Shades of Pink

           Every year, on the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day, a crowd gathers in a rammed-earth shelter on the east bank of the Todd River in Alice Springs to sip sherry and Bickford’s lime cordial and eat Madeira cake. Even in a town where old-fashioned rituals are rare, this secular eucharist has a special piquancy. The revellers eat and drink in remembrance of Olive Muriel Pink or Miss Pink as she is still known: sometime anthropologist, lifetime Aboriginal rights activist and founder of the Olive Pink Flora Reserve. A birthday party in her honour was the last thing Olive Pink would have wanted. But then, even the naming of this amazing arid-zone botanic garden is one of numerous instances in which her wishes have been disregarded by posterity.

          In Alice Springs, where she spent the last 30 years of her long life in a mixture of self-exile and official banishment, Olive Pink stories are legion -- and marvellous. Once only half-jokingly described as the “fiercest white woman in captivity”, she has become the archetypal eccentric in the long, white Edwardian dress and pith helmet, brandishing an umbrella at her enemies. In the words of historian Dick Kimber, she was “cantankerous to an extraordinary degree”. The stories are usually told fondly but the threads of respect and ridicule are often hard to separate.

          Slowly, from a seemingly bottomless barrel of entertaining anecdotes, some real, some cruelly distorted, a remarkable figure is beginning to emerge. In the past two years, her life story has inspired a book and a play, a film is in development and, as more visitors come to the Olive Pink Flora Reserve, the seeds of curiosity are germinating in fertile soil.

          “I wanted to know, if she was an anthropologist, why hadn’t I heard of her? Was she mad?” says Professor Julie Marcus, the founder of the Olive Pink bulletin. The journal is dedicated to “restoring Olive Pink to her place within the history of Australian anthropology”. Contributors discuss “the interactions of race and gender with the practices of anthropology within Australian culture”. They sound like dry matters but they were life and death for Olive Pink, who opposed the policy of forcibly assimilating Aboriginal people into white society and pioneered the concept of Indigenous land rights.

          She rallied against the “men of the anthropology totem”, white academics whom she saw as being in league with church and state in the destruction of Aboriginal society. She fought for “secular reserves” run by white women like herself, where Aborigines would be safe from both religious and sexual invasions. In the pursuit of her ideals, she lived for four years with the Warlpiri tribe on rations and bush tucker in the middle of the Tanami Desert. When she was defeated – by male egos, patriarchal politics and World War Two – she continued to fight on a broader front until she died in 1975 at the age of 91.

          Nevertheless, the restoration of Olive Pink is unlikely to be smooth sailing. Another academic, Russell McGregor of James Cook University, acknowledges that “of all the anthropologists to come out of Sydney University in the 1930s, none was more devoted to the cause of Aboriginal welfare”. But he accuses Miss Pink of “intrusive humanitarianism” based on “the maintenance of hard racial boundaries”.

          “What’s interesting,” says Professor Marcus, “is that people are still asking if she was a goody or a baddy, an anthropologist or just an eccentric.” People were as antagonistic about Olive Pink today as they were when she was alive because she touched the sore spots.

          “There are still questions about race and gender in anthropology. The question of whether Aborigines should have land is just as contentious, as are the questions of having independent barristers and interpreters in court and whether Aboriginal people should live in fringe camps. She put her finger on the contentious issues.”

          Olive Pink was already in her forties when she became an activist but the seeds of her concern were probably sown much earlier. Born in Hobart in 1884, she would have watched, as a child, what was considered the extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines. She heard and read many times the “scientific” observation that mainland Aboriginals faced the same, inevitable fate. Later, she would use the pen-name Truganini, in honour of the Indigenous “Queen of Tasmania”. Although nominally Anglican, Olive Pink was educated in Quaker schools, which seems to have nurtured her sense of social justice.

          Olive studied art in Perth, where she met and apparently fell in love with Captain Harry Southern, an integral part of Pink mythology. A fellow art student, he was killed in the first wave of soldiers to go over the top at Gallipoli. This left Miss Pink, in Professor Marcus’s words, “one of the many single women of her generation”. For many, the absence of Harry became the best available explanation for Olive’s singular life.

          She pursued her art studies in Sydney, where she became a draughtswoman for the New South Wales government and helped to design the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In 1930, she visited the Northern Territory, where she drew wild flowers, collected plants and made notes on their use by Aborigines. In Darwin, she attended the trial of an Aboriginal man charged with murder. She was incensed by the disregard for traditional law in the case and began developing her political ideas about Aborigines. Someone suggested she study anthropology.

          While Tasmanian Aborigines were dying in droves, anthropology was doing well, fostered by the sense that the world was losing something important. However, as Miss Pink was to discover, there were sharp differences of opinion about what its role should be. For some, this was an opportunity to create a living museum of primitive society; for others it would provide insight into the origins of “civilisation”. For Olive Pink, it was a means of stemming the tide of conquest and colonialism, of validating Aboriginal culture.

          When she left her job as a draughtsperson, she studied through the Workers’ Educational Association under the University of Sydney’s Professor A.P. Elkin, often described as a “father” of Australian anthropology. But her work was largely overlooked. Professor Marcus believes is was not her “eccentricity” that held her back in academe. The “trouble” with Olive Pink was that she criticised fellow anthropologists, which in those days was seen as intolerable impertinence, coming from a single woman.

          “Even in this early stage, she opposed any police presence on the reserves and argued against using Aboriginal reserves either as zoos, labour reserves or medical laboratories,” says Professor Marcus. Such almost incidental references in Marcus’s work accumulate to a chilling picture of what was happening in the minds of Australia’s policy makers in the build-up to the formal adoption of assimilation.

          Olive Pink was disturbed by the role anthropologists played in training the colonial officials who ran the missions and reserves.

          “She particularly loathed the popular wisdom among academics that the Aboriginal race was suffering from a death wish, that they had lost their way with the introduction of modernity,” says Professor Marcus. “She said they didn’t need a death wish – they had syphilis and gonorrhoea.”

          A fellow member of the Anthropological Society, apparently tired of her passionate outbursts in tutorials, described her in his diary as “one of those crosses generous academics have to bear.

“Sometimes mistaken on College Street for Daisy Bates, she affected the same dust-dragging Edwardian skirts, starched shirt fronts, poke bonnet and, of course, a pink parasol. We were all much relieved when she took off to Alice Springs.”

The feeling was mutual. Uncomfortable in ivory towers, Miss Pink believed she had a better chance of establishing herself as a “contact anthropologist”. She was encouraged by her long-time mentor, Dr. J.B. Cleland of the University of Adelaide. She had already turned down an offer of funding to study the lives of Aboriginal women, a subject she considered of secondary importance. Nothing less than equality with her male colleagues would satisfy her.

“I never had the slightest difficulty in getting either informants or information and they were most loyal,” she boasted in her first published paper. “To them, we are something new. A woman anthropologist is unlike either the wife of a settler, a missionary or a government official and has a different outlook and method of dealing with them to which they are very responsive. Even some male scientists suggested that I would be handicapped but my data and photographs are proof to the contrary.”

But getting to that point was not easy. On her first field trip in 1933, the reality of frontier life struck Miss Pink in the form of a vicious attack of dysentery after she had set up camp among the Warlpiri, west of Alice Springs. She lost three of her nine stone and most of her hair. She had to be carried 25km on a stretcher made of saplings and flour bags, then 300km over rough roads in a jalopy to Alice Springs. For the rest of her life, she felt indebted to the station owner who drove the car, a soldier-settler called Bill Braitling, although he was to become one of her main enemies.

When she finally recovered, she went back to work not far from Alice Springs, where she lived in a tent and established valuable contacts among the Arrernte. One story tells of a group of men telling her “not to look” while they worked for hours in the sun. When she was allowed to open her eyes, she was awed by the sight of a massive ground painting, done apparently for her benefit.

She wrote an impressive paper on Arrernte land ownership systems but her support in the academic world was declining further as she criticised the missions.

“Why should mission work be sacrosanct and people considered anti-religious who criticise it?” she wrote to Dr. Cleland, who had cooled towards her. “Until we jettison camouflage and hypocrisy (in our culture), we shall not be properly ‘civilised’ or fit to ‘civilise’ others. For instance, why don’t you doctors openly and publicly face the venereal disease question instead of camouflaging the appalling sexual immorality there is – (and among your own sex particularly) …”

Miss Pink advocated “secular sanctuaries”, where tribal Aborigines would be protected from the ravages of both body and soul, living on their traditional lands with access to the best country and waterholes. This was her alternative to missions, which she thought not only attempted to destroy Aboriginal belief systems but also turned a blind eye to the abuse of Aboriginal women by white workers.

“To put it frankly, to consult clergymen-scientists on policies for totemites -- aborigines who retain their belief in the tribal totems – is like consulting a licensed victualler on the desirability of temperance hotels,” she wrote in an article for the Canberra Times.

She had solid political support from the trade union movement but her ideas had little chance of materialising because mission-run reserves saved the government money.

 Professor Marcus believes Miss Pink’s increasingly pink politics limited the size of a grant she received to recommence her work among the Warlpiri in 1936. She believed Warlpiri land should be saved from mining and pastoralism, a view that won her few friends in Alice. When she set out for the Warlpiri lands, her driver failed to take her all the way to Vaughan Springs but dumped her unceremoniously on the nearby Granites Goldfield in the Tanami Desert.

This was to be the scene of a classic encounter between clashing values. When Dr. Cleland turned up with another anthropologist, C.P. Mountford, Miss Pink gave them access to her informants and even organised Mountford’s filming of the making of a spectacular ground sculpture by Warlpiri men. The filming was allowed on condition that it be kept solely for the record but to Miss Pink’s chagrin, it was later shown throughout Europe and America.

Miss Pink’s letters, which Professor Marcus describes as “hopelessly honest”, became even more so with her fury at this perceived breach of trust. Finally, Miss Pink lost Cleland’s support altogether, as well as any financial backing for her work.

“Her grief was enormous. She came to feel that the worst enemies of Aboriginal Australians were anthropologists.”

After briefly retreating to Hobart to lick her wounds, Olive Pink returned to the fray as an “independent sociological research worker”. She resumed the fight for the Warlpiris’ secular sanctuary, unencumbered by academic aspirations but more broke than ever. She collected statistics on the incidence of venereal disease at the Granites, which indicated that more than half the Aboriginal adults had gonorrhoea. She wrote letters to newspapers, politicians and other public figures and had awkward questions raised in the Federal Parliament. The chief result was that the Territory government, then under total Commonwealth control, banned Olive Pink from all missions and government reserves.

Olive Pink was now 58, the year 1942. Government officials used the war as an excuse not to act on her ideas for a secular sanctuary and land rights for the Warlpiri were shelved for another 30 years. Disillusioned but not defeated, the warrior packed her bags and headed off in her own buckboard to live with the Warlpiri on unalienated crown land at a place called Thompson’s Rockhole. These years provide an opportunity to find out what Aborigines thought of Olive Pink.

“The first thing I did was to go and round up some old Warlpiri ladies who lived in town,” says Marilyn Laughton, a young Arrernte woman of mixed descent and researcher for Professor Marcus.  “They’d known her when they were children living out there and were very excited to talk about her. ‘That lovely white lady,’ they said. They’d called her Tarlkinjiya. (The Arrernte knew her as Unjiamba or corkwood flower.)

“She’d obviously become a story that was handed down from generation to generation. ‘My mother and father and grandfather told me to tell this story to the world about this woman,’ they told me.”

Ironically, the Aboriginals told the story of “Missus Pink” because they perceived they had “rescued” her after she was dumped in the desert by fellow whites, not because she had helped them.

Which story is true – they may all be – seems less interesting than the fact that there are so many, as indeed there were many sides to Olive Pink.

As part of her Pink research, Ms. Laughton spoke to her uncle, Rupert Maxwell Stuart. He was disparaging of “that old pinky”, saying “she’s got a lot of our things”, apparently referring to ceremonial objects she collected. Both Stuart and Laughton have good reason to be ambivalent about some of the views of Miss Pink, who made a clear distinction between full-blood and part-Aboriginal people and believed that lumping them together could only harm the interests of the former by “contaminating” their culture. She even once advocated that children born out of illicit relationships with white men should be put in institutions. (This is indeed what happened to the “Stolen Generation”, who were taken away from their families and put into homes to have their Aboriginality “bred out of them”.)

Professor Marcus takes a charitable view of Miss Pink’s opinions on bloodlines on the grounds that she was “a product of her times”.

Miss Pink’s lack of compassion for part-Aboriginal people reflected her obsession with preserving the “pure” culture. She felt the needs of mixed-race people were different from those of the full-bloods and giving citizenship and everything that went with it to tribal people would destroy a culture that was based on consensus.

The silence of the Warlpiri on their own wants left her open to a charge still made against white “advisors” today – that they overprotect those they seek to help. Bill Braitling’s wife Doreen said Miss Pink had an “impossible dream”, impossible because Aborigines themselves wanted change.

Untangling vested interests from opinion is not easy. Station owners employing traditional people were happy to assume that entering the money economy was one change that Aboriginal people didn’t want. Miss Pink, on the other hand, championed the cause of equal pay for Aboriginals while at the same time upholding their rights to practice polygamy, promised marriages and initiation ceremonies. She was undoubtedly a “do-gooder”, as such people are known on the frontier, and she infuriated the Outback establishment with her utter conviction that she was right.

 She left the Tanami in 1944 and went to live in Alice Springs, which she described as a “nauseating place” and as a “modern Sodom and Gomorrah”. Her home was in an old shack, “Hut Number Two”, next to the fire station. Despite her comfortable background and education, she was poor. She sold scones with jam and cream from a table in the street and grew vegetables and flowers to supplement a meagre pension. But she made her own entertainment.

In the words of historian Dick Kimber, she “exercised her rights as a citizen in a democracy to the fullest in a way that drove people to distraction”. She campaigned against the planting of “exotics” such as roses, the building of the defence base at Pine Gap in 1967 and the keeping of caged animals. As a one-person Aboriginal rights bureau, she interrupted court cases on behalf of non-English speaking defendants.

She had friends in high places for whom she would spread a piece of plywood across her bed in the shed to serve high tea. But others tried to avoid her. One senior public servant reportedly hid behind a specially erected screen of frosted glass and had a back exit door to escape her when she visited with her regular complaints.

Humbler beings also felt her sting. Dick Kimber recounts how a man who was driving Olive Pink on a 1,000-km journey joked about the scraggly appearance of some gum trees on the outskirts of Alice.  Miss Pink, the original tree hugger, took offence on behalf of the gums, averted her head and refused to talk to her companion for the next 950 kilometres. On another occasion, she threatened to write to the Governor-General when a shop keeper gave her the wrong size of sauce bottle.

Her numerous complaints about the rowdy behaviour of indecently dressed firemen in shorts led to her eviction from Hut Number Two. She chose a new site, out of town, across the river, where with the help of her Aboriginal gardener, Johnny Tjambatjimba, she created Australia’s first arid-zone flora reserve. 

Miss Pink did not want the garden named after her but preferred to call it the “Altjere-Tjukurpa Reserve”. Both are words for what white people call “The Dreaming”. Miss Pink used the garden to make her own statements. In the grounds, she assigned trees to the various politicians and public figures she lobbied and watered them or left them dry depending on whether they were in her good books. Children chased away from the garden by Miss Pink, occasionally wielding a revolver, recall a ghostly figure, her face obscured by a white cotton fly net.

Although her ethics remained Quakerish, her creative sensibilities were nourished by Aboriginal culture, which she found refreshingly earth-bound. Having abandoned the role of scientist and academic, she found solace and meaning in creating a garden.

She may have “failed” in her lifetime but the sparks that flew from her pen and typewriter helped to keep the cause alive. In the year after she died, land rights finally became a reality. Her research into the Warlpiri was instrumental in their winning back large slabs of their traditional land. 

The white woman who was closest to Miss Pink was the late Sheila Owens. Like her friend, she despised small talk. Before her death, she told me about a rift with Miss Pink that occurred when she was bringing the old woman her groceries – late. “She told me I had no principles,” Sheila said.  “So I said, well in that case, I’m hardly suitable company for you.” They were reconciled after Miss Pink phoned with the characteristic opening line, “I’m not apologising…”

“She had lots of friends and a lot of enemies,” Sheila said. “She was very intolerant and though she was warm-hearted, she could be cruel and spiteful. She lived a single life and had no-one to gainsay her. I used to tell her she needed a strong husband to oppose her.

“She had a childish enjoyment of things. She was the most intelligent woman. People said she was eccentric. But what does eccentric mean but ‘outside the circle’? She was outside the circle and she did her own thinking. She was a voice crying in the wilderness. And a voice in the wilderness can go a long way.”             

Dave Richards