Daisy Bates Author:Elizabeth Salter Daisy Bates spent her life caring for the Aborigines in the far outback of Western and South Australia. For sixteen years, from 1919 to 1935, she lived alone in her tent on the Nullarbor Plain, a spectacle of wonder in her formal old-fashioned clothes to passengers on the Trans-Continental express was it paused for water at Ooldea Siding.