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In July 1899, Mackay left Brisbane with the brothers Alex and Frank White on a bicycle ride which was to take
him around Australia. The Whites were forced to abandon the journey but Mackay finally returned to Brisbane
in March 1900 after a record breaking time of 240 days, 7 hours and 30 minutes and a distance travelled of
17 500 kilometres. His ride took him through scarcely known areas and involved considerable hardships.
Mackay married Amy Isabel Little, daughter of John Little of Sydney, on 16 April 1902 in Sydney. He and his
wife established a comfortable home at Port Hacking near Sydney that he used as a base for fishing, motoring,
sailing and further travel.
In June 1908, he departed for Papua as leader and financier of an exploring expedition that investigated the
headwaters of the Purari River. During the following decade, he sailed a yacht in the South Pacific and visited
New Zealand and the Dutch East Indies.
In 1926, Mackay commenced the first of several exploration trips in the Northern Territory that he both led
and financed when, with the anthropologist Dr Herbert Basedow, he took a camel expedition into the Petermann
Ranges. During 1928, again with Basedow, he was leader of an expedition in Arnhem Land. Between 1930 and
1937, he personally supervised four aerial surveys of Central Australia. One of these resulted in the discovery in
1931 of a large lake that the Commonwealth Government named after him. The surveys meant the production of
far more useful maps than those that had previously existed. He donated copies of all his maps and reports to the
Commonwealth Government and the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1937, Mackay spent most of his remaining
years at Port Hacking. In his old age, he achieved well-deserved recognition as ‘the last Australian explorer’.
While his journeys were not of the same significance as some that took place in an earlier period, he did much to
increase knowledge of remote areas. A powerfully built man, he was well known for his generosity, physical fitness
and qualities of leadership.
Mackay died of cardiac failure at Sutherland Shire Hospital on 17 September 1958. A widower, he had no
children. He was cremated in Sydney following a Presbyterian service. He was the author of various articles and
reports. A brother, Major-General Kenneth Mackay, was a prominent soldier and member of the New South Wales
parliament.
H Basedow, Knights of the Boomerang, 1935; F Clune, Last of the Australian Explorers, 1942; M Durack, Sons in the Saddle, 1983; A G I Hudson,
‘An Account of the Latest Expedition into North Australia’, The Home, January 1929; D Mackay, ‘Charting the Heart of Australia’, The Home,
January 1928; D Mackay, ‘Exploration in New Guinea’, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science Report Sydney Meeting
1911, D Mackay Papers, Mitchell Library; Daily Telegraph, 18 September 1958; Northern Territory News, 12 November 1983; Sydney
Morning Herald, 1 February 1937; T H R, ‘Donald Mackay’s expedition’, New Nation Magazine, June 1928; Australian Encyclopaedia, 1958;
Who’s Who in Australia, 1955.
DAVID CARMENT, Vol 1.
MacKILLOP, DONALD (1853–1924), Jesuit priest (1882–99) and Superior (1890–97) of the Austrian Jesuit
Mission to the Aborigines in the Northern Territory (1882–1899), was born in Portland, Victoria, on 27 April 1853.
He was the eldest son of Alexander MacKillop and Flora McDonald, both of whom had arrived in Sydney from
Scotland in 1835, and who had both moved within a year to Melbourne where they met and married. His father
seems to have been a charismatic personality, combining the gifts of great oratory, a command of six or seven
languages, and several years of ecclesiastical studies in Rome—all of which promised to make him the leading
Catholic layman of early Melbourne, a promise gradually voided by his volatility and depression which grew with
a series of business disasters. Donald’s sister, Mary, known as Mother Mary of the Cross, was founder (with the
Reverend Julian Tennison Woods) of the Josephite Sisters—the largest congregation of nuns in Australia, and
whose existence helped to ensure the survival of a separate Catholic education system. Donald was educated at
St Aloysius’ College, Sevenhill, South Australia, a complex of boarding-school (1856–86), seminary for diocesan
priests, novitiate and scholasticate for Jesuit students, Cellars, and centre for the Mission for the Austrian Jesuits
who had come to the colony in 1848. He entered the Society of Jesus in June 1872 at Sevenhill and did his
noviceship and studies in rhetoric and philosophy there until 1877. He then taught the boys at the same college
until 1882 when he was sent abroad for theological studies at Innsbruck (1883) and in North Wales (1884–85),
where he was ordained priest.
Tertianship, the final year of Jesuit studies, was done at Roehampton. He returned to Adelaide on 14 October 1886
with two Jesuit companions, all three destined for the mission to the Aborigines in the Northern Territory, founded
in 1882 by the Austrian Jesuits from Sevenhill, and then the first and only other Catholic mission in Australia since
the founding of New Norcia, Western Australia, in the early 1840s. The Austrian mission, which lasted 18 years
and involved a total of 19 Jesuits, was the largest conducted in South Australia and the Northern Territory in
terms of the number of Aborigines involved and, compared with its nineteenth-century counterparts in Australia,
had the most advanced missiology. Anthropologists such as W E H Stanner and R M Berndt single it out for
its exceptional insights and appreciation of Aboriginal culture. Unlike other missions, it did not instantly dismiss
native lore as heathenish, but attempted first to understand and then adapt it, a double endeavour that failed.
The mission consisted of four stations, one near Palmerston, two on the Daly River where no white man had
previously settled, and one thirty kilometres west of the Daly. In their policies of gradualism in evangelising,
of respecting the distinct tribal territories, of employing and attempting to preserve the local dialects, and their
effort to accept some aspects of native practice (such as corroboree), these stations were clearly based on the
model of the Jesuit Reductions in eighteenth-century Paraguay. MacKillop was the most forthright exponent of
these policies. From 1887 to 1889, he was attached to the Rapid Creek Station (outside Palmerston), to work and