In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'

In this guise, Bates has, unfortunately, a ready appeal – as she did for Pauline Hanson. Yet somehow, both these books suggest, we have also to find a place for the Bates whose meticulous observations of Aboriginal people, and whose sensitivity to their stories, languages and relationships, have enduring value. She has, for example, been recently invoked as a useful posthumous witness in Western Australian native title claims. Perhaps we also have to cope with the fact that her story – the prim, proud figure in the desert – is wont to be received elsewhere (as one reviewer of Julia Blackburn's 1995 novel-biography fusion put it) as 'one of the world's most eccentric, lonely and worthwhile women'. Ballets, films ( even one proposed for Katharine Hepburn), an opera, paintings, monuments and many books find Mrs Bates entrancing. Why?