Born October 16, 1859, Tipperary County, Ireland
Died April 18, 1951, Adelaide, South Australia
Before the arrival of British settlers in Australia, its native inhabitants—the Aborigines—led a simple existence. They wandered from place to place, living off the land by hunting, gathering plants, and digging up roots for food. They gathered boughs from bushes and trees to make simple shelters, or slept in dug-out hollows in the ground. Their social structure and religious practices were surprisingly complex, however—rich with legends, rituals, and customs. Some 300,000 Aborigines, living in different tribes, were believed to exist in Australia before British colonization.
The coming of Western civilization in the early 1800s radically changed the Aboriginal way of life. The settlers fenced in the land, and cattle and sheep grazed the grasslands, eliminating native hunting and food-gathering grounds. Aborigines who did not obey the laws that governed the new colonies were dealt with harshly, and their numbers were threatened by the new diseases that Europeans brought to their shores. At that time, Australia’s Aborigines were considered the most primitive type of human—with few rights—and they were often exploited and made to perform the most menial tasks under terrible conditions.
In 1899 Daisy Bates, a British citizen and journalist who had lived in Australia, read reports in the London Times describing cruel treatment of Aborigines by western Australian settlers.
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