Olive Pink was the kind of woman who stood out in a crowd. Tall, stern, with a sharp wit and a sharper tongue, she was one of the few white women to settle in Alice Springs in the 1930s. And in that dusty frontier town she quickly became known for a series of causes. Long before it became fashionable, Olive Pink championed the environment. Founder of the town’s Botanic Gardens, she nurtured seedlings in the desert and found the dry heart of Australia a ‘place of peace and beauty’. ‘I worship trees and flowers,’ she wrote, ‘and especially the gallant ones of our arid regions.’

The kind of woman who stood out: Olive Pink at the beginning of her career. PH0091/0058 NTGP Collection courtesy Northern Territory Library.

I worship trees and flowers: Olive’s sensitive rendering of native flora. She made the sketches in Tasmania before trekking across the desert of central Australia. Olive Pink Collection, Rare and Special Collections, courtesy University of Tasmania Library.

Olive was gallant herself and certainly something of a feminist. It was not just that she attended university, studying for a doctorate in the virtually all-male field of anthropology, or that she made an independent living for herself in an age when most women married. Olive Pink loved adventure. In the 1930s, ‘she rolled up her swag, and travelled alone from Port Augusta to Darwin’, pioneering fieldwork amongst the Aboriginal communities of central Australia. ‘I like talking about “things”, ’ she declared, ‘ideas and beliefs, not babies, ornaments and love affairs and all the things a really womanly woman should.’1

Olive Pink was a tireless campaigner for those same Aboriginal communities she studied. At the height of the assimilationist era, she condemned the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families, demanded land for those ‘shamefully’ dispossessed, and called for equal wages at a time when most Aboriginal men and women worked for just a pittance in rations.

She was also an advocate of what today we would call cultural autonomy. ‘All fair-minded Australians, with any real sense of justice, will support a sanctuary’, she declared; a place far from the grog and exploitation of white townships, where ‘the old tribal ways’ were beyond the reach of missionaries and policemen, where Aboriginal communities could thrive on Aboriginal country.2

Fearlessly principled, outspoken and unorthodox, Olive Pink was in many ways exceptional. And yet she shared one thing in common with a generation of women in interwar Australia: Olive lost the man she loved at Gallipoli. And she never loved again.

Captain Harold Alfred Southern fell leading his men in a night attack on the Turkish front line. One of the few to survive the battle, William Hart, a Private in B Company, described his death in intimate detail:

We advanced up the Gully and rushed the ridge on the right of it . . . Southern was next to me. All of a sudden he was hit and fell backwards. It must have been in the throat or chest as he made a gurgling sound . . . I have not seen him since.3

Captain Harold Southern died just ten days after the Landing. Like thousands of others, his body was never recovered from the battlefield. Nor were his parents the first to hear of his loss. Harold’s mother only learned of her son’s death when she received a consolation letter from a friend in Britain. The military authorities had failed to contact her.

All her life, Olive treasured Harold’s photograph and the pictures he painted as an art student in Hobart. These, she explained, were all she had left of him. As she confided to a friend ‘her reason for living died at Gallipoli’.4

My reason for living: Harold Southern on the eve of his departure for war. Harold, like Olive, was an accomplished artist. He was 26 years old when he died. Olive Pink Collection, Rare and Special Collections courtesy University of Tasmania Library.

Every Anzac Day, Olive, like thousands of other women across Australia, would turn to the task of remembrance. She would climb Anzac Hill in the early hours of the morning and place a bunch of native flowers at the foot of the town’s war memorial. Olive always came alone, long before the service commenced: her grief was something she bore alone, needing no words, nursed in reverent silence. For many years, locals wondered how the flowers came to be there, propped up in the cold night air beside the obelisk, waiting, it seemed, for a community to gather around them. Then, by chance, an old veteran came across Olive on her lonely vigil. ‘She stood with head bowed for several minutes’, then slipped away in the darkness.

Needing no words: Floral tributes placed on the Alice Springs War Memorial. PH0034-0048 Anzac Memorial courtesy Northern Territory Library.

Olive Pink died in Alice Springs aged 91, and her body was buried in the cemetery on the fringes of town. She wanted a photograph of Harold Southern placed in her coffin. Her plot faces the opposite direction to every other grave and looks out towards her ‘beloved MacDonnell Ranges’. The authorities denied her last request, that she be buried in ground set aside for Aboriginal people.5

Different to the end: Olive’s tombstone looks out over her ‘beloved MacDonnell Ranges’. All the other graves face the opposite direction. Olive Pink Collection, Rare and Special Collections courtesy University of Tasmania Library.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Harold Southern’s service dossier NAA: B2455 SOUTHERN HAROLD ALFRED; Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Alison Holland, ‘Feminism, Colonialism and Aboriginal Workers: An Anti-Slavery Crusade’, Labour History, 1 November 1995, no. 69, November 1995, pp. 52–64; the works of Russell McGregor, ‘The Clear Categories of Olive Pink, Oceania, vol 65, no 1, September 1994, pp.4–17; Julie Marcus, The Indomitable Miss Pink: A Life in Anthropology (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001); Reg Harris, ‘Olive Muriel Pink [Recollections of Miss Pink’s personal life]’, Bulletin (Olive Pink Society), vol. 6, no. 2, 1994, pp. 7–16. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Alison Holland. For a rich visual record of Olive’s life see the Olive Pink Collection at the University of Tasmania.

1 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1932; B. Clark, Our Formidable Olive, Outback Voices website, www.outbackvoices.com/our-formidable-olive/our-formidle-olive accessed 1 May 2013.

2 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 1935.

3 Statement by Private William Hart, NAA: B2455 SOUTHERN HAROLD ALFRED.

4 Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 108.

5 Reg Harris, Olive Muriel Pink [Recollections of Miss Pink’s personal life] Bulletin (Olive Pink Society), vol. 6, no. 2, 1994, p. 9.