Friday, May 18, 2012

Daisy

You can read a bit about Daisy Bates over at Bob's blog, Kiangardarup (here). The self styled 1890s anthropologist married the horse thief Harry 'Breaker' Morant as a dewy-faced immigrant and then married again, bigamously, while Morant was executed in Pretoria for shooting unarmed prisoners. Daisy took off for the desert and lived with the Aborigines, where over the following 40 years she recorded genealogies and wrote several books. The main criticism that I've read of Daisy Bates is that she used her theory of 'smoothing the pillow of a dying race' to further her career (and funding) as the primary documentor of the Aboriginal peoples.

In the papers I've been reading today, Bates writes about social organisation in north western and south coast Australian Aborigines. She goes into matrimonial traditions, circumcision and subincision, birthing rituals, complex kinship systems and who could marry whom according to their moities. Then she starts on sex. Despite being a serial bigamist, she was no Lady Chatterly (or a D.H. Lawrence more to the point ...) She was able to describe in graphic detail the subincision procedure, infanticide and childbirth but when it came to sex, Daisy Bates resorted to Latin:

Hic mihi enarravit quomode se ponant mulier videtur corpus it ponit ut vir, genibus suppositis, manibus lumbum prehendere posit, unde fit ut genitalia quam proxime conjungur: so modo fieri potest ut semen in vaginum introire poss it.


Section III,  Social Organisation, Part 4 (1), Paper on Marriage Laws and Customs, read before the Glasgow Medical Conference, Folio 13/64-79

8 comments:

  1. Damn, I knew I should have studied Latin at school.

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  2. Damn - I just thought the same as Chris. I hear a lot of masturbation goes on in Catholic schools, now I know how. Et Tu Brutus.

    Just to think that my second schoolboy infatuation was with an Aboriginal girl when I was about 9.

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  3. You can pick up a bit in there because of the Latin roots in our language - but no doubt there is a translation available. Sarah Toa is just being a tease(?)

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  4. He told me how they put the woman's body goes he seems to be a man, supposed knees, hands, loins could seize, whence it was adopted as close as they join, so how can it be that the seed goes into the sheath to enter into possession.

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  5. Thanks Merc. I knew someone would think of google translate.

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  6. Daisy, such a sweet sounding name. Perhaps she was more comfortable with a pen(knife) and paper. My schoolboy latin is long forgotten - amo amas amat.

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  7. Daisy's last query in that piece makes sense when you read her renditions of the subincision procedure.

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