Daisy Bates

Born in 1859 in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, the daughter of a Catholic shopkeeper called James O’Dwyer. When she emigrated to Australia in 1883 she reinvented herself completely: a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentlewoman born 1863, finishing school in Belgium, the lot. She married at least twice without dissolving the previous marriage.

From 1899 she spent the next forty years documenting Aboriginal languages, customs, and kinship structures in the deserts of Western and South Australia. She lived sixteen years in a tent at Ooldea, on the trans-Australian railway, wearing full Victorian dress in the desert heat. She wrote 270 newspaper articles, was made CBE in 1934, and was visited at her camp by royalty three times.

Her papers fill ninety-nine boxes at the National Library of Australia. She died in 1951, aged 92.