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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
the 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.
Olive Pink opposed the policy of forcibly assimilating Aborigines
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.
The white woman who was closest to Olive Pink was the late Sheila
Owens.
“Miss Pink had lots of friends and a lot of enemies,” Sheila
told me before she died. “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.” |