WHITES AND ABORIGINES
The Passing of the Aborigines. By Daisy Bates. (Murray. los. 6d.)
To say the least, Mrs. Bates is an unusual woman. To live thirty-five years in a tent far from civilisation surrounded by natives many of whom were cannibals, is not to be expected of a cultured Victorian woman. However, Mrs. Bates, having gone out to Australia as Times correspondent in the last century to investigate the conditions of the aborigines, became so fascinated by their unhappy attempts to live their own lives in the sea of encroaching white culture that she returned to cast in her lot with theirs. First she camped in a Reserve of the Bibbulmun of south-west Australia, then in various remote parts of the Central Australian bush, and for the last twenty- five years on the Nullabor Plain by the great railway line, the building and working of which attracted wandering tribes from all over the continent, like moths to a candle and with the same fate.
There is no better example of the effects of thrusting twentieth- century culture on to the Stone Age than the natives of Australia, whose tribal life is not only utterly destroyed but who are so reduced in number by white men's diseases and their own lack of the will to live, that they will soon be an extinct race. With their water-holes and forest paths turned into power-stations and motor-roads, and their root foods ploughed up into fields, they have lost their old command of their surroundings. Mrs. Bates shows how clean white hospitals and white medicines kill them ; she describes the gruesome mortality of the Dorre and Bernier Islands hospitals. If the natives can live in the open by their fires and surrounded by familiar dirt and wild life, they recover from frightful wounds amazingly. The book gives convincing accounts of native habits, for the author not only lived among the blacks, she was also initiated into totem ceremonies never seen by a white or a woman ; was accepted as " Kabbarli," grandmother ; and became the focus for hundreds of straggling wretches, to whom she gave food, help and sympathy.
Naturally she gathered much ethnological knowledge, but this is not shown here, where she gives only vague sketches of ceremonies. Her motives in living the life of hardship and isolation she endured were not scientific ; she loved wide horizons and freedom, and she also loved passionately the broken natives who loved her, much as if they were children or dogs, for their ways are not appealing and it is difficult to make contact with their remote and apathetic brains and hearts.
Apart from many startling facts (one of her greatest friends had eaten his baby sisters and four wives) the book shows great wisdom in those constants of human nature—love of kinship, fear, trust and gratitude—and there is much humour. Mrs. Bates has been a unique and invaluable liaison officer between black and white in Australia. A. B. V. DREW.
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