Daisy in the Dreamtime

In 1913, an Irish émigré, Daisy Bates, pitched a tent in the Australian outback and lived there with the aborigines for 30 years. She fed them, doctored them, and recorded their stories and rituals. She was the first white woman to be initiated into aboriginal dreamtime. Her only enemies were the Trans-Australian Railway and Annie Lock, the Lutheran missionary. Daisy's people called her Kabbarli, the great white spirit of the never-never. This is her story and theirs. The play explores Daisy's life and why she abandoned her husband, child and all the comforts of civilization to live in the bleakest place on earth with the most primitive people and proclaim herself blessed. It traces the spiritual quest of a woman in a culture that is free of the two great obsessions of modern civilization: the pressure of time and the accumulation of goods.