Daisy Bates emigrated from Ireland to Australia sometime between 1883 and 1900, depending upon whom is asked. Why such a discrepancy in dates? As Julia Blackburn tells us in her book, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Mrs. Bates was not only an intrepid traveler who preferred the company of Aborigines to the British and Irish high society that she paradoxically coveted, but she was also "an incorrigible liar." Such fact would make it difficult at best for someone to write a biography/travel novel about her; however, in this case the many discrepancies present a work that is all the more a tour de force because of Blackburn's dogged aspiration to uncover something close to the truth about Daisy Bates and her self-imposed exile, first from her native Ireland and then from her fellow immigrants.
We must remember that Mrs. Bates, as portrayed in this fictional piece of travel writing, is at least a partially fictionalized version of the woman who fancied herself a socialite, journalist, and ethnographer. As such, we could say that Blackburn's seemingly puffed-up inscription of Mrs. Bates is just that--except for the fact that the real-life Daisy Bates embellished and downright invented so much of what some readers and scholars have accepted as truth that ordinary comparisons between fiction and biography must be cast aside. To avoid confusion, in this paper I will consider Mrs. Bates as a fictional character who seems more lifelike than the average fictional character because she has been modeled upon a woman who happened to be a real-life individual.
Mrs. Bates is one of millions of Irish immigrant characters in a market that is flooded with fictional Irish immigrants; however, the story of her exile is all the more notable in that it is not as much from her native Ireland as it is from her fellow expatriates and from the family ties she had established even after her arrival in Australia. Such exile-from-exile manifests itself in two ways. First, Mrs. Bates verbally separates herself from conventional "truth" by inventing encounters with famous people (though at the same time spurning them in favor of the natives with whom she chooses to live and work), changing her own personal data (age, marital status, name of child), and exaggeration of societal conditions. Second, she physically abandons her husband and son, as well as her life as an Irish immigrant.
However, Mrs. Bates is ultimately unsuccessful as an "exile" because in order for her life story to be related as she desires, she must kowtow to the white Europeans among whom she steadfastly has refused to live. She is also unable to divorce herself from the prurient fascination with native "lifestyles" that have characterized European colonizers; she obsesses at times about stories of reputed cannibalism among her friends. Consequently, while Mrs. Bates has convinced herself that she has dislodged herself from the European immigrant society, her attempts to completely ally herself with the Aborigine culture are futile because they are always pursued in relation to those she thinks she is fleeing. Daisy Bates, as first-person narrator, demonstrates through her words that she lives among the Aborigines not as a neighbor but as a travel writer whose words are meant for those who live thousands of miles away.
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