Into the Loneliness: The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates

by Eleanor Hogan

448 pp., NewSouth Publishing, 2021

ISBN: 9781742236599, $34.99

Review by Peggy Brock

Edith Cowan University

This well-researched book considers the biographies of two independent, eccentric women whose lives overlapped, although they were from different generations: Daisy Bates was born in 1863, Ernestine Hill over 30 years later in 1899. Both women felt more at ease living and travelling away from urban and rural centres, preferring remote Australia, the ‘Loneliness’. Much has already been written about Bates, much less about Hill. Eleanor Hogan became interested in their overlapping stories when she began researching the life of Hill after reading her book The Great Australian Loneliness, and came across correspondence from Bates to Hill that catapulted her into writing this double biography.

In her Acknowledgments Hogan writes that her publisher described the book as a ‘vast and wandering work’, which does sum it up. A reader without previous knowledge of these women’s lives will find it difficult to follow their chronologies (the book would benefit from a chronological chart) as the narrative both within chapters and between them tends to be thematic without first introducing Bates and Hill and their back stories. It is further complicated by Hogan injecting herself and her travels researching the book into the discussion.

Despite the age difference, there are parallels in the lives of the two women. Both chose to hide aspects of their early adult experiences – Bates was bigamously married twice, and Hill had a child out of wedlock (purportedly by R. C. Packer) and never married, although she adopted the name Mrs Hill a couple of years after her son was born. Perhaps partly because of these indiscretions, both women felt more comfortable when not embedded in Australian society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both women earned money through journalism and writing books based on their peripatetic lives, but as women living independently with no regular income or male breadwinner they struggled to support themselves at different periods, particularly as they aged. They also accumulated large amounts of research materials that they never wrote up and that now sit in various archives and libraries (which Hogan has assiduously tracked down). But there were also major differences in personality, the way they interacted with others, including their sons, and many other details of their lives.

Hogan enters the already existing debates about Bates: her self-promotion and vulnerabilities; the value of her ethnographic work; and whether she enhanced the lives of the Aboriginal people she claimed to assist and/or damaged them with her strongly held views on miscegenation and the inevitability of their demise. Bates was assertive and strongly protective of her independence. She could be both charming and aggravating. She was ahead of her times in her interest in Aboriginal culture and languages and her decision to live alongside Aboriginal communities over many years. She was also very much of her times in many of her racial attitudes. While intrigued by Aboriginal society, she believed she was indispensable to the people she lived with, whom she described as ‘my Natives’. Hogan discusses the contradictions in Bates’s lifestyle and attitudes without coming to any firm conclusions about many aspects of her life.

Ernestine Hill also led a wandering life, but while Bates was adept at self-promotion, creating a biographical narrative that embellished her family origins and early life in Ireland, Hill was a more circumspect and modest person. These personality differences are very evident in their interactions and friendship, which began when Hill visited Bates at Ooldea Siding on the Nullarbor Plain in 1932 and continued until Bates’s death in 1951. They were most evident, Hogan suggests, when they worked together in 1935. By this time Hill was a successful journalist and writer. She persuaded Bates to come to Adelaide to work on what became a series of articles about Bates’s life, ‘My Natives and I’, first published in the Adelaide Advertiser and then syndicated. These articles became the basis for a book, The Passing of the Aborigines, which Hogan claims Hill wrote but Bates never acknowledged Hill’s role as scribe and editor. Despite Bates’s deception, she realised she needed Hill to help her with her many other writing projects and over the ensuing years tried to persuade Hill to visit her wherever she was living at the time. Hogan tracks Bates’s correspondence with Hill and their occasional meetings. She also recounts Hills’s travels around many of the remote parts of northern Australia, her journalism and the books she published, which in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s were widely read both in Australia and internationally with many reprints.

Hogan suggests Hill was generally ahead of her times in her acknowledgment of settler violence against Aboriginal people, the invasion of their lands and the racism still prevalent in the north of the country after the Second World War, although she adhered to the commonly held belief that Aboriginal people would die out. There were occasional lapses in her reportage. In 1932 after her encounter with Bates at Ooldea, Hill publicised Bates’s accounts of Aboriginal women eating unwanted babies, which was widely reported. Later Hill regretted writing the story without checking Bates’s fallacious claims.

Along the way Hogan pulls us into the twenty-first century from time to time, describing her own travels to western South Australia and Western Australia as she traces the journeys and interactions of Bates and Hill. She describes her fears of travelling as a lone female, which suggests she was a more timid traveller than the two subjects of her book.

Hogan has carefully researched the fascinating lives of Bates and Hill, tracking down records in many archival collections, but the narrative does wander through all this material on a trajectory that is at times difficult to follow.