Perth Sculptures: Mary Durack

One of the most captivating sculptures we saw in our outing was the one of Mary Durack. It shows an older version of a writer with her younger self as a child.

The inspiration for this sculpture is Dame Mary Durack, renowned Australian author, engaged in a dialogue with her ‘young self’ as a child. As an adult she represents an ancestor passing on the family history. The two ‘Mary’s’ share a sense of purpose; their attention is rivetted to each other, and on the manuscript – ‘Swan River Saga’. In this and her other works, Dame Mary captured the essence of life in Perth’s pioneer days.

Mary Durack wrote under the name “Virgilia” for The West Australian during 1937–38, a column for women and children in rural areas.

In 1950 she wrote the novel Keep Him My Country.

Zooming in, I loved to see her finger pointing to a place to her younger self.

Other important works include the saga of the Durack family, Kings in Grass Castles (1959) and its sequel, Sons in the Saddle; and a play, Swan River Saga: Life of Early Pioneer Eliza Shaw (1976). A biography, To Be Heirs Forever, also used Eliza Shaw as a subject. Durack also continued to write children’s literature, most notably the story of the Nyungar man, Yagan, which was published in 1964 as The Courteous Savage: Yagan of the Bibbulmun^[2] and Tjakamarra: Boy between two worlds.

Other works by Mary Durack included a two–act play, Ship of Dreams; an Australian Settler (1968);The Rock and the Sand (1969) is a history of missionaries in the state; The Aborigines in Australian Literature (1978) is part of the non-fiction component of her work, a subject often forming the basis of many of her works of fiction.

A list of her books is here.