If you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby even they

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Published: August 18, 2010

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If you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, even, they say, within the first hour after birth, it will push out its tongue in return, not, of course, to blow a raspberry at the world, but in the only gesture of response it can manage Three or four weeks later it progresses to awkward smiles Escaping from our separateness is a human imperative. Most of her obituaries in Australia have focused on her warm and gracious personality; but her long-term importance may well be as one of those who began the process of bringing Australia’s white and Aboriginal cultures into a creative coalition.Geoffrey BoltonMary Durack, writer, historian: born 20 February 1913; OBE 1966, DBE 1978; AC 1989; married 1938 Horrie Miller (died 1980; two sons, two daughters, and two daughters deceased); died Nedlands, Western Australia 16 December 1994.. The main demands on her time were, as ever, informal: researchers se eking background information,lonely old Kimberley hands dropping in for a yarn. And by now she was matriarch of an extensive clan.Perhaps this kindness of heart came at a cost.

A generous spirit sometimes finds it hard to make the historian’s sharpest judgements. But in the increasingly complex and multicultural milieu of modern Australia she provided an authentic bridge to an older pastoral past. Andshe presented Australian readers with a number of themes before they were widely fashionable: respect for Aboriginal attitudes and culture, acknowledgement of women’s role in the outback. She served several years on the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Perhaps it was difficult to approach the present, with its inevitable component of autobiography But the demands on Durack’s time were many. She was director, patron,and an energetic promoter of the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, a memorial and museum at Longreach in central Queensland, eventually opened as a 1988 Bicentenary project.

Without the mythic potential of the overlanding years, her study of the second generation of Duracks showed insight into the predicament of inheritors with neither the zest of their pioneering parents nor the easy acceptance of the environment which would come to their children. A significant sub-theme was the increasing impact of pastoral use on the Kimberley environment; Mary’s brother Kim Durack was a notable reformer in tropical pastoral and agricultural practice, and some of his perceptions found their way into her work.The trilogy was never completed. It enjoyed a success well beyond its original Broome audience, and was one of the first attempts to come to terms with Australia’s increasing multiculturalism.But inevitably she was drawn back to family history, and Sons in the Saddle, a sequel to Kings in Grass Castles, appeared in 1983. Aware that Asian/Aboriginal children found it hard to respond to the traditional literature of school curricula, she wrote Ship of Dreams, a play based on local folklore. Drawing on ageing memories and written sources at risk from the climate and white ants, she producedprobably her finest piece of historical research; but it was too objective and too firmly grounded in the district’s social history to please hagiographers and never won due recognition.Mary Durack and her husband, Horrie Miller, managing partner of the local airline, spent several months of each year in Broome, an old pearling port of great ethnic diversity.

It also challenged stereotypes of Aboriginal-white relations by showing that initial conflict could be followed by collaboration and a degree of mutual respect.Her respect for Aboriginal culture carried over into the present. She was unsparing in her promotion of Aboriginal creative artists and writers. Among those she encouraged was the writer Colin Johnson (now Mudrooroo Narrogin), today probably Australia’s leading Aboriginal novelist. Her generosity was unstinting, and her home at Nedlands was open to a wide range of bush characters, Aboriginal and white, creative artists and promoters of good causes. Such demands often took too much of her writing time, but her output continued.During the 1960s she worked on The Rock and the Sand (1969), an account of the Catholic missions in the Kimberley district. Kings in Grass Castles reminded its readers that women and families were essential to the pioneering process.


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