Author and ethnographer Daisy Bates began her life's work at Beagle Bay Mission in the early 1900s. Her accounts were among the first attempts at a serious study of Aboriginal Australian culture. Her "Native Tribes of Western Australia" is a detailed collection about Aboriginal people of Western Australia, and she did extensive work on Aboriginal languages. Her questionnaires, which were recorded on about 4,000 pages of typescripts, created a vast collection of over 23,000 pages of wordlists of Australian Aboriginal languages, which are now digitised.