Cirrus@Austlit

'Despite its extremes, Mparntwe Alice Springs still maintains a grip'

'Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill were bestselling writers who told of life in the vast Australian interior. Daisy Bates, dressed in Victorian garb, malnourished and half-blind, camped with Aboriginal people in Western Australia and on the Nullarbor for decades, surrounded by her books, notes and artefacts. A self-taught ethnologist, desperate to be accepted by established male anthropologists, she sought to document the language and customs of the people who visited her camps. In 1935, Ernestine Hill, journalist and author of The Great Australian Loneliness, coaxed Bates to Adelaide to collaborate on a newspaper series. Their collaboration resulted in the 1938 international bestseller, The Passing of the Aborigines. This book informed popular opinion about Aboriginal people for decades, though Bates's failure to acknowledge Hill as her co-author strained their friendship.

'Traversing great distances in a campervan, Eleanor Hogan reflects on the lives and work of these indefatigable women. From a contemporary perspective, their work seems quaint and sentimental, their outlook and preoccupations dated, paternalistic and even racist. Yet Bates and Hill took a genuine interest in Aboriginal people and their cultures long before they were considered worthy of the Australian mainstream's attention. With sensitivity and insight, Hogan wonders what their legacies as fearless female outliers might be.' (Publication summary)

'The precise nature of the authorship of Daisy Bates’ controversial bestseller, The Passing of the Aborigines, has been contested since its publication in 1938. Bates was, by then, experiencing health limitations that would have prevented her from producing a coherent, major literary work without significant physical, emotional, financial and editorial support. Ernestine Hill, who provided much of the book’s editorial heavy lifting and writing, later claimed she should have been recognised as co-author, which Bates refuted. The conflicting perceptions and accounts of this authorial collaboration leave some tantalising threads to tease out. To what extent, if any, did Bates contribute to the writing process? Did Hill make as substantial a contribution to the writing and crafting of the book as she claimed?

'To investigate these issues, the authors turned to computational stylistics techniques to develop profiles for the authorial signatures of Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, in an attempt to assess their respective contributions in compositing and crafting The Passing of the Aborigines. The study showed that Hill, as Bates’ ghostwriter, created a new hybrid text type that blended her own more formal, professional journalistic style and Bates’ personal, anecdotal one. As far as we know this is the first time a computational stylistics analysis has attempted to assess the extent to which a ghostwriter’s own stylistic habits — reflected in the relative frequency of their usage of preferred sets of function words — are transferred to the text in question.'  (Publication abstract)

'Daisy Bates, the letter's author, was more than a day's travel from where Hill had first met her, camping on the rim of the Nullarbor. A self-taught ethnologist, she had pitched her tents near Ooldea siding on the east-west railway line to observe the Aboriginal people who gathered at Yuldilgabbi, a nearby soak. For centuries they'd travelled there from Kalgoorlie, Oodnadatta, the MacDonnell ranges and beyond for water, trade and ceremony. Now it was 'Orphan water, all its people dead: explorer after explorer, then the railway's engineers had drained it. But the legend persists and the blacks still come from 400 and 600 miles away, to find that the Yuldilgabbi is a thing of the past'. They drifted down to sidings on the line to beg passengers for food' (Introduction)

'Martin Edmond’s dual biography of Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira illuminates a remarkable friendship, writes Eleanor Hogan'

'Eleanor Hogan reviews a careful and often illuminating history of a northwestern Australian town'

'Eleanor Hogan reviews Warwick Thornton’s film installation, Mother Courage'