For our 50th edition, Territory Q reaches back into the red heart of Australia to celebrate a woman whose life was as rugged and uncompromising as the country she loved.

Olive Muriel Pink (1884–1975) was many things: a pioneering botanist, an artist, an advocate for Aboriginal rights, an urban gardener who created a living demonstration of native flora and a trailblazer who used her voice when others couldn’t. This is our first posthumous tribute, a milestone gesture to a life that is still relevant with the present.

Researching this story in the archive, you find botanist illustrations with strong social and economic notes, plant names, Arrernte words and receipts. 

The postcards, letters and writings are strong, direct and impatient notes that reveal the two threads which ran through her life’s work: a devotion to the desert’s plants and the injustices faced by Aboriginal people. 

Taking that research, I visited the Women’s Museum of Australia and Old Gaol where you can’t help but feel close to the woman who advocated for justice, was refused entry to the prison and created the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens where she planted over 600 arid plants in the 1950s.

Olive was born in Tasmania and trained in art and design at the Hobart Technical college where she met fellow student Harold Southern before moving to the mainland. She met up again with Harold in Perth before he left for Gallipoli. 

Early in her career she worked as an artist and teacher. In the 1920s and 1930s she became deeply interested in Aboriginal cultures and desert flora, travelling to Central Australia when she was retrenched from teaching because of the Depression. She began anthropological research work at her own expense and attended lectures on anthropology. 

Between 1933-1936 Olive received grants to work and study among the Eastern Arrernte people near Alice Springs and the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert and Ilpirra Country. She also met Albert Namatjira during this period and the two remained close friends until his death. 

Olive studied, documented and illustrated, venturing out on field trips by camel, carried a gun and slept in a tent. Her body of work and documentation reflects how active she was over this period. 

In 1955, Olive applied to the NT Administrator for 20 hectares of land on the eastern bank of the Todd River. The grant was gazetted as the Australian Arid Regions Flora Reserve, with assistance from the Minister for the Territories, Sir Paul Hasluck. Olive was appointed the curator. 

Olive set up the garden devoted to native plants and continued as a persistent critic of government policy toward Aboriginal people, campaigning against forced removals, wrongful arrests, gaol conditions, discriminatory policing and restrictive mission controls. Olive lived in an era when Aboriginal custodianship was routinely dismissed. 

She set down roots in the harsh desert community at a time when women of her background were expected to be decorative rather than disruptive. 

Olive refused the narrative at the time; she painted, she planted, and she petitioned. She was an outspoken critic of government officials and practices she saw as discriminatory or exploitative. She campaigned for better education, working conditions, improved housing and health services, and greater respect for Aboriginal people’s rights and dignity. 

Her direct style and refusal to accept the status quo made her unpopular with authorities, but she persisted in drawing attention to the injustice for decades. 

In a 1935 lecture entitled Camouflage, she detailed her opinion and that of a medical authority, that the main cause of ’native depopulation’ in Australia was venereal infection of full-blooded women. 

In the Canberra Times of 6 December 1938, she wrote an article calling on Australians to give each tribe land on which they could shape their own destiny in an atmosphere free of repression.

In a time when government policies treated Aboriginal people in a controlling and dismissive way, her views stood out as remarkably fair, logical and forward-thinking. 

The Olive Pink Botanic Garden in Alice Springs, is a living legacy that bears her name. Like her challenging social views at the time, many settlers tried to tame the Outback with imported species, yet Olive insisted on the genius of native plants. 

She designed paths and plantings that were lessons as much as ornament, species labelled with common and local names, beds that demonstrated drought resilience, and plantings that celebrated the arid interior. 

Olive frequently relied on elders and senior Arrernte women and men for guidance about plant uses, seasonal cycles and local customs. These elders often accompanied her on excursions or visited her garden. Their contributions to her botanical understanding were substantial, and Olive’s field notes preserve many Indigenous plant names and uses recorded in situ. 

Her legacy for plants is an act of advocacy, a statement that Australia’s own flora was worth studying, conserving and celebrating.

Olive was a fierce friend to many. Photographs in the Olive Pink Collection held by the University of Tasmania, show her at work alongside Aboriginal people. For some Arrernte people, she was a valued ally and someone who used her voice in ways few non-Indigenous residents dared. 

In the National Australian Archives, there are volumes of her communications to state and federal ministers. The activist Olive wrote in long sentences, with righteous certainties, a sharp tongue, and at times a very condescending tone. She was famously outspoken, often filing complaints aimed at provoking a reaction.

One file of correspondence from 1957 in which PF Muldoon, Head Gaoler in Alice Springs, described Olive as making “viscous and personal attacks… she was insulting, disrespectful and offensive.” 

Another letter from Chief Guard V Seymour referenced her “reputation as a bigot and objectionable old lady.” The context was that the Gaoler and Chief Guard had refused her entry on a Sunday to visit an Aboriginal inmate whose health she was concerned about. They subsequently wrote to the Controller of Prisons seeking to bar her access permanently. 

Olive and Muldoon never saw eye to eye; she would often attend court cases and interrupt proceedings when she felt tribal law was being ignored. On one occasion, she was fined for contempt of court and refused to pay, insisting she would go to jail instead. Muldoon reportedly paid the fine out of his own pocket rather than have Olive under his care, leaving “Miss Pink most annoyed”. 

As a rule, Olive generally made officials uncomfortable. Her letters are prickly and political, but among them are quieter exchanges: receipts for wages, requests for seed, notes about a neighbour’s illness, or excitement about a visiting friend. These show that her activism was inseparable from everyday care and compassion. She lived her life by the principle that if the truth is known, good must follow. 

As I said, Olive’s activism was relentless. HQ magazine 1996 titled a story ‘She of the never-never’ and stated: ‘The once labelled ‘fiercest white woman in captivity’, eccentric Olive Pink is now being hailed as a land rights pioneer’. But perhaps her most persuasive advocacy was quiet and botanical and the one that I find the most amusing. 

The garden provided employment, training and a public testament to the value of indigenous knowledge and plants. 

It was also activism entrenched in soil as Olive often named the trees she planted after government officials, local politicians, bureaucrats, and usually the ones she needed something from. She would label each plant with their name and if that person didn’t deliver or failed to do as she asked, she simply refused to water them. 

It was her symbolic and stoic way of holding people accountable and bureaucrats would wilt and shrivel in effigy, in her garden, under her watch in the central desert. 

There are multiple accounts of this from people who knew her or worked at the garden, and it’s one of those myth-like stories that sums up her character perfectly as principled, stubborn, and defiant. 

Hasluck had considerable correspondence with Olive over many years as the Minister for the Territories. In the Northern Territory Newsletter obituary in 1975 he told the following story: 

At the Arid Zone reserve Miss Pink planted trees and, with the aid of her Aboriginal helper, watered them and tended them. Each tree bore the name of some prominent citizen and if that citizen fell out of favour with her she ceased to water it. So that if the leaves of ‘Mr Archer’ were drooping and the leaves of ‘Mr Marsh’ were bright and green or ‘Mr Barclay’ was growing vigorously one knew at once what had happened in the handling of her latest request. I visited her on several occasions and could never restrain a curious glance at my tree and felt suitably gratified if I saw that ‘Mr Hasluck’ was being watered regularly. 

Olive lived in a shed at the garden reserve, never married and didn’t have any children. Not long before she died, she said her reason for living died at Gallipoli. A portrait of Captain Harold Southern was her most treasured possession and each ANZAC day Olive was the first person to lay a small floral tribute on the cenotaph at Anzac Hill before dawn. 

Warlpiri man, Johnny Jambijimba Yannarilyi assisted Olive in the garden from 1962-1973 She fought a long battle with bureaucracy to have him formally employed and paid basic wages, which was unheard of at the time. 

Olive Muriel Pink died in 1975 in Alice Springs at the age of 91. She is buried in the Alice Springs Memorial Cemetery, according to her instructions, close to the Aboriginal section with her gravestone facing west towards Mount Gillen which she loved, and in the opposite to everyone else. So, it can be said even in death she insisted on doing things her own way.

Researching this story highlights that history is messy and moral courage is rare. Olive’s notebooks are beautiful with botanical curiosity and blunt with social outrage. Digging into the archives, what she achieved, discovering her love story, visiting the Women’s Museum of Australia and Old Gaol and the Botanic Gardens that bears her name, reminds us that trailblazing can be a long process, and always at some point pushing up against the status quo with fearless determination plus one big thing that I admire most, these people where brave enough to buck the trend. 

Olive was a pioneer who expanded what it meant to stand up for a place and its people, who used her voice. She was a trailblazer who showed that gardens and petitions can be parts of the same struggle. Fifty years after her death we acknowledge a woman who insisted that Alice Springs be seen, understood and defended on its own terms.

On our 50th edition, this is also what we are trying to achieve at TQ by publishing positive stories to ensure the Territory is visible, considered and the little guys are celebrated for their bold vision in business. 

To mark our 50th, Olive is our pioneer because she embodies a Territory spirit we prize: tenacity, curiosity and a willingness to speak truth to power and holding those to account who represent us.

The Botanic Gardens remain a place of learning and reflection, a living exhibit that continues to teach new generations about the resilience of arid landscapes and the legacy of Olive who lived the only way she knew how, loudly, stubbornly and passionately. TQ