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Being responsible for Territory finances, Dwyer was noted as a hard negotiator both with the Commonwealth
Treasury and those bidding for funds from the Territory. He was known always to be sympathetic to the Territory’s
aims towards self-government and played a key role in laying the foundation for Territory development.
After the devastation of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy he played a leading part in the rebuilding of the city through
the Darwin Reconstruction Commission. His public work continued until self-government in 1978, when he
retired.
His involvement in public affairs was also well known. He was Chairman of the Northern Territory Winston
Churchill Memorial Trust and President of the Darwin Branch of Legacy. He also had interests in bowls and golf.
He and his wife Nan retired to Toogoom on the Queensland coast near Maryborough, where he died after a long
illness on 21 March 1981. He had three sons and a daughter.
F Walker, A Short History of the Legislative Council of the Northern Territory, 1986; Who’s Who in Australia, 1977; Northern Territory News,
23 March 1981; personal information from N Dwyer and J Fisher.
GREG COLEMAN, Vol 2.DYER, ALFRED JOHN (1884–1968), Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary to the Aborigines in
Arnhem Land, was born in Melbourne, Victoria, on 17 February 1884. The son of fruiterer and nurseryman Edward
Dyer (his mother was Hester Merritt), he became interested in gardening from a very early age, and was keenly
aware of the beauties of nature, which he tried to express in painting. After an unspectacular time at school he
began working as a salesman at Chandlers Hardware Store, Fitzroy.
Dyer was an unusual person. He was enthusiastic, but erratic; dynamic yet unpredictable; a visionary,
yet incoherent in expression. He offered to be a missionary with the CMS, but the Society had doubts about his
stability. So as a missionary candidate he had to prove himself working as a stipendiary lay reader in the dioceses
of Gippsland and Wangaratta. Finally he was accepted, in March 1915, as a lay missionary for the Roper River
Mission in the Northern Territory. He left Sydney for the north on 17 May 1915 together with the Reverend and
Mrs H E Warren.
On arrival at the mission he commenced his task with enthusiasm. He was intensely loyal to Warren, the
superintendent. In 1916 he joined Warren in several journeys of exploration on the east Arnhem Land coast and
Groote Eylandt with a view to establishing a chain of missions in the area. In the same year he assisted a police
party from the Roper Bar police station by travelling with them as they sought to apprehend the killers of some
Borroloola Aborigines.
Dyer married Mary Catherine Crome at the Roper River Mission on 24 May 1917. Mary Crome was a nurse
who had been working with great acceptance at the mission since August 1913. For the next seventeen years she
worked alongside her husband in caring for the Aborigines. She was 10 years older than her husband, and they
had no children.
During the next few years the CMS planned to start a mission at Rose River (now Numbulwar) on the east
Arnhem Land coast with Dyer as the missionary-in-charge, but nothing came of the proposals. In June 1921 Dyer
was a member of Warren’s party that founded the CMS mission at Emerald River (Yedigba) on Groote Eylandt.
After a short break he and his wife spent the next two years erecting the buildings for the mission, which from 1924
housed the half-caste children brought over from the Roper River Mission.
In 1925 Dyer and his wife founded the CMS Oenpelli Mission in western Arnhem Land. Oenpelli had been the
home of Paddy Cahill, and later a Commonwealth-sponsored experimental veterinary project. With characteristic
enthusiasm and dedication they established the typical pattern of a mission station with school, dispensary, garden,
store, in addition to the cattle work. Before long several hundred Gunwinggu-speaking Aborigines began making
their home there, where they worked in exchange for rations.
The Reverend A J Dyer was made deacon on 15 May 1927 at Christ Church, Darwin, and ordained to the
priesthood in Moore College Chapel, Sydney, on 1 May 1928. During this time he continued his work developing
the Oenpelli Mission that was favourably reviewed by J W Bleakley in his report on the Arnhem Land missions.
In 1933 he joined the Reverend H E Warren and D H Fowler as a member of the CMS Peace Expedition which
persuaded the killers of five Japanese at Caledon Bay in 1932, and the killers of Constable A S McColl, F Traynor
and W Fagan on Woodah Island, to go to Darwin and give themselves up to the authorities to prevent a police
punitive expedition. Dyer, together with Fred Gray, took the killers to Darwin in Oituli, a journey described by
him in a booklet called Unarmed Combat. At the trials the excitable and overwrought Dyer made several strange
outbursts against Aborigines that were quite out of character with his thought and philosophy. Nevertheless he
stood by the Aboriginal killers when they were convicted, and by Tuckiar when he was given the death penalty for
the killing of Constable McColl. When Tuckiar’s conviction was quashed and he was freed, he was scheduled to
meet Dyer who was to take him back to Arnhem Land. Tuckiar disappeared, however, and was never again seen.
Soon after Dyer’s return to Oenpelli, he and his wife were recalled south. He was utterly worn out and she was
suffering from cancer. While in Sydney they resigned from the Society, and Dyer was given the position of Rector
of Guildford. Mary Dyer died there on 26 February 1940. She was a strict yet loving person who had given herself
without reserve to promoting the welfare of Aboriginal people, a deep interest that persisted throughout the long
months of her last painful illness. After her death, Dyer continued his ministry there, then at West Wollongong and
Austinmer. He retired in 1949 when he remarried.
Dyer died at Austinmer on 6 April 1968 as the result of a motor accident. He had served the Aborigines well
during the first part of his ministry and then the southern church during the second. He was an unusual person.
As a lifelong friend, the Reverend Ralph Ogden said at his funeral, ‘It is a well-nigh impossible task to bring out in