After many years of researching the life of of the self-styled anthropologist, and welfare worker in Australian desert regions, the so-called Daisy Bates, nee Daisy May O'Dwyer, seeking the kind help of any good soul who thinks that they may be able to provide it. She told that she was Tipperary-born which may be true or false, as the place of birth she gave does not exist and did not exist. It is more likely that she was born in Dublin. She recorded various dates of birth in the early 1860s. I have some small thread that tells that she was Margaret other than Daisy, and that her name may have been Dwyer or Dwyre rather than O'Dwyer. She claimed a rich background which crumbles under the eye of research. It is well considered that her beginings were impoverished and that she was orphaned at a very early age to an institution where at that place, perhaps in Tipperary, she was trained to be a governess who as a teenager went to work for an English family in Ireland. The young man of the house was so taken by her beauty and charm that he committed suicide as a result of her rejection. At this point, or not so very long following she changed her name and ventured to Queensland, Australia. It is thought that her father, who she named as James Edward O'Dwyer sailed to America on the death of her mother. In Australia, soon after her arrival, another young man was rejected and another suicide was the result. Within a short passage of time she wed a man some years her junior, Edwin Henry Murrant. He was to become famous, or infamous, as Harry Harbord Morant, or Breaker Morant. Edwin decamped soon after while Daisy quickly, without divorce, married Jack Bates who left her at the onset to go droving while the beautiful Daisy, again without divorce fronted the alter where she married an English merchant seaman one
Ernest Clarke Baglehole, whom she dropped almost at once to take up with Jack again. They had a son but soon after she left them both. She went to England for a few years, returned, seemingly got back with Jack for a short time before again pulling out of the relationship. It is a long confused story, a most tangled web. Daisy Bates was a liar of the first water. In 1920 she became a Justice of the Peace. In 1934 she became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The Aborigines called her Kabbarli, the white-skinned grandmother. She died in Adelaide in 1951. Her life in Australia is mostly well documented but of her life in Ireland, and in England, is shrouded in mist. Is there anyone out there who can put another piece to this puzzling jigsaw? It seems as if she had relatives living in Dublin not so many years ago. The suicide which must have taken place in the last few years of the 1870s or early 1880s must be documented. I would dearly value any small scrap of information.

Jim McJannett Queensland Australia.