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:
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 .
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 .
