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Informationen zum Autor Julia Blackburn Klappentext In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this "eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman" (New York Times Book Review) tells a fascinating, true story in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Barry Lopez.One There was once a woman who lived in the desert. There had been no rain for a long time and her eyes were tired from the dazzling brightness of the sky above her, the red monotony of the sandhills that surrounded her like a vast ocean. She wanted something green to look at so she took the stalk of a cabbage and leant it against the smooth trunk of the acacia tree that stood near her tent. Then she sat and stared at it, her thoughts drifting in the heat of the day. I wonder how long that cabbage stalk managed to keep its colour and did the woman ever laugh when she realised it was still there, a sentinel standing guard over her after everyone else had gone home. Or did she not feel there was anything to laugh at, sitting in the doorway of her tent and gazing out, mesmerised by a fragment of green? She looks down on the softly breathing skin of the lizard that sometimes sits on her lap in the afternoon, basking and catching flies. She imagines the sound the rain will make when it does finally come, like the pattering of flies' feet on the canvas of her tent. The rain will break through the layer of metallic scum that covers the surface of the water in the tank that is almost empty. The rain will bring back the birds with their shining feathers; it will bring life back into the desert and then she will watch as groups of naked people again make their way towards her camp. She looks down at the cloth of her long skirt which used to have a dense blackness but has now been turned into a strange patchwork of dull dark greens. She sees herself as a child in Ireland running through fields of deep grass; herself as a young woman watching a coastline receding into the far distance; herself as an old woman, here in the desert. TWO There was once a woman who lived in the desert and her name was Daisy Bates. I have set out a series of photographs of her on the table in front of me, like playing cards in the opening sequence of a game of patience. I look at the movement from youth to an extreme old age and in spite of the camouflage of time it is not difficult to recognise the same defiant face and the same stiff-backed body. The young woman has an ear-ring hanging from the small lobe of her right ear and she is staring out into a sideways distance with pale eyes. How old is she, twenty perhaps? In that case she has seventy-one more years of her life ahead of her, all that battling and hammering at the gates of people and circumstance still to come. I try to decide from the expression on her face if she is as wealthy as she later said she was, or as poor as it seems she might have been. Daisy Bates was a liar, of that I am sure, but the extent and the exact details of her lies remain a difficult territory for which no good maps have survived. I make a jump through time and here I have my subject in early middle age, at the mid-point in her life, just as I am now, with the past and the future in a state of delicate balance. She has white-gloved hands folded on a black-skirted lap, a high-collared white shirt, a black tie, a black turban of a hat that looks as if it could also be used as a tea-cosy, and terrible dark glasses with round owlish frames that make her appear sinister, frightening, fierce, dangerous, difficult in every way that a woman like her could be difficult. I think I can just see her eyes through the dimmed glass and it seems again as if she is staring away from the lens of the camera, but now there is something disdainful in her expression, as if she does not want to waste her time looking ahead ...
