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.

Other places in Things to Do