The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia by Daisy Bates

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has light creasing at edges and spine. Dust jacket is now enclosed in a glossy protective cover. Interior and binding are still excellent.

Daisy Bates writes of her contacts and observations of Aboriginal people in Western Australia over a period of 35 years in this autobiographic account, originally written in 1938.

Bates devoted her life to studying Aboriginal life, history, culture, rites, beliefs and customs. She describes her decades spent living in tents in small settlements from Western Australia to the edges of the Nullarbor Plain. She researched and wrote about Indigenous culture. She also worked tirelessly for Aboriginal welfare, setting up camps to feed, clothe and nurse the transient population, drawing on her own income and inheritance to meet the needs of the aged. Despite her fascination with their way of life, Bates was convinced that the Australian Aborigines were a dying race and that her mission was to record as much as she could about them before they disappeared.

It was claimed that when Mrs Bates' book was first published, she was the only woman in the world on whom primitive tribes had conferred blood brotherhood.

With a foreword by Alan Moorehead