liralen's review
2.0
What an odd duck of a book. Daisy Bates was from Ireland originally but settled in Australia in her twenties. She married twice, though neither union sounds happy. And...eventually she moved to the Outback, where she remained for nearly thirty years, to live among Aborigines.
Bates sounds like a fascinating character, although information about her seems to be limited -- her accounts, according to Blackburn, were often contradictory and could not really be trusted. It sounds as though she may have been dissatisfied with her childhood and have come up with a version that suited her better. But the bigger story is that of her time in Australia, and of that...well, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not, and that troubles me. The back of the book describes Blackburn's retelling as a 'triumphant work of investigation and imagination', but it is imagination that seems to take root most strongly. A huge chunk of the book (120-odd pages) is written as though from the perspective of Bates, such that it is impossible to know how much Blackburn uncovered in her research and how much she just...imagined.
I admit to having put myself at a disadvantage here: I put my reading of the book on hold for a couple of weeks to read library books while on holiday, and my stopping point happened to come right before this shift into first-person 'Bates'. So I was perhaps a bit more discombobulated by it than I might have been otherwise. But honestly...I wanted more fact and less supposition; if there was a limited amount of information available on Bates, that's one thing, but I can't say that this work brought me a great deal of clarity.
Another reviewer described this as an 'experimental biography', which seems accurate. Would probably work quite well for many readers. Didn't work for me.
Bates sounds like a fascinating character, although information about her seems to be limited -- her accounts, according to Blackburn, were often contradictory and could not really be trusted. It sounds as though she may have been dissatisfied with her childhood and have come up with a version that suited her better. But the bigger story is that of her time in Australia, and of that...well, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not, and that troubles me. The back of the book describes Blackburn's retelling as a 'triumphant work of investigation and imagination', but it is imagination that seems to take root most strongly. A huge chunk of the book (120-odd pages) is written as though from the perspective of Bates, such that it is impossible to know how much Blackburn uncovered in her research and how much she just...imagined.
I admit to having put myself at a disadvantage here: I put my reading of the book on hold for a couple of weeks to read library books while on holiday, and my stopping point happened to come right before this shift into first-person 'Bates'. So I was perhaps a bit more discombobulated by it than I might have been otherwise. But honestly...I wanted more fact and less supposition; if there was a limited amount of information available on Bates, that's one thing, but I can't say that this work brought me a great deal of clarity.
Another reviewer described this as an 'experimental biography', which seems accurate. Would probably work quite well for many readers. Didn't work for me.
beckylouise2904's review against another edition
1.0
I loved "These is My Words" and thought this might be similar, but I just couldn't get into the book at all, I did not like the style of writing, and cannot recommend this.
timmason's review
4.0
There are people who did worse things to the First People of Australia - but what she did was bad enough. Her sensationalising portrayals of the people who looked after her during her self-exile in the desert reinforced all the popular prejudices about them. She used them to prop up her own fragile ego.
Blackburn does her best to make an interesting story emerge from the mish-mash of lies, half-truths and concealments that Bates left behind her. It reads well, but leaves the real life ungraspable.
Blackburn does her best to make an interesting story emerge from the mish-mash of lies, half-truths and concealments that Bates left behind her. It reads well, but leaves the real life ungraspable.
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