Olive Pink Botanic Gardens

This is for my history buff friend Georgina.

This is such an interesting story - and again an almost unknown one - that it seemed like a good idea to include it in a separate blog.

Miss Olive Muriel Pink was born in 1884 and grew up in Hobart, Tasmania, and then moved with her family first to Perth and then to Sydney where she studied art at the Julian Ashton Art School and then went on to work as a draughtswoman with NSW Railways Department.

Miss Pink's first foray into desert Australia, and into developing a broader understanding of Aboriginal culture, came about when she went to stay with well known anthropologist Daisy Bates at her camp in Ooldea, northern South Australia, in 1926.  This visit formed a turning point in Olive Pink's life and she returned to Sydney with greatly enhanced resolve to work toward improving Aboriginal welfare and embarking upon her own research in the field of Anthropology.

Arriving in Alice Springs for the first time in 1930, Miss Pink was on an extended rail-based tour of Central Australia, sketching wildflowers along the way and making contact with Aboriginal people and anthropologists and scientists doing research in the region.  The next two decades saw Miss Pink moving between Sydney and living variously with Warlpiri people in the Tanami Desert or around Alice Springs collecting information about culture and customs that was to form the basis of her thesis in Anthropology.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miss Pink lived in Alice Springs,  mostly in an ex-Army hut located on Gregory Terrace, making a small income selling cut flowers from her garden, exhibiting her artwork and cleaning the courthouse.  She dedicated much of her tine to lobbying and advocacy on behalf of Aboriginal people - particularly focussing on trying to establish a secular sanctuary for Warlpiri people in the Tanami.  Miss Pink's letter writing prowess and her determination to change policy and the minds of politicians through endless meetings were formidable.  Many of her persuasive, and at times vitriolic, letters survive in archives and collections around Australia.

In 1956 Miss Pink was successful in lobbying the NT Government to establish a Reserve on the edge of Alice Springs township.  The Reserve, originally called the Australian Arid Regions Native Flora Reserve, is now known as the Olive Pink Botanic Garden, and Miss Pink was its Honorary Curator from 1956 until her death at 91 in 1975.