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hundred of his countrymen to cart loads up to 50 kilograms on their backs over the same route. This had the effect
of lowering freight rates to more reasonable levels.
During 1882, W J Sowden, a journalist, accompanied a parliamentary delegation to the goldfields and
recorded that Ping Que received the party with full celestial etiquette. He also referred to another merchant,
Quong Wing Chong as ‘second only in wealth and power to the almighty Ping Que’. In 1883, Ping Que was a
committee member of the Port Darwin Camp Progress Association and was appointed a member of the mining
board.
All the evidence points to an assessment of Ping Que as an extraordinarily competent and astute businessman
whose integrity was well known. Chinese and whites alike, miners and officials respected him. An official report
records that after a year’s holiday in China in 1884, Ping Que was consulted by Government Resident Parsons
about the likely trend of future Chinese immigration and his answer later proved to be remarkably correct.
Ping Que died suddenly in 1886 and was the subject of an obituary in the Northern Territory Times, the first
obituary of a Chinese merchant in its pages. It concluded, ‘Ping Que will be missed by many who have profited
by his experience and advice. For ourselves we can only express sorrow at the unexpected death of one of the
pluckiest and straightest men it has been our lot to meet in the Northern Territory.’
Ping Que had applied for naturalisation in 1883. It was approved in October 1885 but he died before the formal
certificate was issued.
T G Jones, The Chinese in the Northern Territory, 1988; W J Sowden, The Northern Territory as It Is, 1882; SAPP, 72/1877 & 53/1886;
Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 1875–1886.
T G JONES, Vol 1.PINK, OLIVE MURIEL (1884–1975), artist, planner, anthropologist and naturalist, was born in Hobart,
Tasmania. Her parents appear to have instilled in her an interest in nature, intellectual honesty and a puritanical
streak. By giving her the wonderfully improbable name Olive Pink, they almost certainly gave her a minor cross
to bear and ensured a degree of eccentricity.
A good formal education was followed by training as an artist at the Hobart Technical College, where a fellow
student was Harold Southern. At this time, too, she came to know the family of Admiral Sir Frederick Bedford,
probably as a result of her parents’ associations. Shortly before the First World War she moved to Perth. By this
time, Sir Frederick Bedford was governor of Western Australia and she spent some time in his household, possibly
in an artist-teacher capacity. Coincidentally Harold Southern had moved to Perth, where he had become a chemist
and it is evident that they had a warm friendship. However, when he enlisted at the outbreak of war and, as Captain
Southern, was killed at Gallipoli, she was left with but a photograph and memories: she remained faithful to his
memory throughout the rest of her life, self-contained and with no feelings of romantic love for any other man.
Harold Southern’s death, although no doubt a great blow, in a sense freed her to become more completely an
independent spirit. At the same time, she needed an occupation and it appears that she did a course in draughting or
town planning. She moved from Western Australia and was employed as a tracer with the Public Works Department
and the Railways Commission in New South Wales. Her willingness to question and inquire seems to have led
to her first clashes with red-tape-bound bureaucrats at this time. However, Sydney was also a very stimulating
place for her. There is a possibility that Ellis Rowan’s flower paintings and her independent travels had appealed
to her in both Western Australia and New South Wales, and it is certain that accounts of Daisy Bates’s work with
Aborigines in remote areas had intrigued her. She attended lectures in anthropology and, as her attendance was via
the Workers’ Education Association, it is possible that, in at least an intellectual way, trade unionism and the ideals
of communism had an appeal to her. That her interest in anthropology was considerable is indicated by the fact
that, for a time, she became secretary of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales.
In 1926 and 1927, she travelled to Ooldea, on the Nullarbor Plain to visit Daisy Bates. The latter’s work with
Aborigines was already legendary and, given her anthropological leanings, Olive Pink must have expressed interest
in Aboriginal life. Daisy Bates’s only recollection of her, though, was of a ‘jolly little artist called Miss Pink’.
There can be little doubt that her own formal studies in anthropology and this visit to Daisy Bates stimulated
Olive Pink’s interests still further. She travelled to Alice Springs in 1930 and applied to the Australian National
Research Council (ANRC) to do research in social anthropology in Central Australia. Professor A P Elkin,
chairman of the Anthropological Committee of the ANRC, agreed to the proposal and requested that she study ‘the
local and totemic organization of the northern division of the Aranda tribe’. This she did, over a fourteen-month
period in 1933 and 1934, both in bush camps and whilst convalescing from illness, and in addition was the first
anthropologist to make similar studies of the Ilpirra Warlpiri in their own country. The work was scientifically
presented—an important point with her—extremely well received and published in a respected journal of
anthropological science, Oceania, in 1936.
Every indication is that she was intellectually brilliant—a person capable of gaining a grasp of languages
quickly and crystallising her observations and perceptions into scientific papers of genuine merit. And yet, at the
same time, there was the counterbalancing force of her own prickly personality and an honesty that, while laudable,
caused her problems. A fellow member of the Anthropological Society, of which Professor Elkin was president,
recalled her in unflattering terms: ‘Miss Pink was one of those crosses generous academics like Dr Elkin had to
endure, for the eccentric lady had been a student of his, and trailed him devotedly. Sometimes mistaken on College
Street for Daisy Bates, she affected the same dust-dragging Edwardian skirts, starched shirt fronts, poke bonnet
and, of course, a pink parasol. We were all much relieved when she took off for Alice Springs.’ Even allowing for
a degree of bias and exaggeration, there is a strong element of truth in the image, for it remained with her for the
rest of her life, and was part of her initial impact in Central Australia.