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Come Around Here Again and Next Time I'll Shoot! … I Don't Keep These Pistols Under My Skirts for Nothing. Wretched Police

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Come Around Here Again and Next Time I'll Shoot! … I Don't Keep These Pistols Under My Skirts for Nothing. Wretched Police Come around here again and next time I’ll shoot! … I don’t keep these pistols under my skirts for nothing. Wretched police. Threatening my natives. Lay a finger on a single one of them and I’ll set my Woman’s Patrol on you! And off they scamper! Cowed into retreat by - Daisy Bates! You don’t mess with a Tipperary girl! 1859 I was born – I’m 81 and I’ve got another good 10 years in me. It’s the spirit, you see: I keep myself going by being … contrary - ‘controversial’. I was motherless at 8, shipped over to London at 9, all by myself, to live with bunch of a churchy perfect strangers. … To this day, I’m still dead against it. Stranding children before they’re grown. Despite my own quite poor maternal record. I crossed the seas to Australia alone too: 1884, at the age of 21. Years later, I ended up north of Broome, way way up the north-west coast, months of travelling in a camel- drawn cart. Sent by the Western Australian government to the remote Beagle Mission: as a researcher and recorder - of Aboriginal languages, myths and kinship patterns. What I saw there! Appalling living conditions. Violence. Atrocities. … Missionaries. Huh! Hand in glove with the government, grooming the good girls for service and the strong boys for farming, on a common quest to separate these children from their mothers. And for the half-castes to be married and interbred with nice, white city families. Ultimately, you know, they wanted no such thing as a black. ‘Breeding the black’ out of Australia! I publicly railed against it! In the press: Aboriginal people, I said, are being drained of their own blood by these governmental vampires. Slowly and surely we are killing the true people of Australia. They’re dying in droves, not just because of European settlement, and a whole raft of new infectious diseases to which they have no immunity, but because of cruel inhuman policies. I was vilified, of course – but I was witnessing it every day. These people needed protection. From the forces of so-called ‘good’! By 1912, I had personally set up camps for any of them who needed safety - mostly women – with no strings attached. Sun- beaten, isolated canvas shanty towns they were - one of them right out on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain – yet still not far enough away from state-sanctioned ambushes. Day after day, I met the police head on, splendidly attired in my tailored suit, boots, hat and a veil. Fiercely elegant. Quite hot! … I literally shielded children from abduction behind my skirts! The constables - usually - left quietly, eventually … I have devoted well over 40 years to helping the Aboriginals stay alive just a little longer and to recording everything I can about them before they – disappear on us. Oh, and my camps have never had any financial support from the government! I paid for supplies and equipment myself – funded by the sale of my ex-husband’s cattle station – behind his back. Ha! Three marriages I failed at. … And now, my son – grown and embittered - wants nothing further to do with me. As he sees it, I plumped for the aboriginals over a thriving boy. ‘Dumped him’, he says, in a Perth boarding school and deserted him for years. A mother who went from being a reasonably acceptable ethnologist to an embarrassing and devoted friend of the Aborigines. More interested in producing books and files and hundreds of newspaper articles - and arguing with politicians - than in bringing up her own flesh and blood? I can’t contradict him. I was never given to mothering just one individual. It was peoples I cared for. … Oh, look I’m sad about it but not half as sad as I was on the day I was turned down for the job of Northern Territory’s Protector of Aborigines – because I was a woman. I got some uncalled-for recognition: three royal visits, a CBE, Justice of the Peace – blah-blah. None of that mattered. No, the medal I shall wear proudest to my grave is this: I have never once presumed to teach the Aboriginals a thing. Never once, I can honestly say, have I intruded my intelligence upon theirs. I have worked only to help them stay exactly as they are, in maximum numbers, and to live out the last of their days in peace. Whites call me rude and imperious! Dame of the Desert! … My people call me 'Kabbarli': ‘grandmotherly person’. …. It’s them I heed, no one else. … Now get off my camp! Daisy May Bates CBE, 1859-1951 Angie Cairns .
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