Historian earns prestigious Fellowship

Professor Andris Stelbovics, Pro Vice Chancellor (Research)

Associate Professor Bob Reece from the School of Social Sciences and Humanities has been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive Harold White Fellowship from the National Library of Australia for 2005.

The Fellowship will enable Professor Reece to spend four months trawling through the Library’s collection of the prolific correspondence of Daisy Bates in order to publish an edited and annotated selection of her letters.

“Daisy Bates is an icon of Australian history, and made a tremendous contribution to knowledge about Aborigines, particularly in Western Australia”, Professor Reece said.

“Despite her prominence, however, she still remains an enigmatic figure.”

Professor Reece will examine her correspondence with anthropologists, linguists, police and policymakers, clergy, editors and friends to locate further ethnographical and historical information and to gain some insight into her thoughts and motivation during her eighteen years of camping at Ooldea on the Trans-Australian railway where she tended to the needs of Aborigines coming in from the desert. The National Library also holds the papers of Bates’ first biographer, Elizabeth Salter, her friend and collaborator Ernestine Hill and her patron, Lloyd Dumas of the Adelaide Advertiser.

Professor Reece, who has taught Aboriginal History as part of Murdoch’s History Program for many years, is an authority on Daisy Bates and has recently written an introduction to Hesperian Press’s My Natives And I, a re-print of her series of articles written with journalist Ernestine Hill for the Adelaide Advertiser in early 1936. These articles were syndicated across Australia to major newspapers and were later re-edited and published as a highly influential book, The Passing of the Aborigines, in London late 1938.

In June 2003 Professor Reece discovered a half-forgotten cache of sixty or more letters by Daisy Bates to her publisher, John Murray, at the publisher’s offices in Albemarle St., Piccadilly, which enabled him to document the background of the book’s appearance.

Professor Reece will begin the Fellowship in August 2005.