In short, Daisy was a poor Irish Catholic girl who was orphaned at an early age. She was educated as a charity student at school for girls, where she picked up as much as she could by observing the well-to-do girls. By the time she was 20, she was on a ship bound for Australia, as part of a group of orphaned Irish girls. This was her big break. She realized that as a poor Irish Catholic orphan her chances of having a good life were very slim, so she applied her talents to the situation and reinvented herself as an heiress who was going to the colonies for the fun of the experience. She told the story so well, that even in her old age she was able to convince the historian who befriended her and interviewed her for her life story, that this was the truth.
Daisy had an interesting life, marrying three different men (including the infamous Breaker Morant) one after another, without divorcing. In those days, divorce would cost a woman her reputation and her social status. Daisy loved status, she did her best to move in polite society and cultivate powerful people as friends, and this was something which she continued to do through most of her life.
Daisy travelled all over Australia, worked as a governess, helped to drove her and her husband Jack's cattle, and even went as far south as Tasmania. She had one child who was dumped in a boarding school and left for 5 years while she went to England. When she came back, she had a mysterious sum of money which she invested in a cattle property with Jack, who mismanaged and lost the money.
I imagine Daisy lost hope in the dream of success via marriage, but in the meantime she had learned a lot about Aboriginal people, and had taken a personal interest in them. Over time, she began to spend more and more time with Aboriginal people, and wrote down many words from their various languages, as well as their myths and legends, in what became a huge manuscript.
Daisy felt for the Aboriginal people partly because, as an Irish Catholic who had no right to own land in her own country, she related to the plight of the dispossessed. She also had a feeling and a respect for their spiritual traditions and artwork, and felt that they should be allowed to keep their own religion and not be forced to take on Christianity.
Later in life, Daisy ended up living in Western Australia during the drought of the early 1900's. She camped next to the Aboriginal people and tended to their illnesses and provided food from her own meager funds.
She also wrote newspaper articles and scientific articles about the Aboriginal people, and did her best to bring their plight to the attention of the government. At one point she was named Protector of Aborigines, but due to her gender (and other distractions such as World War I) she was not paid for the position.
Some of the things she wrote are not approved of today, and it may be that she did it for the money, or that hardening of the arteries from years of a poor diet affected her ability to think clearly. On the other hand, the maps which she asked the warriors of the W.A. tribes to paint were later used in land rights claims, and her records of tribal languages were in some cases the only documents available.
Daisy finished her remaining years near Adelaide, still camped in a tent for a lot of the time. By then her Aboriginal friends from W.A. had moved to other places so she had no-one to go back to there, but due to her years in the desert and her slightly loopy ways, she had no real status and few connections in the well-to-do European community. It seems that by the time she knew enough to be truly useful in affecting government policy, she was no longer able to maintain the respect of government officials.
In some ways it seems that Daisy failed at everything she had set out to do... no husband, no acknowledgement from the academic world, no money. On the other hand she lived a truly unique life, especially for a woman of her time. She loved her freedom, the beauty of the desert, the Aboriginal people who returned her friendhip. She met Prince Henry, spoke at several scientific conferences, and experienced the beauty of this country from the tropics right down to Tasmania and W.A. I don't know how she felt about her life in her final years, but I hope her spirit looks upon that life as a life well lived.
