Daisy Bates with Lingthusiasm

Summary

This Guy Sucked — Daisy Bates with Lingthusiasm Podcast Episode Summary Date: April 16, 2026
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin (TGS)
Guest: Lauren Gawne (Lingthusiasm)

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Episode Overview

This collaborative episode of “This Guy Sucked” and “Lingthusiasm” dives into the life and legacy of Daisy Bates — an Irish-Australian figure infamous for her vast collection of documentation on Indigenous Australian languages, and her deeply problematic colonial attitudes and actions. Dr. Claire Aubin and linguist Lauren Gawne unpack Bates’s historical context, her myth-making, and the ongoing impact of her work, while reflecting on the responsibilities inherent to scholarship and public history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction & Framing the Conversation

• Academic “Hating” with Purpose

  • Claire and Lauren agree on the value of revisiting and correcting the glorified legacies of historical figures, making space for justice and academic rigor.
  • “[...] the goal is we're not just being mean. We're doing it to try to rewrite someone's history back into the historical narrative or to try to sort of be clear about harms.” (Claire, 01:20)

• Acknowledgment of Country

  • Lauren begins with a thoughtful land acknowledgment for the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, underscoring the complexity and ongoing impact of colonization in Australia.
    (02:08)

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2. Who Was Daisy Bates?

• Clarifying Identities: Not the American Civil Rights Hero

  • Both stress that their focus is NOT the American Daisy Bates (of Little Rock), but the Irish-Australian linguist known for her work with Indigenous Australians. (07:22–08:02)

• Early Life & Myth-making

  • Daisy Bates, born Margaret Dwyer in 1859 Ireland, came to Australia in the late 1800s under a cloud of personal and biographical confusion, much of it self-crafted.
  • Memorable Moment — Claire: “Part of the difficulty is the fact that their legacy is in part self made.” (11:34)

• Personal Life: Serial Marriages & Charisma

  • Married at least three men (including the infamous Breaker Morant) without divorcing, often reinventing her own narrative. Known for her charm and self-promotion.
  • Lauren jokingly laments the world never got a “Bagelhall Collection.” (13:28–13:41)

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3. Historical Context: Colonial Australia

• Terra Nullius & White Australia Policy

  • The legal and social doctrine of terra nullius allowed settlers to justify land theft and Indigenous dispossession by claiming the land was “unoccupied.”
  • Indigenous Australians weren’t even counted in censuses until 1967. (20:21–22:13)
  • Claire observes: “It’s a really like immensely harmful thing because it enables you to say some people aren’t people or...not people in the right way.” (20:40)

• Systemic Injustices

  • Enforced “slavery-adjacent” conditions, rampant abuse, and state-sanctioned child removals—sometimes with Daisy Bates’s active participation. (34:14-34:45)

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4. Daisy Bates’s Work and Its Legacy

• Massive Data Collection...With a Catch

  • Bates compiled over 20,000 handwritten pages and 4,000 typewritten word lists of Indigenous languages—much of which are the sole surviving records for some languages (06:00–07:22).
  • The “Digital Daisy Bates” project has digitized these archives, providing crucial (albeit problematically framed) linguistic data. (57:37)

• Her Approach: Self-Stylized “Anthropologist”

  • While she often criticized others’ sloppy data collection, Bates exaggerated her own abilities, claiming to speak 100+ languages.
  • Claire (skeptical): “Yeah, I don’t know about that.” (24:14)

• Pervasive Paternalism & Harmful Narratives

  • Bates’s core belief: Indigenous Australians were a “dying race,” and her role was record-keeping during their ‘inevitable’ demise (32:08).
  • She spread unsubstantiated claims of Indigenous cannibalism, actively fueling racist, dehumanizing myths (27:03-28:55).
    • “One time she like, sent some bones to the South Australia Museum and they’re like, this is a cat. You sent us cat bones. Chill, lady.” (Lauren, 27:41)
  • She collaborated with Ernestine Hill but denied her credit, referring to her as a “typist.” (36:15)

• Cult of Personality

  • Bates cultivated an iconic image: a petite, Edwardian-dressed woman in the outback, leaning on stereotypes of maternal colonial civility (30:43–31:43).
  • “Just her presence would be a civilizing influence. And you’re just like, wow, what a mindset.” (Lauren, 32:01)

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5. Modern Reflections: Reckoning With the Past

• The Limits of “Endangered” Language Framing

  • Lauren discusses how linguistic scholarship is still grappling with the “endangered language” narrative, which often neglects agency, context, or the role of forced assimilation.
    “[...] we have this incentive as academics trying to fund the work that we’re doing of talking up the endangerment and how we never talk about what is endangering them.” (Lauren, 41:03–42:33)

• Credit and Collaboration

  • There’s progress, but much work to be done—historically, linguistics has often failed to credit Indigenous collaborators and sources, treating them as “informants” not partners (38:30–41:03).

• Australia’s Ongoing Struggle With Its Legacy

  • Recent political events, like the failed 2023 “Voice to Parliament” referendum, demonstrate widespread denial and resistance to formal reckoning, according to Lauren. (46:32–48:39)
  • “I couldn't find a single person saying anything nice about Daisy Bates, who was Indigenous.” (Lauren, 48:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Exchanges

• On Historical “Hating”:
  “We’re doing it for justice...to be clear about harms that are caused by people that we, in some way or another, hold up as good or useful or important.” – Claire (01:20)

• On Colonial Myth-Making:
  “She just had this absolute sense of self-importance...empire was the religion.” – Lauren (36:22, 53:43)

• On Daisy Bates’s Public Image:
  “Whatever image you’ve had of her, you have to. She’s actually this, like, incredibly tiny woman dressed as Mary Poppins.” – Lauren (30:44)

• On Her Harmful Legacy:
  “She would like alert the authorities to these children who she felt needed to be taken away from their families.” – Lauren (34:36)

• On “Endangered” Language Narratives:
  “The economic and the social incentives, if you’re trying to do work that’s important, you still end up in this trap of talking about or exoticizing ... this language. And there’s maybe an unfair stereotype of a bit of ... ‘My language’, it’s just like the same vibes as Daisy Bates, as like my natives.” – Lauren (42:33)

• On Ongoing Cultural Reckoning:
  “So much work still to be done.” – Lauren (50:51)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–03:37 — Setting the academic frame, land acknowledgment
• 07:22–08:14 — “Which Daisy Bates are we talking about?”
• 10:29–14:28 — Bates’s origins and personal myth-making
• 18:30–24:03 — Colonial context; terra nullius, legal fictions, Indigenous lives
• 27:03–28:55 — Bates’s cannibalism claims & othering narratives
• 30:43–32:08 — Iconic image, “civilizing” mindset
• 34:14–35:05 — Active participation in Stolen Generations
• 36:15–36:22 — Academic credit and erasure (Hill as “typist”)
• 41:03–42:33 — Modern linguistics: “Endangered” languages and agency
• 46:32–48:39 — The 2023 “Voice to Parliament” referendum & public reckoning
• 57:37–58:45 — The Digital Daisy Bates Project: how to engage critically

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Closing Thoughts & Call to Action

• The episode ends with both hosts urging listeners to critically engage with Bates’s legacy and the Digital Daisy Bates collection—not to reject valuable linguistic data, but to be conscious of its colonial origins, the erasure of Indigenous voices, and the continuing struggle for justice and representation. (57:37–58:52)
• “[...] when you’re doing it, think about like where and how these things are being produced and who gets named and not named in their production. Like, that’s what we want.” – Claire (58:19)
• “Why are these the only records that we have of some of these languages and some of these speakers?” – Lauren (58:45)

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Further Resources

• Digital Daisy Bates: Project digitizing and mapping Bates’s field notes for research and public use.
• Recommended reading: Eleanor Hogan’s and Julia Blackburn’s works on Daisy Bates, Larissa Barent’s writings on racialized cannibalism myths, Uluru Statement from the Heart, Yuruk Justice Commission findings.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a critical, comprehensive understanding of Daisy Bates’s legacy, her times, and the ramifications for modern Australia and scholarship.

Transcript

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm Your your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer and most importantly, certified hater. On this show we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. But today we are here to do a super special mashup collaborative episode thing. Woohoo.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yay.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Who are you? What are we doing?

[Lauren Gaughan]

Hi, Claire, name is Lauren. I am a co host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. This is really fun for me because normally we just do yay enthusiasm and like, hating is a new vibe for me. So let's see how it goes.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, I think we try to be enthusiastic about the hating a little bit in the sense that, like, we're doing it for justice, right? Like the goal is we're not just being mean. We're doing it to try to rewrite someone's history back into the historical narrative or to try to sort of be clear about harms that are caused by people that we, in some way or another hold up as good or useful or important. We just like to make sure that the record is balanced

[Lauren Gaughan]

as long as it's pedagogically informed and academically rigorous. Hating. It sounds great.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It sure is. And the way I do that is by having other people who are experts on to tell me to stop. Before we started, we wanted to make some acknowledgments though, and I'll let you take this away.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Thanks, Claire. I want to acknowledge that this recording is taking place for me on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Those lands were never ceded and the Kulin peoples live across the area that we now know as Melbourne and its outer surrounds. Today I want to pay my respects to any indigenous people listening. To be completely honest, you can look at the content notes for this episode. It's going to involve a lot of like, coloniser bullshit. So just as a heads up on that, my acknowledgement to any other indigenous people who have been subjected to colonisation who are listening to this episode as well, because, man, these people are maniacs. I do also want to Let you know that, like, almost all of the story has nothing to do with Melbourne or Victoria or Kulin country. A lot of what we're talking about today has taken place in Western Australia and a lot in South Australia and the Northern Territory. And that's important because Australia is incredibly diverse in terms of indigenous peoples and their cultures and their languages. It is the longest continuing culture in the world. We have records back to 60,000 years ago, and at the time of settlers arriving and white people coming to Australia, there were over 400 distinct language groups. So an incredibly diverse country. I'm going to be talking about a different part of it to where I'm from today.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And this is a very important thing. We don't always do things like land acknowledgments on the show, but it is a very important thing for particularly the person that we're talking about. So there is a particular approach being taken here that we wanted to make sure we were, like, really thoughtful about from the jump so that you know that we're thinking about these things as we're making it. I'm trying to be a little bit better, at least on my show. I think you guys do this better than we do. But I'm trying to be better on TGS about being more open about the back end and how we approach and think about and formulate the show. I think you guys do a really excellent job of that. And I encourage everyone listening to this, if you want the opposite side of this coin and enthusiasm and really, really thoughtful scholarship to go listen to Lingthusiasm, because they're really great. And I'm very excited about this episod because I have been listening to Lauren's show and Gretchen's show for a while. So it's really cool to get to do this.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Well, I'm really excited because doing this. Let me know about your show. And I've since been listening and I love academically informed content. I'm not a historian, as you've correctly identified. For me, I am a linguist, and I'm not even a linguist who mostly works in Australia. A lot of my research is either with English or other languages or a lot of my work has been with Tibetan languages in Nepal, which is a whole other historical and social context. But this person I want to talk about today. Should we get into it?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, please.

[Lauren Gaughan]

She's pretty wild. I came to her in There are some academics who just finish a PhD and wander straight into a research fellowship or a tenure track job.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Not me.

[Lauren Gaughan]

I can hear in your laughter Claire, that. That was not you.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I was working at a store.

[Lauren Gaughan]

It took me about a year, a year and a half to get my first research fellowship. And in that year and a half I had these colleagues who kept trying to find work for me, but there were always these like, I've got 40 hours of research project here. I've got one day as a research officer. And I'm so grateful to all of those colleagues for keeping me employed and housed. Shout out to them in this great period of uncertainty. And one of these colleagues was Nick Tieberger at the University of Melbourne, who was like, I have this big project. I've got these pages and pages of PDFs I've just scanned and I need as many people as I can to help me check that the scans look okay, that everything's there, that they're properly labelled and named. And These are over 20,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts and 4,000 pages of typed word lists. And these were all this massive survey of indigenous languages of western, southern and central Australia that were collected in the early 1900s. And they were collected by or kind of managed by this lady named Daisy Bates. And I was just like, what is this project? And what was this woman doing in the early 1900s? This is an astonishing amount of data. All of these indigenous languages for some of these languages. That's the only record we have left of them. And it was just astonishing. I'd never heard of Daisy Bates. I didn't know this massive collection of data existed. It had just sat in the National Library of Australia for years. People knew it was there. But until Nick had this big project to digitize it in a project called Digital Daisy Bates, it had just sat there.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Uh huh.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Probably should at this point say if the name Daisy Bates rings a bell and you're American, we're talking like different daisies.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Oh yeah. To be clear, there are two Daisy Bates. When you Google Daisy Bates, we're not talking about the civil rights activist. We're not. She rocks.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Okay, good. Because I was just like, I don't know if she sucks. I don't have time to go down that rabbit hole. She seems great.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. On this show, I think I'm happy to come out and say we're openly pro desegregation of Arkansas school in the mid century American period. We like integration and we like Daisy Bates.

[Lauren Gaughan]

So good. Daisy Bates.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

But the one that we're talking about is not that one. That one was not moonlighting as an Irish Australian linguist.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Very busy Irish Australian linguist. 50 years earlier.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Ah, yes. Also, we haven't gotten there quite yet, but it's going to my previous thesis that I have engaged with a little bit on the show, which is that white people in Australia in the late 19th, early 20th century were up to some stuff across the board.

[Lauren Gaughan]

We will talk a little bit about why the social context permitted, in fact, encouraged, that kind of behavior. I probably sound terrible now because I'm just like, this amazing collection. Some of the only recorded information we have about some of these languages and some speakers. She also spent 30 years living in the desert and living alongside especially the Anangal community in the middle of South Australia, literally giving them her own food, the clothes that she had. At this point, I always feel like I'm kind of losing the plot a little bit, where it's just like, is this really a guy who sucks just coming on here to hate on Mother Teresa energy? And at one point when I was kind of preparing for this, because I did this work well over a decade ago now, and I was like, maybe she's not that bad. Maybe I just made up that I thought she was terrible. And then I went back and was like, oh, no, no, it's fine. We can talk about her. She was pretty terrible.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I mean, I've got some crazy news for you, which is that Mother Teresa also kind of bad, as it turns out.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Okay, great, great. I should have seen that coming.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Wild news. Everyone on the show turns out to be a little bit bad, but this is part of it, actually, and so I'm glad that you brought that up early. That part of it is like, the contributions are why we know about people. Often the methods by which they make those or the other people in their lives or the way they position themselves while making those contributions don't necessarily take away from the contributions themselves, but they need to be added into the record. When we think about how all of this knowledge is generated, right? And who is at the center of its generation, like is actually quite important to understanding the story of that knowledge. When we think about Daisy Bates, if people are not familiar with her, which

[Lauren Gaughan]

many people will not be, most Australians, even, I think she had a real moment in, like, the 1970s. And since then, she's just been kind of for good reason, actually. Just let be she was born in 1859 in Ireland. The problem with detangling her history is that there's a lot of, like, she was born Margaret Dwyer. By the time she came to Australia, she was Daisy Mae O'Dwyer. Her Wikipedia page is a thing of beauty because it tells her story as she tells it. And then down the bottom there's a whole section of like, where the bullshit is.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Thank you to the Wikipedia editor who did that. I'm just going to tell a version of her story and not worry too much about the inconsistencies because I used to think they were important that she was like such a liar. And I actually don't think it's that important anymore.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I mean, it also kind of goes to something. We talk about the show a lot, which is that part of the difficulty of understanding people's legacies is that they engage in these myth making practices while they're alive.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Oh, she was so good at that.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So part of the difficulty is the fact that their legacy is in part self made.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So, yeah, it's totally okay to be like, we're going to go with what we've got, but who knows if it's real?

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. So at age 23 and like the 1880s, she lies and says she's 21 so she can meet the criteria for this. Irish people come to Australia for free because they're trying to bring over all these working class white people to create the white Australia that they think should be created. She works in Queensland and New South Wales as a governess. While she's there, she just like gets married three different times.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Never divorces, which apparently was pretty common. Like people would just get married again because divorce was so hard to come by.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

So she marries her first marriage and for Australia, Australians, this will be wild. This is like the surprise crossover you did not expect. In 1884, she marries Braker Morant, who is a kind of mythologised Australian hero poet who actually did war crimes in the Boer War and was one of the last Australians to be executed by the British.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Absolute. That guy sucks, for sure. But they got married briefly. He didn't pay for the marriage license and, like shirked off on her. So that marriage ended. And then in 1885, she marries Jack Bates, hence Daisy Bates. At some point, that marriage isn't going well because she, like, expected a lot of him and he was just a dude driving horses and driving cattle and would disappear.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Classic Australian stuff.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Just classic, classic Australian stuff. At some point they're like, not really together and an old flame named Ernest C. Bagelhall comes to Sydney.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sorry.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For real. His name is Bagelhall. For a long time I was really distressed that that marriage didn't survive and it wasn't known as the Bagelhall Collection.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

She could have been Daisy Bagelhall.

[Lauren Gaughan]

She could have been Daisy Bagelhall. It appears that, like, he's a guy she knew from Ireland maybe, and he was in Sydney because he was working on the ships and they like, kind of had a relationship for a while. Daisy burnt all of her correspondence and all of her diaries shortly before her death. So piecing all of this together and whether she felt like any of these marriages were, like, more real or if she was just. This was just the way one kind of led a more casually promiscuous life in the 1880s, it's very hard to say, but she was definitely bigamist. Trigamous, I guess.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Trigamous, polygamist, sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

She's apparently like a very charming, mega flirt.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Everyone talks about her being very charismatic. I think that charisma links through to her later life.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

With Jack, she had a son. She didn't seem that into being a mom. Apparently. She had a baby and she's like, well, no one told me that was going to hurt. And like, swore off sex for the rest of her life according to her narrative.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Look, I'm saying I get it.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I have not given birth, but I understand the implications of this and I get if that's what someone chooses to do afterwards.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. If you didn't have a heads up on that, like, golly, golly. She didn't seem that into her son. She, like, sent him off to boarding school and to live with her extended family. Like, he doesn't appear in the story that much. I think it's an oversimplification to just be like, she wasn't maternal. There was something wrong with her. But, like, she really didn't seem to be into parenting in the 1890s, like 1894. So, like, her son was like primary school age. Her relationship wasn't working out. She went to London. She was like, I have to go home, I'm feeling homesick. And became a Fleet street journalist for a while. She was working on this, like, newspaper about psychics and mediums and she's like, not a fan.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Look, she and I agree on.

[Lauren Gaughan]

She doesn't seem to be super into the woo woo. Like, she seems like quite a rationalist.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

But she gets this really great apprenticeship in journalism and writing for public audiences. And then this is where the relationship between reality and not reality becomes a lot harder to pin down. In 1899, she comes back to Australia. She comes to Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia, saying that she has a commission from the Times of London to write a Story about how indigenous Australians are being ill treated. This does not appear to be true. It's possible that she talked to someone at the Times who said, sure, you can send a letter to the editor if you want. And then by the time she got to Australia, this had evolved into a full blown story from here on out. She starts talking about Jack as her late husband. He is not dead. She's just like, sure, I mentally divorced him, he's dead to me.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A conscious uncoupling. Isn't that what people were calling that for a little while? The Gwyneth Paltry?

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah, it's like a very powerful manifestation of she's like, no, he's, he's my late husband. The other two never get mentioned again in her lifetime.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Wow.

[Lauren Gaughan]

In fact, it wasn't until like historians started looking in the 1970s that they put together the like Breaker Morant story.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Huh.

[Lauren Gaughan]

So she's very circumspect about her life unless it suits her story. She's like a great self publicist. We're going to see that a lot for the rest of this.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hello everybody, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're currently listening to the free version of our show. Because we're trying to make accessible, engaging history independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts and it's in the budget for you, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pint of beer, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the biweekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com this guy sucked. Or follow the link in our episode description to sign up. So what is the context of what? Australia. What, like settler and indigenous relationships? What is this looking like at this moment when she comes back and is like, I'm here to do my to. To write.

[Lauren Gaughan]

So in 1899, Australia is two years off becoming a federated Commonwealth where we still have the British head of state as our head of state.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And we have a governor general who like, acts for the King. Just. It's so cringe to even say it

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

out There I lived in New Zealand for a year and I still do not understand what the deal is over there.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Technically, the king is not meant to interfere in the running of Australia, but like, there was some extreme bullshit in the 1970s where some dudes who sucked definitely had some royal interference in our government. So we are a couple of years off being federated the West, a little bit like the us, I guess, where like the east coast was, the colonies were established there first and then white occupation. It didn't quite go across the country because across the country, right in the middle, there's like a great big bit known as the Nullarbor because there is null arbor, no trees. It's just very hard to impose a Western way of living on that part of Australia. So there were some train lines that were built to get people east to west, but in general, kind of sea travel was the way to get around the country. They created a whole new legal illusion to allow white people to feel okay about occupying Australia. So they invented this thing called terra nullius, where they're like, there aren't people living here. And when everyone was like, what about all those people living here? They were like, they're not people people because they're not doing the kind of agriculture or house building that we do. So. Because they're different, they're not.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Right.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And that will just allow us to take the land because we're using it in like a good European way. And that wasn't overturned as a legal framework until the second half of the 20th century, like, well into the 1980s.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. If I'm thinking about my understanding of terra nullius, it's a way of thinking that a land that is a uncultivated in the concept of, like, Western cultivation of land is therefore unoccupied land. And so it like, really relates or ties the relationship of peoples to, like, their use of space. And this is something we see repeatedly in history. But it's a. It's a really like immensely harmful thing because it enables you to say some people aren't people or like you've said, they're not people in the right way.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And you get this doctrine that allows people to be treated closer to, like, animals or just features of a landscape which you are now trying to cultivate rather than human beings with rights and dignity and desires and agency.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. And the academic part of me wants to. Well, actually them with, like, there are really great examples of very elaborate, like, aquaculture, of course, like eel traps. And Bruce Pascoe has done a lot of work on like traditional grain farming that doesn't look anything like Western grain farming because they're very different grains. But like it wasn't about proving that, yeah, they were really occupying the land because that wasn't the point. The point was to create this nonsense framework.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. What happens when you push back against that is implicitly you are saying that there is something of worth that you need to argue with to begin with. Right. To be like, well, they are actually occupying the land in the European way. We don't need to acknowledge the argument in the first place.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Indigenous Australians weren't even counted as people until 1967 when we had a referendum. So they couldn't get passports, they couldn't vote, they couldn't do all the things that everyone else living in the country could. And so when I say Daisy Bates was outraged about how they were being treated, there was like this straight up abuse and neglect. There were also a lot of Aboriginal people essentially in slavery adjacent conditions. You know, they were working for people where they wouldn't really be being paid. So there were lots of really dire circumstances. It's not that she wanted them to be able to live rich and free lives. It's that she straight up thought and wrote in her book like, this is a dying race and we are just kind of being nice to them while what she saw as the inevitable played out. And so her work in the 1910s and the 1900s with it seems like the government was already sending out this survey for people to collect words from different languages. Like it was already being sent out to pastoralists and police stations. But it seems like she was the one who collated it all and would often. This is the one bit that I find really relatable about her. She'd get these surveys back and she's like, this person did a terrible job. Like they're missing a whole bunch of words. This is sloppy work. And she'd travel around Western Australia pinning people down, finishing the forms, collecting data for herself to build this really comprehensive, I mean relatively comprehensive. It would actually just be better if we had let people continue to speak their languages.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

But then again the like self aggrandizing and the strong personal narrative where she would talk about being able to speak over a hundred different languages and it's just like, I am skeptical.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I don't know about that. Especially because part of this is she's sort of a self styled anthropologist, self styled linguist person. Like. Yeah, and that's not to say that one can't learn lots of things without like specific Extensive training.

[Lauren Gaughan]

But in defense, anthropology didn't actually like super technically exist, certainly in Australia, and certainly not in a way that women were allowed into that academic community. There's a really great book by Eleanor Hogan where she talks a little bit about the ethnomania of this era. And it really ties into this like, empire nonsense where people were just trying to collect everything for the empire. And that included people and their customs and their languages. So she was really a person of her time. The fact that it was a little bit odd that she was a woman. Normally this was men doing this work. After that time with the Western Australian government, she moved to Udella, which no one's ever heard of it. It's literally not a place anymore. It was like a stop on the train line across from east to west. And she lived there for over 16 years with the Anangu people who kind of lived near the sightings because their way of life had been completely disrupted by the train bringing Western practices, bringing in Western foods that upset their natural ecology, draining the water soak that was nearby. So there wasn't fresh water that people could access easily. And then you had this train that kind of brought these people through for them to trade with. And so by 1919, she's like in her 50s. She's there until her 70s. People start bringing her in for care and heading out. She kind of leaves again and she never really settles down well into her 80s. Eleanor Hogan has this amazing book, it's one of the more recent public, about Daisy Bates, where she looks at her relationship with a traveling journalist named Ernestine Hill, who seems pretty cool. She was kind of travelling around in the 1930s. She came to Udalla to talk to Daisy Bates and kind of published a couple of articles about Daisy Bates time in the desert in that community. A thing she regrets is that she published the story that Daisy Bates had about cannibalism among Indigenous Australians, which, like, again, I kind of thought like, oh, maybe she just said that one time. But no, she, like went on about it all the time.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Which is not only unsubstantiated, but like, seems pretty actively refuted by evidence at the time. Like, this is why I think Daisy Bates sucks. Specifically because lots of people weren't great, but lots of people at the time were just like, we don't think this is true. There was very little evidence. One time she like, sent some bones to the South Australia Museum and they're like, this is a cat. You sent us cat bones. Like, chill, lady. But this narrative of cannibal Natives is like such a classic bullshit trope. There's a really great book by Larissa Barent, who's an indigenous lawyer and scholar, looking at this narrative of cannibalism in a different context in Queensland. But I think it's part of this recurring trope of using it to make other cultures scarier and othering them.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, absolutely. We have lots of examples of this, actually, like, particularly in spaces where there is, like, rapid colonial expansion, we see cannibalism being used. For example, in our Christopher Columbus episode, we talk about cannibalism as this trope that's being used against people in the Americas. And what's actually happening in these spaces is more often we see much more intense violence and, like, things like torture coming from the colonizing side against the indigenous people. Right. Like, the things that they're being accused of doing more often are closer to things that are being done to them in this moment. And it's a way, I think you're totally right, of othering people and saying, well, they're doing something we find unconscionable in order to distract from the fact that we are, in fact, doing something unconscionable to them. Right. Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

It's just like such a bingo card.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, it really is. Also, everything you've said about Daisy Bates so far reminds me of an episode that I highly recommend people listen to, actually in conjunction with this, which was with Rhiannon Garth Jones on late 19th, early 20th century Orientalists in places like Iran and Iraq, where they're doing the same thing. They're like, oh, we're paying attention to the art, to the language. We're translating their poetry to show that they are this backwards place. And we're taking this and we're sending it back to the Imperial Court. We're sending it back to, like, the governments that we work for or the journals that we work for in. In these cases, the UK at this point or Ireland, where saying, like, we're sending this back there in order to then justify actually the actions that are being taken in these spaces. These, like, incredibly violent things that are happening there.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

There's one of these women named Gertrude Bell in Iran who's doing almost the same thing that Daisy Bates is doing, which I find fascinating that they're both women who are like, okay, well, I'm gonna go far away from home where I can be this thing that I couldn't necessarily be back there and be Girl boss in the wild. And like, Gertrude Bell, for example, was doing the same Thing in Iran, where she's like, well, I live out in the desert with these people and I really understand their way of life. And you're like, and I think it's

[Lauren Gaughan]

really important that they are women for this narrative. So she was given a most excellent Order of the British Empire a CBE in 1934 for this incredibly paternalistic. But, like, it's the maternal spin of, like, this woman in the desert looking after her. She talks about her. Her natives.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yes.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Who is a term that got used at the time that doesn't get used in Australia as much. And, like, the thing I haven't stressed enough, possibly, is whatever image you've had of her, you have to. She's actually this, like, incredibly tiny woman dressed as Mary Poppins. Like, she's in full Edwinian governess gear and she never gives this up. And I think she really understood the power of the personal brand before celebrity was a thing. Clearly an incredibly strong and resilient woman out in incredibly hot, arid conditions in full Edwardian bone corset that was not comfortable, but there was something really compelling to people about this woman and this tension between this incredibly edge of civilization as it was, conceptualised place, but while completely from another era and completely refined, and all this decorum.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And you're able to be photographed, for example, in this case, like, around people who are dressed for the environment that they're in and be able to be like, look at how civilized I am. Look at who I am, especially this maternal feeling that I have towards them. Not my own son, but these people that I have.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And she talked about just her presence would be a civilizing influence. And you're just like, wow, what a mindset.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, for sure. And I think that's visible when you look into some of these things. In the research I did ahead of time, I was thinking about this dying race thing that you brought up earlier, this idea that, like, her research follows this narrative that assumes these indigenous cultures are sort of inevitably disappearing. Like, this is an inevitable disappearance. And she's doing this, like, pastoral thing to help them as they are in culture. Cultural hospice. Right. Where she's like, the most I can do is catalog all of this and look at how wonderful I am for doing that and how much I love you for that. Instead of being like, ah, this is a living, evolving society that I can help to thrive and grow and, you know, work against.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And we've just stuck a, like, giant stick in the gears of this society. Like, we've completely ruptured it. And then we're Surprised that it's a ruptured society. Wow.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. You'd be like this thing. Society is dying. Who knows what killed it, you know, which is just wild. Like is a wild formulation for this.

[Lauren Gaughan]

In 1939 she publishes her book called the Passing of the Aborigines. Just in case you weren't entirely sure that she thought this was a doomed

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

society and not a word we're using that much anymore. Am I right on? Because some of these things differ across countries and spaces. Right. I don't think we're using that word right so much.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Aboriginal, indigenous.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yes.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Are pretty like different groups have different preferences. There's a bunch of sub preferences. We also distinguish the Torres Strait Islands right up the top of Queensland. Some groups will prefer like Koori is a very New South Wales Victoria term. We sometimes talk about first Nations. I know that's a very North American way of talking about things. But no Aborigines. It has a real 1938 vibe to it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It does. Especially because it starts usually with the beforehand. And anything we say like the race, we have a problem.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Often I think it's just worth flagging. Like she's a big fan of removing children who had aboriginal mother and a white father from their family context. A process that happened for many, many decades in Australia and is a major intergenerational trauma that we now refer to as the stolen generations.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And she would like alert the authorities to these children who she felt needed to be taken away from their families.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I was gonna ask what you meant by her being like a fan or a proponent of this. And I thought you were gonna say like, oh, she was like in legislation. No, she was like let's call the police. That's wild. I'm sorry, that's like so far beyond what I thought you were gonna say. Say I'm not laughing like haha. I'm laughing like that's like appalling.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Absolutely valid shock response to that behavior.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It has the vibe of being like, ah, there's someone in the attic, let's call the Gestapo. And I. And I study Nazis. So that's like where my brain is immediately going. But like this is a type of a person, Right. Who like thinks they're doing something for a good reason, but the thing they're doing is just abjectly terrible. And pretty much anyone can see that.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Also just another sub thread of why this guy sucks is Eleanor Hogan's book is all about this relationship between Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, who wrote those initial articles with her. Daisy Bates had been publishing in newspapers. That's how she had supported herself while living in Udela and all these other remote places. Her prose was becoming increasingly not of the era. She Was this like 75 year old Victorian lady. And so Ernestine wrote those couple of articles with her and then essentially co wrote the book with her, which started as a series of newspaper articles, became the whole book. And Daisy Bates just gives her no credit. She refers to her briefly at some point as her typist.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

The academic, the scholar in me is even I, I don't like this woman at all. I already did.

[Lauren Gaughan]

No, but she just had this like absolute sense of self importance.

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[Lauren Gaughan]

And like Ernestine Hill, very famous in Australia in the early 20th century for her prose. And it is a horrific book in terms of content, but there's quite a bit that's quite well written and it's very engaging and it's rollicking and you're just like, oh, that makes complete sense. That explains why that book was so well regarded. It was considered a bestseller. It was continuous, pretty much basically in print until the mid-1970s. My copy is from a reprint in 1966. And she not only responded to, but actively fed in the public imagination this narrative that still absolutely harms Australia's understanding of itself until today. And I think like I haven't really thought about Daisy in the decade or so since I last did a little bit of work on her. And as I said, I don't necessarily research in Australia, but now that I work in Australia and I teach in Australia, and for me returning to this story is part of an ongoing process I'm trying to engage in, in educating myself, doing better by my discipline and by my students to understand the historical context of Australia and drawing a line directly between the kind of narratives Daisy Bates engaged in and the kind of things that especially non recent migrants and non Indigenous Australians need to really unpack. Like we still have like massively high rates of Indigenous incarceration. The Stolen Generations is considered historical. But we still take like a massive number of children out of their family context into like the foster home system every year. Like that's still just perpetuating this kind of attitude towards Indigenous Australians.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So I've been thinking about the best moment to bring this up. And when you talked about her not properly crediting one of her collaborators, I have a question about like linguistics in general and how the field works in relation to her. When I was doing research, I started to kind of feel like the way that Daisy Bates is talking about people who she is ostensibly working with or getting information from. She's treating them like subjects and informants rather than as collaborators in this project that she's working on.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Oh, absolutely.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It does the field now do a better job. Do you think of crediting the people that you're learning from as like sort of collaborators in your learning? Is that more normal?

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah, there's definitely a lot to reflect on in Daisy Bates work. Like, not only in my understanding of like Australia's colonial history, but also in like, linguistic colonial history. My summary would be that individuals are better at thinking about their relationship with the people that they're working with as a field. I think we generally would love to see more and try to encourage more people to work with their own languages to change that power relationship. But institutionally, I think institutions are just so slow moving. It's hard to always necessarily have that play out in a more fully fledged form, if that makes sense. So, like, I think individuals are better at crediting, making people visible. Not always. I had this project with colleagues where we looked at the genre of descriptive grammar writing. This is where you write about the full grammar of a language, not just word lists like Daisy Bates did. As like even 10, 20 years ago, a shocking number of grammars were written where it's like, I don't know the names of the people you spoke to. And that feels like what. That feels like a bit of a problem. Like there were some grammars where we were like, does it count that they talk about some people in the acknowledgments as like, making visible the work those people did? No.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

This is so wild to me because, like, our fields are so different, obviously, like in many different respects, but you could not get away with that in history. Now, like, the whole thing is the source. The whole thing in history is who is saying something.

[Lauren Gaughan]

I think the PhD grammars we looked at were doing better. Like, I think the genre moves so slowly and the researchers are doing better. The other thing that I think really has caused me to reflect a lot in this narrative is that the field that I work in, which is documenting and describing languages, we talk about it a lot as endangered language documentation. And there's been this whole reckoning in the last kind of, since I've been a graduate student. So in the last 15 years there's been this reckoning with what does it mean when we're calling these languages endangered? Because it is this encroachment of larger languages. You know, English being the obvious global example, but in China it's Mandarin. In Nepal, where I work it's. Nepali is the language of state education. And so these languages are endangered. The problem is that we have this incentive as academics trying to fund the work that we're doing of talking up the endangerment and how we never talk about what is endangering them.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I was going to say that sounds like the passive voice to me. Right. Even imperiled is better than endangered my mind because it endangered to me is like the way we talk about species or something where like some environmental change has just happened rather than this being not a naturally occurring phenomenon and instead an utterly man made one.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And so the economic and the social incentives, if you're trying to do work that's important, you still end up in this trap of talking about or exoticizing, you know, this language. And there's maybe an unfair stereotype of a bit of a. Like, well, how many speakers does your language have? My language like the language I work with and you know, the, the. My language is just like the same vibes as Daisy Bates, as like my

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

natives, I was gonna say.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah, and so the really difficult thing about reading about Daisy Bates, like just absolutely, really problematic discourses, but it's still discourses we are trying to unpack and step away from even today.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

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[Lauren Gaughan]

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[Lauren Gaughan]

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[Dr. Claire Aubin]

There's so much here that I find fascinating in that how well do you feel like Australia has reckoned with this really awful path? Like my feeling on America is bad, like reckoning with this bad. And so I am curious what your view on how Australia has dealt with this and how this has helped to shape Australia's understanding of itself. Like what your feelings regarding these things are or how you're reading them. As someone who is thinking through a lot of this stuff, even not from a scholarly perspective, but just from like thinking and teaching in this space.

[Lauren Gaughan]

The data that I will bring to this is that in 2023 our government brought forward a national referendum. We don't do these very often. We wanted to change the constitution to include an Indigenous voice to parliament, and this was framed as a way of actually listening to Indigenous people, letting them lead policy that related to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians make up about 4% of the Australian population, but the majority of larger Indigenous communities are still in remote South Australia, Northern Territory in Western Australia. And this Indigenous voice referendum was supposed to be a way to provide structural acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians. And due to kind of a confluence of conservative media and conservative politicians campaigning against this idea. But also I think because a lot of Australians haven't acknowledged this history, the referendum was voted down pretty much 60, 40 across Australia. What?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, like I'm saying what? As though that's not what would happen in the US right now too. Like, what would we do here?

[Lauren Gaughan]

But this is a classic case of, like, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US have a lot of overlap in kind of history. And it's very interesting that I feel like each of us point to the other and we're like, but you're doing better, right? Like, you can't be doing worse than here. And so often when I talk with North American colleagues, they're like, but you guys have got it sorted out, right? I was just like, ugh, I wish.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

You know what is funny is when I was living in New Zealand, it was always like, well, Australia is worse. Like, when they would be like, oh, we have some problems. You should look at what they're doing in Australia. Yeah. Because I work for the New Zealand government when I was working there. And so it was. It's funny because there it was the opposite, where they were like, well, at least we're not Australia.

[Lauren Gaughan]

I'm happy. Like, I'm happy to give New Zealand. That's that for sure. So that's what's happening on a national level. It just created this massive flashpoint for people to be really racist overtly, publicly. So what a lot of Indigenous Australians have asked for. And, like, I couldn't find a single person saying anything nice about Daisy Bates, who was indigenous. They're possibly out there. I'm sure she had some personal relationships. But in terms of what Indigenous Australians want, again, this is not. Not everyone, but we have something called the Uluru Statement from the Heart from 2017, in which they lay out very clearly the challenges Indigenous Australians are facing, the rich diversity of Indigenous culture, but also that what they are asking for is truth telling, treaty and a voice. And I think in some ways putting that referendum for a voice ahead of the truth telling really didn't help because a lot of people aren't receptive to the truth at this time. In Victoria, we have gone through a truth telling process with the Yuruk Justice Commission in which our premier stood up and was just like, oh, I didn't quite realise that those massacres happened. Or the effect that this has all had is just like, ah, this is, you know, this is progress. And from the work from the Yuruk Justice Commission, a treaty was signed in 2025 in Victoria which is a step towards the formation of a voice that is framed around a mutually shared set of agreements and expectations. So things are happening, but this pernicious narrative, I mean, I was just listening to a podcast episode the other Day with Sue Ann Hunter, who's our new National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children. And she was just like, our kids are still really dehumanised. And I was just like, oh, like, absolutely. A direct line between what Daisy Bates was doing and the challenges that Sue Ann Hunter articulates. And you're just like, ugh, so much work still to be done.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I mean, even the word voice I find very interesting here in this context, like, thinking about Daisy Bates and the idea of, like, we want a voice, right? Because there's also this person who's going around being like, well, actually, what we can do is erase the people who speak the words that I'm collecting, right? We can just divorce the words from the people who use them or the grammar from the people who use it, et cetera. And we can separate these and we can preserve just the word and not the voice that speaks it. Right. Not the person as a collaborator. They're an informant. They don't have a voice. I just find just the word voice really interesting in this context too, because even being like, well, we want. Want not just to say, but a representation. When we get to say something or ask for something, we want actual representation. I find fascinating. And the fact that it's still like, no, like, yeah, you should be represented in some way, but you aren't. The person who gets to represent you fits with Daisy Bates approach to all of this. Because I was also finding things, like, within her personal narrative, right? Like she's saying that the indigenous people she's working with, she's saying that they're calling her grandmother and that they have this, like, sweet familial relationship to her,

[Lauren Gaughan]

which is probably cause she was just handing them foodstuffs that they needed.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, also, like, maybe it's a situation where, like, every old lady who's hanging out with you is grandmother. You know, like, the way that I would call anybody an auntie or something here, there's something here where she's also like, ah, they see me as their mother, and I can impose this thing on them, and I can take away their voice and I can control their look, language. And, like, all of this creates a worldview that I don't think is gone. It sounds like from what you're saying,

[Lauren Gaughan]

yeah, she definitely had, like, in the 1960s and 70s, there was a lot of repressing, some of her more eccentric behavior. And there was, like, a less complicated story about her, a lot of the early response to her work in the 1960s and the 1970s, obviously, her time spent in Udala with the Anangu people was central to the hero myth and the media narrative. And a lot of the response was really positive. Like Elizabeth Salter's 1971 biography. You probably get the vibe of the hero myth from the fact that it's called the Great White Queen of the Never Never.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That's wild.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And there were like, plays, there's like paintings, like, like she is kind of mythologized because she's so iconic in this long black skirt and this rigid jacket and she wears this like, hat and veil. She had this umbrella that she used everywhere because it was so sunny.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

She's got a cbe. She's basically like the queen.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And you know that she wore it all the time. And just like, I think she was definitely not motivated by religious feeling, but like, empire was the religion.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And then Julia Blackburn's 2012 book called Daisy Bates in the Desert is a, I would say, fascinating choice to try a first person biographical account. And given how hard I find it to get into the head of Daisy Bates, I would personally not try that.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, so I found the Smithsonian article where they talk about these people who Daisy meets and they say in this Blackburn book that they are naked, smiling and glistening in the sunshine. And something about that to me is smacks so incredibly much of this orientalist worldview. Like, part of why I'm thinking about this is because I taught Orientalism in my class on Thursday. So it's the most recent thing that I've taught in class.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

But it's one of those things that whenever I teach my students, like, once you understand this, you're gonna start seeing it everywhere. It's everywhere. And I think what's fascinating and many other people have made this argument much better than me, there is no untangling of this imperial Orientalist thing in the east in terms of like, spaces like the Middle east and this same gaze within the Australian context. Because they're still saying there is some far away, static, unchanging, even dying, because they're unchanging race that are. And they're more naked than us, they're more free, they're more primitive than us. And it gets like reinscribed over and over and over again. And then someone can write a book decades later and still do the same thing without realizing that what's animating it is this view of this unchanging, barbaric east, basically, or this island, other nation. And it's so wild to me that you could write that, like, not that long ago and still be doing it, basically.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. And I think, like, there's something really hard to get your head around with Daisy Bates where you're like, promiscuous, polygamous, like, and then there's like, prim and proper, but, like, just motivated by her own self interest.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Whatever she wants to do, she can do, basically.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

This is so fascinating. And I feel like it's one of these episodes where I emerge being like, I'm gonna be thinking about this for a while afterwards. Right. Because, like, it really does have some resonances with present cultures that I like. Some episodes I'm like, yeah, obvious, draw a line, whatever. And other episodes I'm like, oh, this one's gonna stick with me. And it's gonna be one where I notice it a bunch after this. Yeah.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And when you were like, who do you wanna talk about? And I was like, ah. All these years later, like, she's still with me.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, hopefully this will help you to feel like you have said your piece on this and been like, I want to go on the record and say that this woman has been haunting me.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And I don't like her.

[Lauren Gaughan]

No, no. It's time for me to, like, it's been really good to revisit her and my complicated feelings about her and about white ladies blundering into places that they do not need to be.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I mean, and again, this is one where we can say, someone did useful, interesting scholarship. It. I think they did it the wrong way. And it's had some. Some of the other stuff they were doing while conducting this study had really bad, long term negative effects. And so it's good to be able to complicate things in that way. Like, we should be doing this in public, which is the point of this podcast.

[Lauren Gaughan]

And you can visit the Digital Daisy Bates Project. You can see all those beautiful pages and pages of. Of manuscripts. And the way that the website has been set up, it is set up as a map so that you can bring up a particular word and see what that word was in each of the indigenous languages geographically, or you can look at a particular language or the words of a particular speaker. And it's just such a great digital humanities project in bringing 90 archive boxes full of thousands and thousands of pages of manuscripts into something that we can interact with as a living collection today.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And we'll make sure to link that below for people because it's important that people are still using this scholarship, but that they're engaging with it with a critical view. Like, we want this to still be used. Please go look at it and please check it out and do some exploration. But also when you're doing it, think about like where and how these things are being produced and who gets named and not named in their production. Like that's what we want.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Yeah. And why are these the only records that we have of some of these languages and some of these speakers?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Definitely. I think this is a good place to end now that we've given people a little bit of a call to action. Thank you so much for this. I'm so happy that we are able to make this happen and have this conversation and it's given me a lot to think about.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Thanks Claire. This has been more fun and cheaper

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

than therapy that it usually is on the show. This is gonna go out as a collaborative post on Patreon for people who are listening on our respective feeds elsewhere. It will be there too, but both our podcasts will be linked everywhere below. If anybody wants to check out Lauren's or from Lauren's show if they want to check out mine. And thank you to everyone who's listening to the this. And remember, if you encounter someone in Australia in history in the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century, you should be suspicious.

[Lauren Gaughan]

Get the full story.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Get the full story. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked, a member of the Multitude Podcast Collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire, featuring special guest Professor Lauren Gaughan of Blingthusiasm and edited by Spaghetti Ravioli Linguini Giulia Schiffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by the man in my vents, Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our [e-mail] this guysucked. See you next week.

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[Dr. Claire Aubin]

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[Dr. Claire Aubin]

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