- page -
http://www.cdu.edu.au/cdupress
Go Back >> List of Entries
University of Tasmania in 1915. As a schoolboy, he exhibited a natural artistic ability, inheriting the gifts of
his mother who was a friend of the artist Norman Lindsay. He always worked with a skilful left hand, and his
etched drawings at thirteen years of age were later framed to become family heirlooms. This capacity was to be
an outstanding characteristic, along with his expert photography, in his later meticulous survey work and location
reports as a civil engineer.
His university course was interrupted after the November examinations in 1917 by his enlistment for war
service and, when he was demobilised from the army at the end of the next year at the age of 21, he joined the
Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission and worked on the diversion of the Ouse River into the Great Lake,
and survey work on the Shannon River dam. He then worked with the contracting firm of E G Stone and Company
in their construction of the Kellsol and Kempe Woollen Mills, the Shale Mine at Latrobe, the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall
Factory at Claremont, the Goliath Cement Works and the Launceston Railway Workshops.
On 16 April 1925, at the age of 28, he married Margaret Grace Murray of New Town, Tasmania.
David Smith was now looking for other fields. An offer came from the Australian Commonwealth Railways to
conduct a survey for a railway line between Daly Waters in the Northern Territory and Dajarra in Queensland, and
from Dunmarra to Wyndham via Wave Hill. In March 1927, Smith undertook this task, leaving his wife and small
baby daughter Margaret Claire, for the time being, in New Town. In July 1928, after completion of this railway
survey, he was appointed by the Commonwealth Department of Public Works as Resident Engineer for Central
Australia and came to be known throughout the Northern Territory by the popular name of ‘DD’. He initially lived
in a tent in Hartley Street, Alice Springs, and his wife and baby came from Tasmania to join him there. This area
is now dedicated as the DD Smith Memorial Park.
During the Second World War D D Smith was commissioned as a Reserve Officer of the Northern Territory
Garrison as well as carrying out intelligence duties, and he made the initial inspections and surveys of the road
from Darwin to Alice Springs in preparation for the sealing operation by the Civil Construction Corps. At the age
of sixty in 1957, he retired from the Public Works Department and made his home at 1 Chewings Street, East Side,
Alice Springs. One of the last things he did was to open up the track to Ayers Rock, expressing his practical belief
in the future of Centralian tourism. The family comprised two girls, Margaret Claire and Helen Verity, and three
boys, David Lindsay, Douglas Murray and Graham Wishart. D D Smith and his wife were divorced in 1967.
He subsequently married Dylis Mary, daughter of James Ernest Hurst and Agnes Alicia, nee Wade, of Melbourne
on 28 February 1969.
After his retirement he directed his energies to cattle production on a property called Mount Allan of 2 030 square
kilometres situated about 290 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, the lease of which he had acquired in 1949.
Fencing, bore-sinking, home construction and stocking with cattle had all to be undertaken with the help of his
youthful son, David. D D Smith set out to show that the economic utilisation of Centralian cattle resources lay
in the turning-off of weaner-yearling males for fattening in the south. He bought another cattle station in the
southeast of South Australia in 1971 and worked on it for six battling years, developing it for his fattening project.
He possessed a natural determination to put to practical use for cattlemen in Central Australia his knowledge of
transport conditions by rail and road, of harnessing artesian waters, and of facing seasons of drought.
His well-known interests in community developments in Alice Springs were invariably related to the needs of
the young and the old. He supervised the contracts for the building of the John Flynn Memorial Church and the Old
Timers’ Homes. He helped to get the first kindergarten established, to buttress the formation of the Boy Scouts and
Girl Guides, and to maintain a vital membership on the Public School Committee and the Race Club. He acted as a
Justice of the Peace from 1929 to 1981. He was elected the Member for Stuart in the Northern Territory Legislative
Council, 1962–65. On 13 June 1981, he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in recognition of
his unique services to the Northern Territory.
D D Smith was small in physical stature, measuring 165 centimetres in height, but a man of big spirit,
long-sighted brown eyes, and indefatigable energy. He inherited strong Scottish traits of honest pride in his work
and of dogged perseverance. In the management of his staff he had the secret of winning firm loyalties and
was respected, if not always loved, for his discipline, his open dealings, and his disdain of bureaucratic control.
He was basically a reserved personality, sometimes intolerant, but with an inborn interest in the common man
and a commitment to old-time Labor ideals. When he campaigned throughout Central Australia for election to
the Legislative Council, he ‘chatted’ to hundreds of people at their work and in their homes about his dreams of
development of the Northern Territory, of his fundamental belief in human dignity and equality, particularly in
relation to Aboriginal people.
He died on 7 July 1984 in his 87th year in St Andrew’s Hospital, Adelaide, having undergone orthopaedic
surgery for a broken hip. The government of the Northern Territory honoured him with a State funeral in the John
Flynn Memorial Church, Alice Springs, on 11 July 1984, conducted by the Very Reverend Fred McKay, at which
a eulogy was also given by Jim Robertson, Attorney General of the Northern Territory. The burial took place in the
Alice Springs Lawn Cemetery.
Smith papers, Mrs Dylis Smith, Alice Springs; AIM papers, NLA NT Legislative Assembly minutes, 5 March 1985; George Redman,
[D D Smith], Dept of Housing and Construction Journal, September 1984.
J FRED McKAY, Vol 1.
SMITH, JESSIE ADELE (1915– ), domestic worker, nursing sister and missionary was born on 10 May 1915
at Kerang in Victoria. She was the third daughter of Harold Walters Smith and his wife Annie, nee Russell who
were married on 17 September 1901. Her father was born in England in 1874 and emigrated to Australia when he