To bring the empire to the desert
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In Forrest, as in Sir Henry Parkes, Daisy saw the embodiment of
her ideal. She spoke the same language, shared the same loyalty.
Forrest talked of the ‘crimson thread of kinship with the mother
country.’ He regarded the Empire as a ‘symbol of triumph of freedom,
justice, civilisation and progress.’ She respected him as an explorer
who had dared to follow in Eyre’s footsteps and to walk the waterless
plain from Eucla to Fowler’s Bay, thankful to quench his thirst
with the blood of a hawk. She admired him as a man of vision, who,
with the help of engineer O’Connor, was realising his dream of a
pipeline to bring water across three hundred and thirty miles to
the thirsty diggers of Kalgoorlie.
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Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates:
The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1971, p. 70 |
To believe in the west
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By the time she had returned to Perth, Daisy was a devotee of the
new State that she called the ‘plain sister’ of the Commonwealth.
‘As one become more familiar with its gaunt gum tree, its apparently
miserable attempts at water courses and rivers, its huge plains
of sand and scrub, a certain harmony grows on one,’ she wrote. There
was ‘the fascination of ugliness in the bush scenery of the West
as there is in certain types of manhood.’
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Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates:
The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1971, p. 111 |
To enjoy the Nullarbor
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Here there is nothing young that was not long since old. Here there
is no germinating potency of nature. The mystery, beauty and freedom
of these boundless plains will repel one whose artistic sense demands
a more genial scene for its gratification.
There is a solemnity for some, a weirdness for others in this hushed
immensity.
There is little travel along these desolate tracks. The mailman,
ever anxious about horse feed and water, oddments of humanity [who]
pass through on their way to fortune or defeat.
The air is so sensitive that the crack of a whip, the slow tread
of the camels and the noise of the lumbering, broad-wheeled wagons
can be heard for miles. Sometimes there are no signs to indicate
that living things have ever drawn breath in this desolate and treeless
plain. The solemn all embracing silence… is so impressive that one
feels as if the moment of breaking will usher in some catastrophe.
Even the echoes seem to be dead.
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Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates:
The Great White Queen Of The Never Never Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1971, p. 160 |
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Nullarbor was named by the surveyor Delisser from the Latin, nullus
arbor, for the great plain is utterly treeless, covered with
salt-bush and blue-bush and other low and inconspicuous herbage.
The natives believes it to be the abode of a mighty magic snake
called Ganba or Jeedarra which ate any human that entered his territory…
According to the natives, the blow-holes are the gates through which
Ganba passes to his sea home.
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Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The
Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives
Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 132 |
To watch the sunset
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Sunsets blaze and fade, and blaze again in these great empty wilds,
and dawn sets her diadem over them. The light loitering winds carry
delicate perfumes hither and thither, but all these places that
once echoed with song or war-cry are now left to the birds and animals
whose forebears witnessed the arrival of the humans, and who themselves
are now witnessing their passing.
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Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The
Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives
Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 143 |
To read the book of nature
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the mornings were spent in wondering from camp to camp, attending
to the bodily needs of the scattered flock. I knew every bush, every
pool, every granite boulder, but its age-old prehistoric name, with
its legends and dream-time secrets, and its gradual inevitable change.
There was no loneliness. One lived with the trees, the rocks, the
hills and the valleys, the verdure and the strange living things
within and about them. My meals and meditations in the silence and
sunlight, the small joys and tiny events of my solitary walks, have
been more to me than the voices of the multitude, and the ever-open
book of Nature has taught me more of wisdom than is compassed in
the libraries of men.
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Daisy Bates (1859 - 1951) The
Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives
Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 116 |
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