An
Alice Springs identity who took a keen interest in Aboriginal matters and the activities of editor Jim Bowditch
was Miss Olive Pink, widely regarded as an eccentric
and one of those “Goodies ” .
While Miss Pink was
clearly mainly interested in the
plight of fullbloods, Bowditch concentrated on the
advancement of those called half-castes. He said he thought Miss Pink disapproved
of him because she had a low opinion of white men who had
a half-caste girlfriend or wife. Still, she occasionally
invited him to her humble residence
for a cup of tea and forthright discussions about various issues.
She
often came to court to listen
to cases involving Aborigines and spoke
to Bowditch. During court hearings she would interrupt proceedings
by calling out from the public gallery
when she thought an injustice was being committed. At the end
of a tribal murder case , Miss Pink snorted ,“ So much for so-called British
justice” . The judge heard her outburst and
ordered her arrest. She was allowed to go once she apologised for her remark .
By Peter Simon
Miss
Pink was a living legend. By and large, she loathed
Alice Springs and said many of its white residents were wife beaters. She also branded the town Sodom and Gommorah. She had been
campaigning for Aborigines since the l930s and had a
tragic and unusual background .
From Tasmania, Miss Pink met her
“ greatest friend ,” Harold Southern ,
when they were art students in Hobart; it is suggested she had taught
art at a
private girls’ school. Early in the
l900s she was in the household of
the WA
Governor, Sir Frederick Bedford , who had been in Tasmania . At about
that time the Southern family also came to Perth from Tasmania.
Her friend Captain Southern was killed at Gallipoli in l915. Each Anzac Day in Alice , Miss Pink used to honour his name. Many people believed she had in storage the wedding dress she would have worn to marry Captain Southern .
In
the l920s she
stayed with Daisy Bates, who ran an Aboriginal
settlement at Ooldea , in South Australia ,near the
transcontinental railway line across the
Nullarbor. Bates , an Irish journalist
,who had once been married to Breaker Morant, executed by the British Army during the Boer War , spent 33 years working with desert tribes in South Australia and Western Australia. Bates , who regarded Aborigines as a dying race,
mentioned “ a jolly little artist
called Miss Pink ” having visited her .
Daisy Bates became one of
Miss Pink’s great hates . The worse thing anybody could do was liken her
to Bates .
Miss
Pink moved to Sydney and worked in the draughting department of
the NSW Railways Department.
Her work there was said to
have involved drawings
associated with the huge
Sydney Harbour Bridge
project. Her interest in Aborigines seems to have grown from
observations she made while on leave making concessional
rail trips interstate.
On
one of her trips she went to Alice Springs and
along the way painted flowers. In l932
she delivered a speech to a meeting
of the Anthropology Section of the Australian New Zealand Association
for the Advancement of Science
on the uses to which the Aranda
and Arabanna tribes of Central Australia put their indigenous flora .
Vice president of the Anthropology Section was Professor A. P. Elkin of Sydney University Elkin
, an influential advisor to government
on aboriginal matters, commented
favourably on her talk.
Later on she wrote a magazine article describing how she could
tell the time in Central Australia
by observing flowers.
Elkin told me the first time he met Miss Pink
he found her alert and nicely dressed, a scarf tied about her hair
and wearing a green tie .
At the time she was living in
rooms opposite the university. She then turned up at weekly anthropology classes he ran for
the Workers’ Education Association .
As Elkin became a leading figure in the Association for Protection of Native
Races, Miss Pink’s interest blossomed and she took part in lively discussions on the subject. Right at the very
start, the professor ,
himself an Anglican clergyman , noticed
Miss Pink had an antipathy
towards religions . Years later it was
suggested that Miss Pink’s
aversion to all religions,
especially Catholicism, was
due to the suicide of a close
female friend who had been unable to obtain solace or support from her church in a time of deep
personal stress. It was hinted that the woman had become pregnant to a married man and had suicided .
Miss
Pink proposed carrying out field work in the Northern
Territory and Elkin, giving his
blessing to the project, arranged
some financial support. This trip into Central Australia, at times
travelling by camel, with a
revolver for protection , resulted in a paper Spirit
Ancestors in a Northern Aranda Horde Country , which appeared in Oceania
, the anthropology journal founded
and edited by Elkin. Another important paper she wrote was about land ownership among
Aborigines .
During
anthropological work in l933
Miss Pink became dangerously
ill with dysentery
at a desert camp near Mount Doreen
Station in the NT. The owners of the station, the Braitlings , went to her rescue
and she was carried on a
litter made from saplings and flour bags for about 50 kilometres over boggy ground to a car which took her to Alice Springs
hospital.
Following
that illness, Miss Pink
then wrote to Professor Cleland ,
head of the Department of Pathology, University of Adelaide, for
information on how to combat dysentery
and what could be done to help ease the pain
of an elderly Aborigine with
apparent gall bladder trouble. In l935 she
put another proposal to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science
for her to set up a special reserve
in the Tanami Desert , near The Granites, at a place called Thompson’s
Rockhole, where she would carry out further
field studies and no other
Europeans would be allowed admittance. Much to her annoyance, she failed to
gain support for the proposal.
Elkin
said he had voted against her proposal ,
not because she was a woman, but because
it would have been difficult for anyone , male or female, out there in the desert. He believed
that apart from doing
anthropological research, she also wanted to emulate the work of Miss
Annie Lock, a missionary activist
who was mentioned in the Coniston
Massacre inquiry as being a
person who had lowered respect for whites by mixing with Aborigines.
Despite
failing to gain backing from her
peers for the field work, she went to Alice Springs under her own volition
and resumed her work at Thompson’s Rockhole, living in a tent . One day
D. D. Smith, head of the Department of Works in Alice , who became Bowditch's boss when Jim moved there after the war, was driving
through the Tanami Desert when he came across Miss Pink, on foot, clad in a
high-necked dress which went to
the ground , carrying a sugar bag in
which there were watermelons. He offered
a lift , but she firmly declined his kind gesture. As the nearest
habitation was about 70 miles away ,
where he was heading, he felt she might perish
out there in the wildness.
A small man, he got out of the car , took her by the arm and tried to steer her into the vehicle. Miss Pink struggled, hit him with her bag of watermelons , scratched his face and implied an improper motive in him trying to get her into his car. Convinced that she was deranged, he drove off, still worried about her well being ; he checked to see that she had arrived safely at her destination, three days later. NEXT: Miss Pink nearly shot.
