Daisy

You can read a bit about Daisy Bates over at Bob's blog, Kiangardarup (here). The self styled 1890s anthropologist married the horse thief Harry 'Breaker' Morant as a dewy-faced immigrant and then married again, bigamously, while Morant was executed in Pretoria for shooting unarmed prisoners. Daisy took off for the desert and lived with the Aborigines, where over the following 40 years she recorded genealogies and wrote several books. The main criticism that I've read of Daisy Bates is that she used her theory of 'smoothing the pillow of a dying race' to further her career (and funding) as the primary documentor of the Aboriginal peoples.

In the papers I've been reading today, Bates writes about social organisation in north western and south coast Australian Aborigines. She goes into matrimonial traditions, circumcision and subincision, birthing rituals, complex kinship systems and who could marry whom according to their moities. Then she starts on sex. Despite being a serial bigamist, she was no Lady Chatterly (or a D.H. Lawrence more to the point ...) She was able to describe in graphic detail the subincision procedure, infanticide and childbirth but when it came to sex, Daisy Bates resorted to Latin:

Hic mihi enarravit quomode se ponant mulier videtur corpus it ponit ut vir, genibus suppositis, manibus lumbum prehendere posit, unde fit ut genitalia quam proxime conjungur: so modo fieri potest ut semen in vaginum introire poss it.

Section III,  Social Organisation, Part 4 (1), Paper on Marriage Laws and Customs, read before the Glasgow Medical Conference, Folio 13/64-79