THINK PINK
A native-plant reserve in Alice Springs is named in honour of botanical artist Olive Pink – but this incredible woman’s story begins in Hobart from where she branched out to become a pioneering anthropologist and activist
A new book unearths the many achievements of pioneering botanical illustrator, anthropologist and activist Olive Pink from Hobart town
M y first contact with Olive Pink was as a name on a native-plant reserve in Alice Springs, the Olive Pink Botanic Garden. I had no idea Pink came from Tasmania or was a talented botanical artist and anthropologist.
That revelation came two years ago when I was in the audience of an Australian Garden History Society lecture about Pink given by Gillian Ward, who described Pink’s long and fascinating life.
Ward has documented her journey from botanical artist in Hobart to a champion for Aboriginal culture and land in Central Australia in a handsome book, Olive Pink: Artist, Activist & Gar
dener (and subtitled A Life in Flowers), which traces Pink’s life through her art and writing and also publishes a selection of her flower paintings.
Although Hobart is a long way from Alice Springs where Pink was such an outspoken voice for Aboriginal culture and for the native plants of Central Australia, it was her upbringing and early education in Hobart that set her life course.
QUAKER INFLUENCES
Pink was born in Hobart in 1884 in a house on Church St in North Hobart. The house today looks much as it did when it was home to three generations of the Pink family. Pink grew up there with her parents, Robert and Evaline, her widowed paternal grandmother, Sarah Pink, and her brother Eldon.
“Our home was such a happy affectionate one,” Pink wrote in a letter in 1935.
Quaker friends and a Quaker education at a private Hobart school run by Sarah Walker, daughter of Quaker missionary George Washington Walker, set the scene for Pink’s later life in Central Australia, explains Ward. “There were three parts to her life: art, her love of gardening and her deep concern for indigenous Australians. Her childhood exposure to social justice issues through her friendship with the Walkers and her Quaker education underscored her later life as an activist.”
No doubt Pink would have heard about George Washington Walker’s missionary journeys around Australia from his daughters and later would have seen Aboriginal artefacts in the studio of her teacher Mary Augusta Walker, says Ward.
“When Olive was desperately short of money and attempting to return to Alice Springs, a Quaker benefactor provided her with a retainer, which enabled her to buy a truck and to have a small income to live on,” she says.
PLANTS AND GARDENS
Pink’s grandmother nurtured her childhood interest in plants and gardens. The family frequently took bushwalks on Mt Wellington and along the River Derwent. When Pink turned 12 in 1896, a family friend gave her a book on Tasmania’s native plants. A Handbook of the Plants of Tasmania by W.W. Spicer would have helped her identify plants on these walks, says Ward. It has survived along with her other treasured childhood book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll.
Another important influence on Pink’s life was the Tasmanian International Exhibition held in Hobart from 1894-95. Pink,
Opposite, clockwise from top left: The intrepid Olive Pink and an Aboriginal guide travel with camels laden with camping provisions through the harsh terrain of Central Australia for a research trip about 1934; a portrait of Olive Pink from the 1920s; Olive Pink and her artist friends dress up at Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin’s farm, about 1910; a life drawing class takes place in Hobart Technical School, about 1907. her grandmother and her brother Eldon had season passes. The photograph of Pink aged 10 taken for the pass shows a confident little girl in a checked, frilled dress.
Her grandmother’s death in 1911 saw the family uprooted. Pink left behind the life of an artist in Hobart pushing into the wider world as she travelled with her mother to Western Australia, where Eldon had a farm. For the next four years Pink lived in Perth and worked as an art teacher.
She also reconnected there with artist and Hobart friend Harold Southern. Ward notes much has been made of Pink’s relationship with Southern. When he enlisted in World War I in 1914, Pink and her mother were on the wharf to see him off as his ship sailed to the Middle East. His death at Gallipoli the following year affected Pink’s health and changed the course of her life.
“Her many references to him in conversations and in letters implies a great lost love,” writes Ward, but she says there’s no evidence she would have married him had he survived the war.
“Her single status gave her freedom to choose how and where she would live, which would probably have been denied to her as a married woman,” Ward says.
With Southern’s death and crop failures at Eldon’s farm, Pink and her mother left Perth for Sydney where she continued to teach art, did volunteer war work with the Red Cross and took classes at the famous Julian Ashton Art School. By the 1920s she was part of Sydney’s vibrant artistic movement.
Another theme of Pink’s life was her continued pursuit of education. She became interested in the new profession of town planning and enrolled in a diploma at the University of Sydney. These studies led her to her first full-time employment as a tracer at the Department of Public Works and later as a draftswoman for the railways.
Her interest in Australian indigenous culture, too, was ignited and her attention directed towards Australia’s harsh inland. Inspired by a solo trip to the Nullarbor Plain to camp with anthropologist and welfare worker Daisy Bates, Pink began to study anthropology and travelled through Central Australia recording Aboriginal language and culture, honing her desert survival skills and painting arid-land plants.
“That first trip gave her the confidence to know that she could manage in the most difficult conditions,” writes Ward. After a brief return to Hobart in 1937, Pink set her sights firmly on a life in Central Australia. At age 56, in 1940, she returned to Alice Springs where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.
HOBART HOME
Pink always considered herself a Tasmanian. In her frequent letters to friends and relatives she often reminisced about Tasmania, particularly the plants and the cool, temperate climate (no doubt a green oasis in her memory as she endured decades of hot and harsh living conditions in tents, shacks and finally a corrugated iron building beside the Todd River that she called Home Hut).
In 1973, shortly before her death at 91, she sent some 200 works of art from Alice Springs to the University of Tasmania. It was Pink’s legacy of paintings and drawings tucked away in the university library that first spoke to Ward.
“I worked in the university where I curated and created exhibitions from the university collections,” she says. “In 2004 after seeing the collection of Pink’s botanical paintings, I curated an exhibition in conjunction with the Tasmanian Herbarium, pairing the paintings with plant specimens from Central Australia.
“I gradually discovered more and more information about Olive and developed a fascination with her life.” In the years since Julie Marcus published The Indomitable
Miss Pink, the first biography of Olive Pink, personal information has become more accessible.
“Olive’s great nieces kindly made her family photographs, letters and artworks in their possession available. It was material that had not been published before. This allowed me to create an illustrated and very personal biography of Olive Pink.”
The family also donated many of these items to the University Library’s Olive Pink Collection in 2016.
Olive Pink: Artist, Activist & Gardener by Gillian Ward will be launched in Hobart on Tuesday, May 1, at 5pm at Narryna, 103 Hampden Rd, Battery Point. Attending the launch and meeting for the first time will be descendants of Olive Pink – her great nieces from Western Australia, who hold the family archive, along with cousins from northern Tasmania. The book will also be launched in Alice Springs at the Olive Pink Botanic Garden. To attend the Hobart launch, register online at fullersbookshop.com.au. An exhibition of Olive Pink’s botanical work and memorabilia will be held in the Morris Miller Library, Sandy Bay y campus, University of Tasmania, for the month of May.