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As a result of Dunk’s intervention, following his own visits or my reports, considerable improvements were
made to public service conditions. For example he wrote to Paul Hasluck, Minister for Territories, asking him
to have a number of houses built to facilitate recruitment of competent staff; consequently a virtually new suburb
of houses at Fannie Bay was constructed. He arranged for Dr McPherson, an expert on tropical living conditions,
to be engaged as a consultant. The outcome was fly wiring of houses and offices and air-conditioning in new
office construction. To improve performance at lower and middle levels in the Public Service he set up a Training
Unit and had a range of procedure manuals prepared. He also established a small training school for typists and
secretaries. Joan Mullins, one of the original trainees, is now a senior officer with the Department of Education,
Employment and Training.
For public service he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1954 and was
made Knight Bachelor (Kt) in 1957. He was a member of the Melbourne Club. He died in Melbourne on
12 January 1984.
WE Dunk, They Also Serve, 1974; personal information; Who’s Who in Australia 1983, 1983.
TIMOTHY G JONES, Vol 3.
DUNLOP, (LILIAN) DORIS: see GILES, (LILIAN) DORIS
DURACK, MICHAEL PATRICK (M P) (1865–1950), pastoralist and politician, was born at Goulburn, New
South Wales, on 22 July 1865, the son of Patrick Durack, a pastoralist, and his wife Mary, nee Costello. Part of his
childhood was spent at Thylungra Station in western Queensland, where he learned how to ride horses and handle
stock. He was educated by a tutor and at the Christian Brothers’ College in Goulburn. In 1886 he travelled with a
brother to the Kimberley region of Western Australia, where they took over management of an enormous holding,
Argyle Station, based on the Ord River. It was to be the focus of Durack’s activities for many years thereafter and
developed in close association with the adjoining Victoria River District in the Northern Territory.
In the early 1890s, together with Tom Kilfoyle of Rosewood Station, he opened up a market for Argyle beef
at the Pine Creek goldfields. In 1897 he became member of a partnership with the two Irishmen Francis Connor
and Dennis Doherty, whose Territory stations, Newry and Auvergne, adjoined Argyle’s eastern boundary. Connor,
Doherty and Durack, as the partnership was known, employed Durack as Manager of its properties. He organised
in that capacity the annual movement of thousands of head of cattle to southern markets in chartered ships. Despite
the imposition of a quarantine barrier on the Western Australia and Northern Territory border in 1897, he continued
to arrange the purchase of Territory stock. Between 1898 and the First World War he travelled quite extensively in
Australia and overseas in pursuit of his company’s interests. On 22 September 1909 in Adelaide he married with
Catholic rites Bessie, daughter of William Johnstone, a police magistrate in Port Adelaide. They had four sons
and two daughters. Between 1917 and 1924 he was a non-Labor member of the Western Australian Legislative
Assembly.
The years following the First World War saw a decline in prospects for the northern pastoral industry. In the
1930s Connor, Doherty and Durack fell into serious debt. The Second World War, however, caused a big rise
in beef prices and by 1948 the company’s debts were gone. In August 1950, ‘weary of the burden of the years’,
and having reserved a Northern Territory block, Kildurk, for his son, Reginald (Reg), he sold the remainder of
his company’s properties to Peel River Estates of New South Wales. He died in Perth, Western Australia, on
3 September 1950 and was buried with Catholic rites. His wife and children survived him. His estate was sworn
for probate at 61 195 Pounds.
‘An intellectual whose strong sense of family loyalty had bound him to a lifetime as a pastoral entrepreneur’,
the historian Geoffrey Bolton wrote, ‘Durack was a distinguished figure with a trim vandyke beard and the stamina
to take part in prospecting expeditions on horseback, even in his 82nd year’. He was also an energetic compiler
and hoarder of the written word, who left trunks full of diaries, letters, cables and accounts which are today a most
valuable historical resource. These formed the basis for his daughter Mary’s book Sons in the Saddle, published in
1983, and were also used in her widely acclaimed Kings in Grass Castles, which appeared in 1958.
G C Bolton, ‘Durack, Michael Patrick’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol 8, 1981; M Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, 1958, ‘Michael
Patrick Durack’, in L Hunt (ed), Westralian Portraits, 1979; Sons in the Saddle, 1983.
DAVID CARMENT, Vol 2.
DURACK, REGINALD WYNDHAM (REG) (1911– ), stockman, general station hand, pastoralist and scholar
of Greek literature, was born in 1911 at Semaphore, South Australia, son of Michael ‘MP’ Durack and Bess,
nee Johnstone, who were married in Adelaide in August 1909. M P Durack was one of the famous Duracks who
pioneered much of the East Kimberley region in the 1880s. He was later a member of the Western Australian
Parliament. Bess was the daughter of William Johnstone, a South Australian magistrate.
Reg spent his first years on Ivanhoe and Argyle stations in the East Kimberleys before moving to Perth where
he was educated at Claremont State School, and at the Christian Brothers College in Perth. He was Dux of the
College in 1928. During his school years his holidays were usually spent on a family stud sheep property, Behn Ord
Estate, near Wagin in Western Australia.
At the completion of his formal education at the age of 17, Reg was unsure what vocation he wanted to follow,
so he decided to return to the north to experience life in the pastoral industry. He began work in the stock camp at
Argyle under the manager, Patsy Durack, one of his father’s cousins. Reg credited Patsy with grounding him in
many aspects of cattle station work and he always held Patsy’s memory in very high regard.