'Bates devoted more than 35 years of her life to studying Aboriginal life, history, culture, rites, beliefs and customs. Living in a tent in small settlements from Western Australia to the edges of the Nullarbor Plain. She researched and wrote millions of words on the subject.'
'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. In spite of 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...' (Source: GoodReads website)
'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)
