Artist, Aboriginal-rights activist, anthropologist and gardener, studied art at the Hobart Technical School with sculptor Benjamin Sheppard ( ADB 11) before joining the staff as a teacher in 1909. Then gave private art lessons in Perth, moved to Sydney and studied at the Julian Ashton art school under Adrian Feint , also teaching in private girls’ schools. In May 1915 she was employed as a tracer in the NSW Department of Public Works; later she painted 'excursion posters and the like’ for the NSW Government Railways and Tramways until retrenched during the Depression. In 1930 she embarked on a sketching tour of Central Australia and investigated the conditions in which Aboriginal people lived, having been inspired by a visit to Daisy Bates at Ooldea (SA) in 1926-27. This changed her life.

She studied anthropology at SU from 1932, but this career came to an end c.1936 when she refused to publish research that relied on descriptions of secret rituals. Forced to leave the Walpiri in the late 1940s, she lived in a corrugated-iron hut on Gregory Terrace, for a time working as a cleaner in the court-house where she also monitored cases in which Aboriginal defendants appeared – an arrangement that 'proved uncongenial to magistrates and police alike’. So she formed a committee to obtain land for a museum. It failed and she set up a small private display of her wildflower paintings and Aboriginal artefacts at one end of her hut. Although she charged for admission, it was not very lucrative, especially as her friends didn’t have to pay and 'time-wasters’ were excluded. Finally, with the help of (Sir) Paul Hasluck, she established a flora reserve (gazetted in 1956) where she worked as a curator (now the Olive Pink Botanic Garden). She died on 6 July 1975 in Alice Springs Hospital and was buried in the Quaker section of the local cemetery.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007