I’M AS IRISH as Patrick’s pig,” Daisy Bates told the Adelaide News in January 1941, “but Australia has been my new home since I first landed in the West.” Having spent the first twenty or so years of her life in Ireland, practically all of it in Roscrea, north Tipperary, she nurtured for the rest of her days a strong sense of her Irish identity. While it is true that in Australia from 1883 she concealed her Catholic orphan convent school background, passing herself off as a member of the Protestant Irish gentry, she remained quintessentially Irish. This was expressed…