Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.44 (659 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0679744460 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-02-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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.. In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia
Blackburn superbly fills in gaps with her own research and sympathetic imagination, while preserving the enchantment that Bates herself wove. The author traces Bates's steps and draws on her voluminous notebooks and letters, which reveal her as an acute observer of nature and a gifted writer whose works were imbued with dreams and hallucinations. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. She remained there until her death in 1956. . From Publishers Weekly Blackburn ( The Emperor's Last Island ) here presents a biography of the extraordinarily determined and independent Daisy Bates who, in 1913, at age 54, removed herself from England to Australia's red desert outback as a self-appointed champion of the Aborigines. She not only shared the Aborigines way of life but so gained their confidence that she was made privy to the men's secret rites
A contrarian's view of Daisy Bates in the Desert. Mary Whipple Daisy Bates, a controversial woman who has attained almost mythical status in Australia, was an inveterate liar, constitutionally incapable of seeing herself in the world as it really was. Instead, she created a better world in her own mind and assumed that everyone else recognized her world as real. As Julia Blackburn reconstructs what she believes to have been Daisy's life in Australia's western desert, and her seemingly futile efforts to protect and preserve the aborigines and their culture, she presents a plausible personality with whom the reader can, to a great extent, identify.Blackburn is . A Customer said If you enjoy fantasy and poetry this book is for you. The author is highly imaginative and tells a lot about her own life in this mish mash. We never learn much about Daisy Bates. the author writes " her body shudders like a dying rabbit and her new husband wakes and stares at his new wife" But the author is really describing her own childhood dream of an old man with his legs wrapped around her neck!!! Blackburn's "very personal interpretation" of the life of Daisy Bates seems to include Blackburn trying to overcome some of her own childhood traumas and problems with men. If little is known about Daisy Bates' feelings towards her husband, I'd rather. "Not a good example of historical fiction" according to Leib Gershon Mitchell. If you have a burning desire to read some historical fiction, I'd recommend Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel by Arthur Golden as a shining example thereof.What are the problems?1. Lots of digression/ babbling/ fillers sections of prose. It seems like a lot of it was inserted to give the book length. If the point of this was to give us an idea of the life of Australian aboriginals, the author could have supplied details to that effect. Instead, we get the author's imagined internal dialogues of a central character that may well have been schizophrenic.2. Why would Blackburn choose an inveterate liar to