KABBARLI

KABBARLI explores the extraordinary life of Daisy Bates and her passionate involvement with Australian Aborigines. The film interweaves fiction and biography, history and memory to explore Daisy Bates' life - a dramatic map of the colonial imagination, and a portrait of a remarkable and wily old woman.

Dressed in stiff Edwardian attire, a 60 year-old woman pitches a small white tent in the scorching sandhills on the edge of the Nullarbor. She reigns in the desert, as a self appointed Queen, and adopts the Aborigines as her subjects. She is known as "kabbarli" (grandmother).

Daisy Bates died in 1951, an Australian legend. She was a ground-breaking anthropologist, and exceptional linguist and a woman who defied convention. She was also a devout royalist, a fervent believer in the British Empire, and an outrageous snob. Some looked upon her as a saint; a tireless worker for Aboriginal welfare. Others saw her as a manipulative and self-serving do-gooder. She was cantankerous. She was charming ...

She was also a shameless liar. Masquerading as an immigrant of aristocratic Anglo-Irish descent, a respectable Victorian lady and a journalist for The Times newspaper, she constantly reinvented herself. Recently, it has been revealed that she was a poor child o the Irish potato famine and a bigamist who married the drover, Jack Bates, while she was also secretly married to the infamous Breaker Morant.

"All over the West Australian frontier I saw whole populations completely devastated ... Kabbarli, the natives would say to me - meenya jang-ga bomungat - the smell of white man is killing us." - Daisy Bates, Ooldea Notebooks, 1919.

With LYNNE MURPHY as Daisy Bates
and MARY REGAN as Ernestine Hill

Written and directed by ANDREW G. TAYLOR
Producer - JO-ANNE McGOWAN
Executive Producer - BRIDGET IKIN
Director of Photography - STEVE MACDONALD
Production Designer - RITA ZANCHETTA
Costume Designer - ANITA SEILER
Editor - REVA CHILDS
Composer - PAUL HEALY

Produced in association with the Australian Film Commission.
Produced in association with the NSW Film and TV Office.
Jointly commissioned by SBS Independent
and Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 2002

(c) 2002, Resonance Productions Pty Ltd

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