Why did Breaker Morant and Daisy Bates marry????

Margaret Dwyer (1859–1951) was born into an Irish family. Her mother died when Margaret was still a baby, so she was raised by relatives and given a decent education. But it did not seem to be a happy or stable childhood.

Apparently something messy had happened in Ireland and the young woman felt obliged both to leave the country and to create a new biography for herself. In 1882 Daisy O'Dwyer emigrated to Aust­ralia.

I am fairly confident that in 1884 in Queensland she married the poet and horseman who later went on to fame as Breaker Morant. But it was not a happy marriage. Perhaps Morant was a bit of a horse thief! In an era when women never left their husbands, she left Morant, but there was never a proper divorce. Nonetheless she moved to New South Wales where she met and married the bushman/­drover Jack Bates (1885). They had a son in 1886 but this marriage was also not a happy one. And there was perhaps a third marriage that was poorly documented.

Daisy Bates in her desert tent, 1921

Photo credit: National Library of Australia 

In 1894 this gutsy woman returned to England, leaving her two+ husb­ands and one son in Australia. Life in England must have been a ter­rible struggle but fortunately she found a position as a journalist.

While still in Britain, Daisy Bates heard about the poor treatment of Australian Aboriginals, and offered her investigative and journal­ist­ic expertise to The Times newspaper. In 1899 Bates sailed back to Australia and spent the rest of her life studying Aboriginal history, rites and community life. For a woman who looked like a well educat­ed, professional and slightly prudish journalist, it was amazing that she lived in primitive conditions out in the vast, bleak Australian bush.

Daisy Bates was commissioned to investigate stories of cruelty within some of the aboriginal communities. At first she saw herself as an in­formal protector of the Aborigines, and then in 1910, she was form­ally appointed as a Travelling Protector. This gave her the legal right and responsibility to examine the conditions under which abor­ig­inal families lived and their employment situation on white men’s farms. Bates took to the Aboriginal welfare cause like a duck to water, writing reports on their needs for food, clothing, medical care and housing.

In an Australia that had just federated (1/1/1901), two aspects of welfare policy distressed her in particular – a] the forcible assimilation of black youngsters into white Aust­ral­ian childcare arrangements instead of leaving them with their own parents and b] the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by European men.

Now fully familiar with local communities, she even compiled a dictionary of several Aboriginal dialects. But if we want to assess her legacy in total, we can do no better than reading her own work The Passing of the Aborigines, first published by the University of Adelaide in 1938. 

In 1934 Daisy Bates received the Order of the Commander of the Brit­ish Empire. Australia had a living treasure in this special Aborig­inal welfare advocate and anthropologist, but living treasures are rarely paid decent salaries. In 1951 she died a pauper, still wearing the Victorian clothes she brought from England in 1899.

Whether Daisy Bates was truly progressive or was the inevitable product of Victorian thinking has been argued in Green Left, but that is the subject for another post.

**

Harry Morant (1864–1902)’s early life was as difficult to unravel as Daisy Bates’. It seems that Murrant (as he was then) was born in Som­erset in 1864, but alas his father died that very year. His mother worked hard to keep her family alive, but clearly Harry thought life would be easier in Australia. He left Britain in 1883.

Morant had an unusual range of skills. He was a drinker, drover and brilliant horse trainer, yet he was also a bush ballad­eer/poet who could often be found published in Australia’s most infl­uen­tial C19th weekly mag­azine, The Bulletin. This was a man who moved from state to state; from farm to country town to city centres, never settling anywhere in particular. He had more lady friends than any other man in Australia! 

Lieutenant Harry Breaker Morant

South Africa 1899-1902

In 1884, Morant met Daisy O'Dwyer on a cattle station in Queensland, both of them freshly off the ship from Britain. The educated Daisy had been hired as a governess for the children; the hard drinking Morant had been hired as a horse trainer and trader. The marriage that was conceived in lust.. was ill advised, hastily organised and brief. How could two less suitable people find each other in this huge nation? Perhaps Ms Bates was having a naughty moment, agreeing to marry some rough trade before she thought better of it.

My favourite line comes from The Monthly. "While the Breaker was riding the South African veldt, doing the Empire's dirty work, Daisy Bates was beginning her lifelong journey into Australian mythology". After 1884, the two were never to meet again.

In 1899 Morant and many other British-Australian travelled to South Africa to help Queen Victoria and the Motherland, loyally joining the war against the Boers. Most Australians know the story of Harry Morant because of the hugely thought-provoking film of 1980, Breaker Morant. He was as suc­cessful with the horses and the women in South Africa as he had been in Australia. 

Only towards the end of the Boer War did Morant and his friends come to grief. They were involved in the killing of Boer pris­oners and the killing of a German missionary who had seen Australians shoot the Boers. Despite the fact all three Australian officers had insisted they had simply been following British orders, the men were charged, tried and swiftly executed by a British court and British soldiers.

Australian historians insist that British forces chief, Lord Kitchener, had indeed issued an informal order that troops fighting the Boers should “not take prisoners”. British historians believe Lord Kitchener said no such thing. But in any case, what was the British army doing, executing loyal soldiers from the colonies?