Olive Pink Botanic Garden

The Olive Pink Botanic Garden on the south bank of the Todd River is a 16-hectare garden specialising in the plants of arid central Australia — the same plants that the Arrernte people have used for food, medicine, and ceremony for tens of thousands of years. The garden is named for Olive Pink (1884-1975), anthropologist and early advocate for Aboriginal rights, who established it in the 1950s and tended it until her death.

The garden trails pass through a representative sample of central Australian plant communities: mulga scrub, spinifex grassland, desert oaks, and the distinctive Centralian flora that most visitors overlook in favour of the dramatic rock formations. It is a good introduction to the arid-zone ecology before you venture out into the MacDonnell Ranges. The tearoom has fine views over the Todd River floodplain.

things to do sight
A story
Olive Pink herself was one of the most unusual figures in Australian colonial history — an anthropologist who lived among the Arrernte people for decades, became a passionate advocate for Aboriginal land rights at a time when such advocacy was deeply unfashionable, and spent her final years establishing this garden. She was difficult, obsessive, and almost certainly right about everything that mattered.