Paper short abstract:

Daisy Bates is an 'excluded ancestor'. We explored her writings and find her work to be 'seriously anthropological' and insightful. Her contribution to the development of ethnographic fieldwork compares favorably with Malinowski's. Bates ought to be "reclaimed" as an anthropologist.

Paper long abstract:

Daisy Bates (1859-1951) has long been denied the status of a 'real' anthropologist; at best she is considered an 'enthusiastic amateur'. Her work is often discredited because of moralistic views about her personal life: a 'spoilt' moral character, evidence that her writings cannot be trusted. Examining her correspondence, published and unpublished papers, we argue that much of her work is "seriously anthropological" and her 'invention' of ethnographic fieldwork compares favourably with Malinowski's developments a decade later.

We suggest that Bates was ahead of her time, avoiding many of the shortcomings of 'modern' anthropology with its focus on Aboriginal 'cultures' as discrete and fixed. She understood the interaction of local and regional systems, of the movement of people, objects and intangible phenomena within and between regions. However, in other ways she remained a pre-modern anthropologist focusing on ethnology and endeavouring to create an encyclopedic compendium of 'facts' about all aspects of Aboriginal culture. But then, so did many of her contemporaries.

We argue that much of the criticism of Bates and her work is moralist and 'presentist' in the extreme and fails to acknowledge the complex history of the development of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. We contend that Bates is an "excluded ancestor" who needs to be "reclaimed". Her corpus of ethnographic material needs to be examined not for "useable bits of lore" but in such a way as to provide a more critical understanding of the development of ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia.