SPOTLIGHT ON RUTH DAYLIGHT AND CANBERRA ROYAL VISIT

The above  front cover photograph on  the Australian Inland Mission of  the Presbyterian Church Frontier Services report  for 1957-l958  featured  unnamed  children from the outback meeting the Queen Mother   at  the Governor-General's Canberra residence, Yarralumla.  The Aboriginal  girl on the  left was  Ruth Daylight, plucked  from  a  West Australian  hovel  for  the  royal event. 
 

As a result of   Daylight's  visit   to  the  national  capital  to meet the  Queen Mother , Melbourne  Herald  journalist Douglas Lockwood (1918-1980) recalled in 1960: 

 I have a soft spot for Hall's Creek. It was there that I wrote a story which later won the Walkley  (Award  for Journalism)  in Australia  in l958. The story concerned  an  attractive fifteen-year-old aboriginal  girl named  Ruth  Daylight who was flown to Canberra to meet the Queen Mother . Ruth was uprooted  from  the primitive customs of  her Moola Boola tribe  and taken on a  nationwide  junket .

 

 She was decked out in fine feathers : a  filmy dress , shoes she had never  worn , and  gloves! And outside Yarralumla , the Governor-General's Canberra residence, she curtsied gracefully  for the Queen Mother . There followed a big-city neck-craning  trek, studded with  plush suites , bedside telephones , inner spring beds , private bathrooms , room service and midnight suppers. 

 

Within a few days she was speechless  with delight . But the day of reckoning was to come . Ruth was taken back to Hall's Creek to her tribal mother, Ida Daylight .

 

I found her there a few weeks later , living in a filthy hovel of canvas  and bits of  old iron .The roof was just three feet   from  the earth floor . Ruth lived in  it  with her mother and sister, Doreen , and a  couple of  big cattle dogs. They had to crawl inside, where  they slept  in  the  dirt .

 

The visit  to the Queen Mother upset her terribly because she saw  for the first  time  what the world had to offer , and now knew that it was all  beyond  her reach . Her future  held  only the drab prospect of  being given in  tribal marriage  to some near-primitive  who would use her , in accordance with the tribal custom , as   a  chattel .

 

 There are no  room-service bells in an aboriginal camp ! The one bright spot in Ruth's life  is that she is cared   for as much as possible by a dedicated  white woman , Matron Lois  Hurse, of the Australian Inland Mission's  Hostel  at  Hall's Creek .  

 

The native children call her Miz'urse. She is a practical, practising  Christian . She probably doesn't understand  much about theology , but she certainly understands how to  look after  her children . She is a doer rather than a  talker . In  other days  her name  might  have  been  Miss Nightingale .
 

UPDATE  FROM   LOCKWOOD'S  ORIGINAL STORY  

Ruth Daylight stayed in Hall's Creek. Lockwood's son, Kim , also a journalist,  met her  there  in 1970, when she admitted  the celebrity of the Canberra  visit  as a shy teenager had caused her stress . She had a one-year-old son , Cedric. She later got a marriage proposal from an Alice Springs  man, but she did not want to leave home . At some stage, perhaps in her thirties, she married a man called Mills, and they remained in  Hall's Creek . She died there in 2004  aged  62 . Matron Lois Hurse was living on the Gold Coast when this update was  first published .