Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines [Paperback]

In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this "eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman" (New York Times Book Review) tells a fascinating, true story in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Barry Lopez.Julia Blackburn is the author of three books of nonfiction, Charles Waterton, The Emperor’s Last Island, and Daisy Bates in the Desert, and of two novels, The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in England.The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Julia Blackburn's Daisy Bates in the Desert. We hope they will provide you with a number of possible ways of looking at this entrancing book, a combination of biography, novel, and meditation.

1. What is the purpose of Blackburn's frequent use of death imagery? What does she mean to imply about Daisy? About the Aborigines? About Australia itself? How does Daisy's funeral compare with the one she had imagined for herself? "Death is not always sad" [p.99], Daisy says. What does the Aboriginal willingness to embrace death say about their culture as a whole? By extension, what does our unwillingness to confront it say about ours? Do you find Daisy's own death to be a sad one?

2. Bates's "paternalistic" (or, rather, "maternalistic") way of dealing with the Aborigines is an ethos that has come in for a great deal of criticism and derision since the breakdown of the British Empire. Daisy's role as Kabbarli, the great white grandmother, can be seen as noble, offensive, or simply ridiculous, depending upon tlóH