressed for the environment that they're in, and be able to be, like, look at how civilised I am. Look at who I am, especially this maternal feeling that I have towards them. Not my own son, but these people that I have. And she talked about, like, just her presence would be a civilising influence.

33:25Oh, God. And you're just like, wow, what a mindset. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's visible when you look into some of these things. In the research I did ahead of time, I was thinking about this dying race thing that you brought up earlier, this idea that, like, her research follows this narrative that assumes these Indigenous cultures are sort of inevitably disappearing. Like, this is an inevitable disappearance. And she's doing this, like, pastoral thing to help them as they are in cultural hospice, right?

33:57Where she's like, the most I can do is catalogue all of this, and look at how wonderful I am for doing that, and how much I love you for that. Instead of being like, ah, this is a living, evolving society that I can help to thrive and grow and, you know, work against. And we've just stuck a, like, giant stick in the gears of this society. Like, we've completely ruptured it. And then we're surprised that it's a ruptured society. Wow. Yeah. You'd be like, this thing, society is dying. Who knows what killed it? You know,

34:31which is just wild. Like, it's a wild formulation for this. In 1939, she publishes her book called The Passing of the Aborigines, just in case you weren't entirely sure that she thought this was a doomed society. And not a word we're using that much anymore. Am I right? Because some of these things differ across countries and spaces, right? I don't think we're using that word, right? Aboriginal and Indigenous are pretty, like, different groups have different preferences.

35:05There's a bunch of sub-preferences. We also distinguish the Torres Strait Islands, right up the top of Queensland. Some groups will prefer, like, Koori is a very New South Wales, Victoria term. We sometimes talk about First Nations. I know that's a very North American way of talking about things. But no, Aborigines, it has a real 1938 vibe to it. It does, especially because it starts usually with the beforehand. And anything we say, like, the race, we have a problem often. I think it's just worth flagging. Like, she's a big fan of removing children who had Aboriginal

35:42mother and a white father from their family context. A process that happened for many, many decades in Australia and is a major intergenerational trauma that we now refer to as the Stolen Generations. Sure. And she would, like, alert the authorities to these children who she felt needed to be taken away from their families. I was going to ask what you meant by her being, like, a fan or a proponent of this. And I thought you were going to say, like, oh, she was, like, in legislation. No, she was, like, let's call the

36:15police. That's wild. I'm sorry. That's, like, so far beyond what I thought you were going to say. I'm not laughing, like, ha ha. I'm laughing, like, that's, like, appalling. Absolutely valid shock response to that behaviour. It has the vibe of being, like, ah, there's someone in the attic. Let's call the Gestapo. And I study Nazis, so that's, like, where my brain is immediately going. But, like, this is a type of a person, right, who, like, thinks they're doing something for a good reason,

36:45but the thing they're doing is just abjectly terrible. And pretty much anyone can see that. Also, just another sub-thread of why this guy sucks is Eleanor Hogan's book is all about this relationship between Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, who wrote those initial articles with her. Daisy Bates had been publishing in newspapers. That's how she had supported herself while living in Udella and all these other remote places. Her prose was becoming increasingly not of the era. She was this, like, 75-year-old Victorian lady. And so Ernestine wrote those

37:19couple of articles with her and then essentially co-wrote the book with her, which started as a series of newspaper articles, became the whole book. And Daisy Bates just gives her no credit. She refers to her briefly at some point as her typist. The academic, the scholar in me is even, I don't like this woman at all. I already did it. No, but she just had this, like, absolute sense of self-importance. Yeah. And, like, Ernestine Hill, very famous in Australia in the early 20th century for her prose.

37:53And, like, it is a horrific book in terms of content, but there's, like, quite a bit that's quite well-written and it's very engaging and it's rollicking. And you're just like, oh, that does, that makes complete sense. Like, that explains why that book was so well-regarded. It was considered a bestseller. It was continuous, like, pretty much basically in print until the mid-1970s. My copy is from a reprint in 1966. And she not only responded to, but actively fed

38:25in the public imagination this narrative that still absolutely harms Australia's understanding of itself until today. And I think, like, I haven't really thought about Daisy in the decade or so since I last did a little bit of work on her. And as I said, I don't necessarily research in Australia, but now that I work in Australia and I teach in Australia, and for me, returning to this

38:55story is part of an ongoing process I'm trying to engage in, in educating myself, doing better by my discipline and by my students to understand the historical context of Australia, and drawing a line directly between the kind of narratives Daisy Bates engaged in and the kind of things that especially non-recent migrants and non-Indigenous Australians need to really unpack. Like, we still

39:28have, like, massively high rates of Indigenous incarceration. The Stolen Generations is considered historical, but we still take, like, a massive number of children out of their family context into, like, the foster home system every year. Like, that's still just perpetuating this kind of attitude towards Indigenous Australians. So I've been thinking about the best moment to bring this up. And when you talked about her not properly crediting one of her collaborators, I have a

40:02question about, like, linguistics in general and how the field works in relation to her. When I was doing research, I started to kind of feel like the way that Daisy Bates is talking about people who she is ostensibly working with or getting information from, she's treating them like subjects and informants rather than as collaborators in this project that she's working on. Oh, absolutely. Does the field now do a better job, do you think, of crediting the people that you're learning from

40:35as, like, sort of collaborators in your learning? Is that more normal? Yeah, there's definitely a lot to reflect on in Daisy Bates' work. Like, not only in my understanding of, like, Australia's colonial history, but also in, like, linguistic colonial history. My summary would be that individuals are better at thinking about their relationship with people that they're working with. As a field, I think we generally would love to see more and try to

41:08encourage more people to work with their own languages to, like, change that power relationship. But institutionally, I think institutions are just so slow-moving, it's hard to always necessarily have that play out in a more fully-fledged form, if that makes sense. So, like, I think individuals are better at crediting, making people visible. Not always. I had this project with colleagues where we looked at the genre of descriptive grammar writing. This is where you write about the full

41:40grammar of a language, not just word lists like Daisy Bates did. And it's like, even 10, 20 years ago, a shocking number of grammars were written where it's like, I don't know the names of the people you spoke to. And that feels like... What? That feels like a bit of a problem. Like, there were some grammars where we were like, does it count that they talk about some people in the acknowledgements as, like, making visible the work those people did? No. This is so wild to me because, like, our fields are so different, obviously, like, in many different

42:14respects. But you could not get away with that in history. Like, the whole thing is the source. The whole thing in history is who is saying something. I think the PhD grammars we looked at were doing better. Like, I think the genre moved so slowly and the researchers are doing better. The other thing that I think really has caused me to reflect a lot in this narrative is that the field that I work in, which is documenting and describing languages,

42:45we talk about it a lot as endangered language documentation. And there's been this whole reckoning in the last, kind of, since I've been a graduate student. So, in the last 15 years, there's been this reckoning with, what does it mean when we're calling these languages endangered? Because it is this encroachment of larger languages, you know, English being the obvious global example, but in China, it's Mandarin. In Nepal, where I work, it's Nepali is the language of state education. And so,

43:18these languages are endangered. The problem is that we have this incentive as academics trying to fund the work that we're doing of talking up the endangerment and how we never talk about what is endangering them. Yeah, I was going to say that sounds like the passive voice to me, right? Even imperiled is better than endangered in my mind. Because endangered to me is like the way we talk about species or something where, like, some environmental change has just happened rather than this being not a

43:50naturally occurring phenomenon and instead an utterly man-made one. And so, the economic and the social incentives, if you're trying to do work that's important, you still end up in this trap of talking about or exoticizing, you know, this language. And there's maybe an unfair stereotype of a bit of a, like, well, how many speakers does your language have? My language. Like, the language I work with and, you know, the my language is just, like, the same vibes as Daisy Bates as, like, my native. I was going to say, yeah.

44:22And so, the really difficult thing about reading about Daisy Bates, like, just absolutely really problematic discourses, but it's still discourses we are trying to unpack and step away from even today. Yeah. I mean, there's so much here that I find fascinating in that how well do you feel like Australia has reckoned with this really awful path? Like, my feeling on America is bad. Like,

44:57reckoning with this? Bad. And so, I am curious what your view on how Australia has dealt with this and how this has helped to shape Australia's understanding of itself, like, what your feelings regarding these things are or how you're reading them as someone who is thinking through a lot of this stuff, even not from a scholarly perspective, but just from, like, thinking and teaching in this space.

Reckoning with the Past

45:22The data that I will bring to this is that in 2023, our government brought forward a national referendum. We don't do these very often. We wanted to change the constitution to include an Indigenous voice to Parliament. And this was framed as a way of actually listening to Indigenous people, letting them lead policy that related to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians make up

45:53about 4% of the Australian population, but the majority of larger Indigenous communities are still in remote South Australian Northern Territory and Western Australia. And this Indigenous voice referendum was supposed to be a way to provide structural acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians. And due to kind of a confluence of conservative media and conservative politicians campaigning against this

46:24idea, but also, I think, because a lot of Australians haven't acknowledged this history, the referendum was voted down pretty much 60-40 across Australia. What? Yeah. I mean, like, I'm saying what as though that's not what would happen in the US right now, too. Like, what would we do here? This is a classic case of, like, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US have a lot of overlap in kind of history. And it's very interesting that I feel like each of us point

46:55to the other and we're like, but you're doing better, right? Like, you can't be doing worse than here. And so often when I talk with North American colleagues, they're like, but you guys have got it sorted out, right? And it's just like, ugh, I wish. You know, what is funny is when I was living in New Zealand, it was always like, well, Australia's worse. Like, when they would be like, oh, we have some problems. You should look at what they're doing in Australia. Yeah. Because I worked for the New Zealand government when I was working there. And so it was, it's funny because there it was the opposite, where they were like, well,

47:26at least we're not Australia. I'm happy, like, I'm happy to give New Zealand that for sure. So that's what's happening on a national level. It just created this massive flashpoint for people to be really racist, overtly, publicly. So what a lot of Indigenous Australians have asked for, and like, I couldn't find a single person saying anything nice about Daisy Bates, who was Indigenous. They're possibly out there. I'm sure she had some personal relationships. But in terms of what Indigenous Australians want, again, this is not

48:01everyone, but we have something called the Uluru Statement from the Heart from 2017, in which they lay out very clearly the challenges Indigenous Australians are facing, the rich diversity of Indigenous culture, but also that what they are asking for is truth-telling, treaty, and a voice. And I think, in some ways, putting that referendum for a voice ahead of the truth-telling really didn't help because a lot of people aren't receptive to the truth at this time. In Victoria,

48:36we have gone through a truth-telling process with the Europe Justice Commission, in which our Premier stood up and was just like, oh, I didn't quite realise that those massacres happened, or the effect that this all has. It's just like, oh, this is, you know, this is progress. And from the work from the Europe Justice Commission, a treaty was signed in 2025 in Victoria, which is a step towards the formation of a voice that is framed around a mutually shared set of agreements and

49:11expectations. So things are happening, but this pernicious narrative, I was just listening to a podcast episode the other day with Sue Ann Hunter, who's our new National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children. And she was just like, our kids are still really dehumanised. And I was just like, oh, why? Absolutely a direct line between what Daisy Bates was doing and the challenges that Sue Ann Hunter articulates. And you're just like, oh, so much work still to be done.

49:41Yeah. I mean, even the word voice, I find very interesting here in this context, like thinking about Daisy Bates and the idea of like, we want a voice, right? Because there's also this person who's going around being like, well, actually, what we can do is erase the people who speak the words that I'm collecting, right? We can just divorce the words from the people who use them or the grammar from the people who use it, etc. And we can separate these and we can preserve just the word and not the

50:13voice that speaks it, right? Not the person as a collaborator. They're an informant. They don't have a voice. I just find just the word voice really interesting in this context, too, because even being like, well, we want not just to say, but a representation when we get to say something or ask for something. We want actual representation. I find fascinating. And the fact that it's still like, no, like, yeah, you should be represented in some way, but you aren't the person who gets to represent you fits with Daisy Bates' approach to all of this. Because I was also finding things like

50:44within her personal narrative, right? Like she's saying that the indigenous people she's working with, she's saying that they're calling her grandmother and that they have this, like, sweet familial relationship to her. Which is probably because she was just handing them foodstuffs that they needed. Well, also, like, maybe it's a situation where, like, every old lady who's hanging out with you is called grandmother. You know, like the way that I would call anybody an auntie or something here. There's something here where she's also like, ah, they see me as their mother

51:16and I can impose this thing on them and I can take away their voice and I can control their language. Like, all of this creates a worldview that I don't think is gone, it sounds like, from what you're saying. Yeah. She definitely had, like, in the 1960s and 70s, there was a lot of repressing some of her more eccentric behaviour and there was, like, a less complicated story about her. A lot of the early response to her work in the 1960s and the 1970s, obviously her time spent in

51:51Udala with the Anangu people, was central to the hero myth and the media narrative. And a lot of the response was really positive, like Elizabeth Salter's 1971 biography. You probably get the vibe of the hero myth from the fact that it's called The Great White Queen of the Never-Never. Okay, that's wild. And there were, like, plays, there's, like, paintings, like, she is kind of mythologised because she's so iconic in this long black skirt and this rigid jacket. And she wears this, like,

52:23hat and veil. She had this umbrella that she used everywhere because it was so sunny. She's got a CBE. She's basically like the Queen. And you know that she wore it all the time. And just, like, I think she was definitely not motivated by religious feeling, but, like, Empire was the religion. Yeah, absolutely. And then Julia Blackburn's 2012 book called Daisy Bates in the Desert is a, I would say, fascinating choice to try a first-person biographical account. And given how hard I find it to get into

52:59the head of Daisy Bates, I would personally not try that. Yeah, I mean, so I found this Smithsonian article where they talk about these people who Daisy meets and they say in this Blackburn book that they are naked, smiling, and glistening in the sunshine. And something about that, to me, smacks so incredibly much of this Orientalist worldview. Like, part of why I'm thinking about this is because I taught Orientalism in my class on Thursday. So it's the most recent thing that I've taught in class. But it's one of those things

53:30that whenever I teach my students, like, once you understand this, you're going to start seeing it everywhere. It's everywhere. And I think what's fascinating, and many other people have made this argument much better than me, there is no untangling of this imperial Orientalist thing in the East in terms of, like, spaces like the Middle East, and this same gaze within the Australian context. Because they're still saying there is some faraway, static, unchanging, even dying because

54:05they're unchanging race that are beautiful, and they're more naked than us. They're more free, they're more primitive than us. And it gets, like, re-inscribed over and over and over again. And then someone can write a book, you know, decades later and still do the same thing without realizing that what's animating it is this view of this, like, unchanging, barbaric East, basically, or this island other nation. It's so wild to me that you could write that, like,

54:38not that long ago and still be doing it, basically. Yeah. And I think, like, there's something really hard to get your head around with Daisy Bates, where you're, like, promiscuous, polygamous, like, and then there's, like, prim and proper, but, like, just motivated by her own self-interest. Yeah. Whatever she wants to do, she can do, basically. Yeah. This is so fascinating. And I feel like it's one of these episodes where I emerge being, like, I'm going to be thinking about this for a while afterwards, right? Because, like,

55:11it really does have some resonances with present cultures that I, like, some episodes I'm like, yeah, obvious, draw a line, whatever. In other episodes, I'm like, oh, this one's going to stick with me, and it's going to be one where I notice it a bunch after this. Yeah. And when you were like, who do you want to talk about? And I was like, ah, all these years later, like, she's still with me. Well, hopefully this will help you to feel like you have said your piece on this and been like, I want to go on the record and say that this woman has been haunting me.

55:43Yeah. And I don't like her. No, no, it's time for me to, like, it's been really good to revisit her and my complicated feelings about her and about white ladies blundering into places that they do not need to be. Yeah. I mean, and again, this is one where we can say someone did useful, interesting scholarship. I think they did it the wrong way. And it's had some of the other stuff they were doing while conducting this study had really bad long-term negative effects. And so it's good to be able to

56:18complicate things in that way. Like, we should be doing this in public, which is the point of this podcast.

56:27And you can visit the digital Daisy Bates project. You can see all those beautiful pages and pages of manuscripts. And the way that the website has been set up, it is set up as a map so that you can bring up a particular word and see what that word was in each of the Indigenous languages geographically. Or you can look at a particular language or the words of a particular speaker. And it's just such a great digital humanities project in bringing 90 archive boxes full of thousands and thousands

57:01of pages of manuscript into something that we can interact with as a living collection today. And we'll make sure to link that below for people because it's important that people are still using this scholarship, but that they're engaging with it with a critical view. Like, we want this to still be used. Please go look at it and please check it out and do some exploration. But also when you're doing it, think about like where and how these things are being produced and who gets named and not named in their production. Like, that's what we want. Yeah. And why are these the only records that

57:38we have of some of these languages and some of these speakers? Definitely. I think this is a good place to end now that we've given people a little bit of a call to action. Thank you so much for this. I'm so happy that we are able to make this happen and have this conversation. And it's given me a lot to think about. Thanks, Claire. This has been more fun and cheaper than therapy. That usually is. This is going to go out as a collaborative post on Patreon for people who are

Conclusion and Call to Action

58:12listening on our respective feeds elsewhere. It will be there too. But both of our podcasts will be linked everywhere below if anybody wants to check out Lauren's or from Lauren's show if they want to check out mine. And thank you to everyone who's listening to this. And remember, if you encounter someone in Australia in history in the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, you should be suspicious of that.

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1:00:52Thank you! You