Customer Reviews

DAISY BATES IN THE DESERT.

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 successful in making Daisy's dream world seem like an understandable response to the privations and hardships she faced in her early life alone. In Part I, Blackburn describes what Daisy has said about her life, and follows it with what Blackburn has discovered to be the truth as a result of her documented research. In Part II, she allows Daisy, as she understands her, to speak to the reader herself, and we "live" with her in the desert for many years, watching as her original dedication becomes a mission and then a mania, and her insecurity grows into delusion and eventually paranoia. A woman who seems to have accomplished nothing of lasting significance, Daisy might have achieved some of her goals if she had only bent a little. Part III tells of Daisy's life after she leaves the desert.

Blackburn brings Daisy's Australian desert camp to life--the blinding sun, the heat of day and cold of night, the ghostly arrivals and departures of the shy aborigines, the birds and animals who were often Daisy's only company, and the changes wrought by the railroads, settlement, missionaries, and unfeeling governmental bureaucrats. Though she presents Daisy sympathetically, she is not Daisy's apologist, offering no defense, other than Daisy's own personality, for her extreme and solitary viewpoint. Unlike other readers, I found this a very poignant story of a woman who, at the end of a life of the utmost privation and dedication to saving a culture, realizes with sadness that it has all been for naught. Clearly, she never had a clue that most of her failure was her own fault. Mary Whipple

Daisy Bates appears to be delusional at times in recounting her adventures with the Aboriginese but this is still one of the most fascinating reads I've had in a long time! If you were to separate her tales from the fact that she lived on her own among the indigenous peoples of Australia during a time when it was shocking for a woman to do so, there would still be an incredible story of courage and perserverance. This is an account worth reading!

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 have that than a lot of silly conjecture and fantasy. The prose is very good, very flowery and high flown, but it doesn't help tell the story of Daisy Bates. Like other reviewers, I will have to research Daisy, yes even after reading her "biog". It didn't feel balanced at all.

I read this book for my reading group, and if it hadn't been the "assigned" book for the month, I would not have finished it. I was initially enthusiastic about the book because of its unique setting, and Daisy Bates sounded like an interesting character. Like most of my reading group's members, I was disappointed in the writer's treatment of Daisy's life. She failed to provide sufficient details to form an interesting and cohesive story. I found myself skimming through much of the book because I didn't really get to know Daisy well enough to care about her as a character.

In spite of the two star review already posted on this book, I found it to be a great book. Really well written...lovely prose...insightful...made me want to know more about Daisy and so I went into research in greater depth. I think this book would make an excellent study for any women's literature course.

Too much novelistic improvisation and repetition ruin this book. Julia Blackburn is clearly more interested in Julia Blackburn than in Daisy Bates. Julia Blackburn's ideas and dreams are constantly inserted just when you think you might get to read something about Daisy Bates! Julia Blackburn presents Julia Blackburn as a dreamy, visionary person, while describing Daisy Bates as a Liar over and over and over again, and then giving Daisy an "imaginary" life... It could have worked if Julia Blackburn weren't so in love with herself--- I bought this book because life among the Aborigines sounded interesting. But it's really too much about Julia Blackburn and she bores me. I read a lot of novels, biogs, poetry, and history, and this books tries to capture it all and while at times it is eloquent, it often feels false and flat.

If you have a burning desire to read some historical fiction, I'd recommend "Memoirs of a Geisha" 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 characterize the experience of a white living amongst the Aborigines? Were there no other whites that lived among them during that time? One thing that was clear was that there were many different types of whites to be found in contact with the Aborigines at this time. Could we not have seen these Native Australians from the perspective of government officials? Or railroad workers?

3. On the whole, the characters were very poorly developed and one dimensional-- and especially those of the Aborigines. This might have been another vehicle to show us the customs that a reader might be intersted to know, such as language/ customs/ family structure.

4. If this work was supposed to have been historical fiction dedicated to understanding Daisy Bates, the author could have taken artistic license to develop the character of Daisy Bates as it might have been seen through the eyes of an Aborigine. Or several of the government officials with whom she came into contact.

Again: If you are looking for good historical fiction, don't look for it in this book.