The Great Australian Loneliness

Ernestine Hill

4 ideas

1. Daisy Bates's Tent at Ooldea Siding

   Hill visits Daisy Bates, an elderly white woman who lived for years in a tent beside the Trans-Australian Railway at Ooldea on the edge of the Nullarbor. Bates spent her own small means feeding and nursing the Aboriginal people who gathered there. She kept Edwardian dress and manners in the desert and saw herself as easing the last days of a people she believed were dying out. The episode shows one person's lifelong devotion to others, a devotion shaped entirely by the racial assumptions of her time.

2. Broome's Pearling Fleet and Its Divers

   Hill depicts Broome in the early 1930s as a multiracial pearling town. The divers faced drowning, cyclones and diver's paralysis, and the town's cemetery recorded that cost. The profits flowed mainly to white master pearlers and to the mother-of-pearl button trade.

3. Distance as a Force Shaping Character

   Hill treats the vast emptiness of the north as an active force on the people living in it, not just a backdrop. With neighbours hundreds of miles apart and supplies arriving rarely, people had to be self-reliant. They developed hospitality to strangers as a survival norm, and without anyone around to enforce conformity they drifted into eccentricity. Reading remote lives this way explains their character by how thinly people were spread and how scarce contact was, rather than by individual temperament.

4. The 'Dying Race' Framing of Aborigines

   The book repeatedly adopts the 1930s belief that Aboriginal Australians were a doomed race destined to fade away. That belief turned protection policy and mission work into a matter of comfort and custody rather than rights or land. The framing presented the population collapse caused by dispossession and violence as a natural inevitability. By doing so, it relieved settler society of responsibility for causes it could have changed.

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