The parallel experiences of working as an academic and anthropologist in Central Australia gave Julie Marcus the affinity to write a book on the life of her feisty predecessor, Olive Pink, and the determination to make her research accessible to the wider public.

Last week, Julie Marcus won the 2002 Dobbie Award for a first published book by an Australian woman writer for her work on Olive Pink, The Indomitable Miss Pink: A Life in Anthropology. 

Julie Marcus is Professor of Social Anthropology at Charles Sturt University's Bathurst Campus.

The Award judges said that Professor Marcus had done justice to the extraordinary life of one of her predecessors in the field of anthropology.

"Pink's views about Aborigines have a very contemporary resonance, yet Professor Marcus does much more than present Pink as a woman ahead of her time. The full import of the subject's unorthodox behaviour is celebrated and contextualised in this lively study," the judges said.

Professor Marcus said her book looked at how Olive Pink's life was transformed by her visit to Central Australia in the early 1930s and how her humanitarian activities undermined her career as an anthropologist. It also records how she was remembered in Alice Springs today and by the Warlpiri and Arrernte people she tried to help.

Although she has researched Olive Pink since 1984, Professor Marcus says there is still much she could learn about the woman who died in 1975 at the age of 90.

"I feel I know her to a point. She was a prolific letter writer, but at the same time she was a very private woman.

"Although I've read thousands of her letters, I fear there were thousands more," Professor Marcus said.

"My understanding of her character is a feminist understanding that grows out of my own experience as well as hers."

The Dobbie Award was established in 1992, in memory of librarian and research officer Nita May Dobbie, to support Australian women writers.