Australian Dictionary of Biography

Don Dunstan, 1970

Adelaide City Council Archives

Donald Allan Dunstan (1926–1999), premier, lawyer, and restaurateur, was born on 21 September 1926 in Suva, Fiji, younger child and only son of South Australian-born parents Francis Vivian Dunstan, store manager, and his wife Ida May, née Hill, a former schoolteacher. When Don was two, his father took the position of manager of the Morris Hedstrom Ltd store at Nausori, a town thirteen miles (21 km) to Suva’s north-east. He attended kindergarten locally, before being sent to the elite Suva Boys’ Grammar School at age six. During the week he lived at Miss Grayburn’s private boarding house for small boys. After only a few months there, he caught a staphylococcus infection, resulting in boils. Nursed at home, he recovered slowly and, he recalled, ‘virtually had to learn to walk again’ (Dunstan 1993, 15).

To assist his recovery, at age seven Don was sent to South Australia to live with his maternal grandmother and aunts at Murray Bridge. There he attended the local infant and primary schools. It was a distressing separation from his parents; he had few friends and was lonely. His Aunt Beth ran the town’s newsagency and brought books home for him to read. Don also listened to music and took elocution lessons. He helped his grandmother to bottle fruit, and began to take real pleasure in food. Partly because he himself was bullied at school, he defended two other children, an Aboriginal girl and an Italian boy, from racist taunts. He recalled these playground encounters as his first experience of standing up for others against injustice.

Those long years in Murray Bridge were broken up by spending school holidays in Adelaide, in the house that his paternal uncle Bay (Howard) and aunt Effy (Ada) shared with her parents. Effy was the daughter of the then lord mayor of Adelaide, (Sir) Jonathan Cain. Although Cain was politically conservative, Don was inspired by the leadership role he took during the Depression in providing assistance to the many unemployed, initiating the Lord Mayor’s Relief Fund and the United Relief Council. He would credit Cain with sparking his interest in politics, and developing his awareness of social inequalities and the need to address them.

In early 1937 Dunstan returned to Fiji. By then, there was a bridge over the Rewa River, enabling him to live at home and resume his studies at Suva Grammar. Students were taught according to the New Zealand school curriculum and prepared for New Zealand higher school and civil service examinations. Fundamental to the school was its racial criterion restricting admission to boys who had at least fifty-one per cent European parentage. Dunstan later joked disparagingly that the headmaster must have used a light meter to implement the policy. His best friend had Fijian heritage, although Dunstan would say he looked completely European. His parents did not approve of the friendship and they restricted out-of-school-hours contact between the boys, a decision he thought was ‘absolutely absurd and hurtful and bad’ (Dunstan 1980).

Although not a diligent scholar, Dunstan was a bookworm and academically successful. He came second in his final year examinations; his father, however, was disappointed he was not dux. His family intended that he should follow his sister, Beth, and undertake his final years of high school in New Zealand, but an unexpected offer to live with his aunt Effy and uncle Bay’s family enabled him to attend the Collegiate School of St Peter in Adelaide. By 1940, when he returned to South Australia and went to live with them, Cain had died and they had moved to Glenelg.

From 1940 to 1943 Dunstan attended St Peter’s. He was quite uninterested in sport, the school’s dominant culture, although he did play House football. Instead he joined the Boy Scout troop and the debating team, but it was in the school plays that he truly shone. In 1941 and 1943 he took leading roles in the dramatic society’s annual productions, including starring in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln. He would continue his interest in amateur theatre after he left school and took up part-time work in radio. His participation in the union movement in the 1950s was through the local branch of Actors’ and Announcers’ Equity of Australia. Academically, his interests lay in music, English, history, and languages including Latin. Along with essay prizes, he won the school’s public-speaking prize while still only in his Intermediate year (1941). In 1943 he passed Leaving Honours and appeared on the State-wide general honours list. In that final year he was a prefect for Da Costa House.

Dunstan pursued law at the University of Adelaide (LLB, 1949) as well as taking arts subjects. In his first year and a half he also studied piano at the Elder Conservatorium of Music. From September 1946 he lived at St Mark’s Anglican men’s college, North Adelaide. He was active in student politics in 1947 and 1948, being elected to the Students’ Representative Council and as its delegate on the Union Council. After early flirtations with communism and the Liberal and Country League, he joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1945. He was prominent in both the Socialist Club and the university’s Fabian Society, and was dubbed by the student newspaper the ‘suave Socialist’ (On Dit 1948, 1). When the Fabian Society of South Australia held its inaugural meeting on 4 September 1947, he was appointed to its executive.

Early in 1948 Dunstan fell in love with Gretel Ellis (anglicised from Elsasser), a new student on campus whom he came to know through the Socialist Club. From a highly educated German and Swiss Jewish family who had fled Germany in 1938, she had arrived in Australia in 1939. She quickly became proficient in English, and in 1947 won the Tennyson medal for English literature in the Leaving Honours examinations. The couple announced their engagement in September 1948. Having served his articled clerkship with the Adelaide firm of Browne, Rymill, & Stevens, Dunstan was admitted as a practitioner of the Supreme Court of South Australia on 30 December 1948. He had intended to complete his arts degree and undertake honours in history and political science, but these plans were interrupted by his mother’s death on 13 December that year.

Soon after, Dunstan returned to Fiji to be with his father Viv and to take up a legal career there. In February 1949 he was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Fiji. He came back to Adelaide to marry Gretel on 4 June 1949 at St Bartholomew’s Church of England, Norwood. She travelled with him to Fiji and, after briefly living with Viv at Nausori, they moved to Suva where their first child was born. Don worked as a solicitor handling the Magistrate’s Court cases for Grahame & Co. The cases he handled frequently involved Fijian and Indian, and occasionally Chinese, plaintiffs, and often related to minor commercial dealings. Some of the predominantly European legal fraternity in Fiji disliked his commitment to racial equality. While there he honed his ‘techniques of cross-examination’ and developed ‘a fine sense of the use of timing and tactic’ (Dunstan 1981, vii). Outside of work he renewed his association with the scouting movement, becoming a district commissioner for the Rewa area in 1949.

In early 1951 Dunstan and his family returned to Adelaide. He set up office in the old Torrens Chambers at Victoria Square, but struggled to get work in a city already overflowing with lawyers. During that year he often conversed with Elliott Johnston, a lawyer and communist, at a shop near his practice. Among other matters, they talked about their opposition to (Sir) Robert Menzies’s campaign to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. Johnston recalled trying to recruit Dunstan to the party—an objective in which he failed, owing to Dunstan’s commitment to both democracy and the ALP. By October Dunstan was honorary secretary of the party’s Norwood electorate committee. In that capacity he wrote to H. V. Evatt, the Federal party leader, to congratulate him on the ‘magnificent fight’ (Dunstan 1951) he had led to defeat the referendum to ban the CPA.

Dunstan’s career prospects improved dramatically in 1952. Early in the year he took up the invitation of Patricia Hackett, whom he knew through amateur theatre circles, to share her law chambers on Grenfell Street. He also secured a significant case courtesy of the ALP Federal member for Hindmarsh, Clyde Cameron, who had recognised his political ability and was determined to support him. Dunstan represented a group of mostly British migrants against Commonwealth Hostels Ltd which had suddenly raised their charges, contrary to an agreement. The full bench of the High Court of Australia, while rejecting part of Dunstan’s argument, upheld the basic principles of the case, determining that Commonwealth Hostels had breached State Prices Regulation Acts. The case cost the Commonwealth over £8 million. For Dunstan, it was a turning point that enabled him to emerge from legal obscurity.

When Don and Gretel had shifted back to Adelaide he had intended to go into politics. In late 1951 they bought a house in Norwood, in part because he had the support of key figures in the ALP to run for preselection for the local State seat. During the campaign in early 1953, he demonstrated determination and energy. Election pamphlets showed him sitting at a desk, a young, slim man, formally dressed in a suit and tie, wearing heavy horn-rimmed glasses. While he was aware that he was an unusual ALP candidate, he rejected suggestions that he modify his cultured diction and pad his suit to give him the appearance of broader shoulders. At the general election on 7 March he defeated the sitting Liberal and Country League (LCL) member, A. R. Moir, by more than two thousand votes.

Arguably, Dunstan had won the campaign through sheer effort. Convinced that direct contact with voters would lead to success, he visited thousands of homes, wearing out two pairs of shoes in the process. He developed a strong and enduring support base in the electorate. In later years his practice of door-knocking was assisted by his family, especially Gretel, who also made sandwiches and scones for polling-booth volunteers on election days. Until the mid-1960s, he was also a practising Christian and regular churchgoer. In 1956 he became a member of the Adelaide diocesan synod of the Church of England, representing St Mark’s church, Maylands—close to his George Street home. He remained the member for Norwood until his retirement and continued to live in the electorate for the rest of his life.

At twenty-six Dunstan was the youngest member in the House of Assembly. He shared few interests with his Labor colleagues. Typically they were working-class men who had received little of the educational advantages he had enjoyed. Unlike many of them, he was uninterested in sport, preferring theatre and the arts. Yet he developed ways of working beside them and by September 1955, he was sufficiently popular to be elected to the ALP State Executive. Alongside his parliamentary career he juggled his legal work, forming a partnership with John Roder, a friend from his student days. His family commitments also expanded with the birth of two more children in 1954 and 1957. Gretel returned to university part time in the late 1950s and later tutored in the economics department at the University of Adelaide.

Dunstan would come to regard his contribution to Aboriginal rights as his most important legislative legacy. From the mid-1950s he regularly attended Aborigines Advancement League meetings and came to know several influential Indigenous activists including Bob Wanganeen at Point Pearce, and Gladys Elphick, Olga Fudge, and Charles Perkins in Adelaide. He valued their advice and assisted when he could, providing legal counsel and political advocacy. His support for Aboriginal rights attracted public attention after Rupert Maxwell Stuart, an itinerant Arrernte man from central Australia, was convicted and sentenced to hang for the 1958 rape and murder of a nine-year-old white girl, Mary Olive Hattam, near Ceduna. In the wake of allegations that the police had coerced Stuart’s confession, and moved by growing opposition to capital punishment, Dunstan urged his ALP colleagues to take up the case and led debate on it in the House. In August 1959 he introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment that received bipartisan support until the LCL premier, Sir Thomas Playford, suddenly commuted Stuart’s sentence to life imprisonment. The next year Dunstan added the presidency of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines to his many responsibilities.

When Dunstan was first elected in 1953, South Australia’s electorates were malapportioned in favour of rural voters who were less likely to support the ALP. While some Labor parliamentarians had become resigned to remaining in Opposition, he and other energetic members embarked on a long campaign to return to power and overhaul the State’s electoral system. In 1962, by strategically identifying strong candidates to contest vulnerable seats and supporting them with a television campaign, Labor won over 54 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and a further two seats, yet still failed to secure office. Finally, after thirty-two years in Opposition, Labor came to power at the 1965 election, with the former stonemason Frank Walsh as premier.

In the new government, Dunstan was appointed attorney-general, and minister of social welfare and of Aboriginal affairs. He immediately set to work on legal and administrative changes to the electoral system. The Children’s Welfare and Public Relief Board was soon abolished, and he oversaw the introduction of a more progressive welfare system. Adopting a policy of integration rather than assimilation, he oversaw landmark legislation, the first in Australia to ban racial discrimination and to establish Aboriginal rights to land, including the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act (1966), the Prohibition of Discrimination Act (1966), and the Aboriginal Affairs Act Amendment Act (1966–67). In 1967 he served as chairman of the Federal ALP civil liberties committee. During 1965 he had also been appointed Queen’s Counsel.

On 1 June 1967, following Walsh’s retirement, Dunstan became the thirty-fifth premier of South Australia. A sharp dresser, who had built up his physical fitness, he stood in dramatic contrast to the likes of Walsh and Playford. He regularly worked out at a gym in the city and had taken up surfing (named ‘Surfer of the Year’ in 1968). Considering the existing conventions ‘a sort of hardening of the arteries of government,’ he shunned the expected look for a premier—‘formal sort of suit, rather stuffy looking office, atmosphere of tradition’ (NAA M2684). His rise to power was part of a broader generational shift in ALP leadership, signalled only months earlier when Arthur Calwell finally stepped down and Gough Whitlam became leader of the Federal Opposition. Dunstan and Whitlam had met in 1953, and from that time worked together on a range of policy issues, succeeding not least in 1965 in the removal of the White Australia policy from the Federal ALP platform.

At the election on 2 March 1968, the ALP won more than 50 per cent of the vote, but lost the election. The new Liberal premier, Steele Hall, reformed the House of Assembly electoral system to a degree, in effect ensuring his eventual demise. Two years later at the 30 May 1970 election, the ALP secured a solid majority of twenty-seven seats to the LCL’s twenty. Dunstan was back in power, with a clear mandate and a sizeable reform agenda. He would remain premier for nine years, even retaining power in 1975 when there was a strong national swing against the ALP. The period became known as the ‘Dunstan decade.’

For those seeking a socially progressive political culture, Dunstan’s reascension was galvanising. In a reform program that was extraordinarily wide-ranging, he maintained a genuine and personal interest in initiatives focused on the arts. He ensured that the Adelaide Festival Centre was larger than previously planned, encompassing a multi-venue performing arts complex. Furthermore, he provided foundation support to the State Theatre Company of South Australia; established the statutory State Opera of South Australia and acquired Her Majesty’s Theatre in Grote Street as its home; cooperated with the Victorian government to support the Australian Dance Theatre, a modern dance company; set up the Jam Factory craft and design centre; and established the South Australian Film Corporation which produced classic films including Sunday Too Far Away (1975), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and Storm Boy (1976).

Through pioneering legislative changes, Dunstan’s government emerged as a champion of civil liberties. In 1965, when attorney-general, he had sought to decriminalise homosexuality but was unable to secure the support of the ALP caucus. He continued to speak out on the subject, arguing that existing laws were ‘the product of 19th Century repressions’ (Dunstan 1970, 5). Ten years later his government passed a private member’s bill, introduced by the attorney-general, Peter Duncan, that abolished male homosexuality as a crime. Also in 1975 the Dunstan government passed Australia’s first Sex Discrimination Act, which prohibited discrimination based on sex and established a Sex Discrimination Board. Alongside these changes, his government strengthened women’s rights, creating a Women’s Advisory Unit and introducing support services encompassing a Rape Crisis Centre, Women’s Community Health Centre, and Sexual Assault Referral Centre. In 1976, after persistent campaigning, he eventually succeeded in abolishing capital punishment in the State.

Under Dunstan’s government a range of consumer protections were also enacted, from the sale of second-hand cars to manufacturers’ warranties and credit arrangements. Many initiatives arose from his own passions. His interest in urban planning and housing policy resulted in widening the remit of the South Australian Housing Trust so that it contributed to urban renewal. Moreover, the trust would assist not just workers to obtain housing, but also pensioners, the homeless and unemployed, Aboriginal people, and the disabled. His concern for heritage preservation saved not only Her Majesty’s Theatre, but also Ayers House, Edmund Wright House, and the Old Parliament House. His reforms to electoral laws were particularly significant. By 1977, after decades of malapportionment, he presided over arguably the most democratic State in Australia, with an independent electoral commission overseeing fair boundaries, and a reformed Upper House.

Although journalists were persistent in trying to get Dunstan to admit to being gay, he never used that term about himself. He believed that ‘to be human was to be ambisexual’ (Patience 2014). Many of his sexual affairs were with women, but he also had numerous male lovers, from the late 1960s onwards. In 1972 he and Gretel separated, and they divorced in 1974. He found a block of land in Clara Street, Norwood, and had a modest but stylish modern house designed and built. Especially prized was the open kitchen that enabled him to cook and entertain, and the large vegetable garden and orchard at the back. On 22 December 1976 he married his research assistant, Adele Patricia Koh (formerly Reece), a Chinese Malaysian journalist, in a civil ceremony at his home. It was a tragically short-lived marriage; she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in March 1978 and died in October the same year. Her death, and the strain of caring for her during very difficult months as premier, were contributing factors to Dunstan’s worsening health.

The difficult time was compounded by the political storm over Dunstan’s sacking of the police commissioner Harold Salisbury. For years questions had been raised as to whether some files kept by the Special Branch were political, and sexual, in nature. A January 1978 report found that they were. The crux of the matter was that Salisbury misled Dunstan twice about the files, who in turn misled the parliament. Salisbury denied his accountability to the government and refused to resign. Dunstan’s sacking of him was constitutionally justified, though done so quickly that it sparked public outcry and demonstrations. A June 1978 royal commission report found that the dismissal was justifiable. While Dunstan was vindicated, the criticism took a political and personal toll. In February 1979 he collapsed in the House during question time, and resigned on the advice of his doctor. In June he was appointed AC.

During and beyond Dunstan’s political career, with his high national popularity, commentators speculated as to whether he might enter national politics. Some ALP heavyweights and many supporters had suggested it. The evidence is mixed as to whether Dunstan wanted to do so, or would have been willing to take the political risks. After his resignation, he became a commentator and writer. He was already the author of two books, having published the best-selling Don Dunstan’s Cookbook (1976), and Don Dunstan’s Australia (1978). In 1980 he became the compere of the television program Capriccio! in which he interviewed personalities in the media and the arts about music, their selected piece being performed on the program by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He also undertook a short stint as guest editor of POL, a stylish lifestyle magazine. In 1981 Don Dunstan’s Australia was adapted for an Australian Broadcasting Commission television series, accompanied by a small paperback, titled Australia, A Personal View: The Dunstan Documentaries. By then he had begun to write his political memoirs, partly in response to Des Ryan and Mike McEwen’s sensationalist book It’s Grossly Improper that had appeared in 1979 and deployed salacious details of one of Dunstan’s affairs to suggest, somewhat bizarrely, corruption on his part. Felicia: The Political Memoirs of Don Dunstan was published in November 1981 and was launched in Adelaide by the Labor Opposition leader John Bannon.

In August 1982 Dunstan was recruited as the director of tourism and chairman of the Victorian Government Travel Authority (Tourism Commission from 1983), serving under the recently elected ALP premier John Cain. While his experience in developing the tourism industry in South Australia made him well-suited for the role, it was a step down from his previous career. Moreover, his public service contract imposed conditions that he found difficult to accept, including restricting his ability to speak on current affairs. His major project was to restore Melbourne’s Chinatown as a cultural precinct and establish the Museum of Chinese Australian History (1985). Unsurprisingly, he was targeted by the State Liberal Opposition, which frequently criticised his initiatives. In December 1986 he resigned, almost a year and a half before the end of his contract. He would later say it was the only part of his career he regretted.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Dunstan played a prominent role as an activist for human rights and democracy. He served as Australian president (1982–87) of the Freedom From Hunger Campaign, and then chaired (1992–93) Community Aid Abroad (Australia). A prominent voice on matters relating to neighbouring Pacific nations, he presided over the Australian branch of the Movement for Democracy in Fiji, and chaired the Fiji Independent News Service in the wake of military coups in the country on 14 May and 25 September 1987. His international activism also embraced southern Africa. In October–November 1989, he spent a month in South West Africa (Republic of Namibia) as an election observer for the United Nations. From 1987 to 1993 he was president of the Mandela Foundation of Australia. The foundation’s campaign for Mandela’s release from gaol and the end of the South African apartheid regime, culminated in his visit to Australia in October 1990.

In Melbourne in 1986, Dunstan had met Steven Cheng (Cheng Man Sin), a student from Hong Kong undertaking a degree in biochemistry at the University of Melbourne. In 1988 Cheng moved to Adelaide to live with Dunstan, and took honours in microbiology at Flinders University. Dunstan taught Cheng how to cook, and he studied at the Regency Park School of Food and Catering. In July 1994 they opened their first restaurant, Don’s Table, at Norwood. Cheng was the head chef while Dunstan took on front of house duties, his reputation drawing customers even from interstate. Hoping to expand the business they moved to a two-storey, 1860s bluestone house in Kensington Road. They opened in July 1998 but the venture was short-lived, and a financial catastrophe for the pair.

Beginning in 1991, Dunstan endured several bouts with cancer. In October 1998 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, although he had never smoked. Despite his deteriorating health, he continued to participate in national debate, speaking for democratic socialism, criticising neo-liberalism, and arguing for Australia to become a republic. Survived by Cheng, and the daughter and two sons from his first marriage, he died at home on 6 February 1999; he was cremated following a small, private funeral. On 12 February thousands of people gathered inside and outside the Festival Centre for a memorial service, which was broadcast on television and radio. Soon after his death, the Dunstan Foundation was established at the University of Adelaide to foster research and education in social justice. The playhouse at the Festival Centre (2002) and the South Australian electoral district of Norwood (2012) were renamed in his honour.

Dunstan had presented a different version of Australian masculinity—bisexual, elegantly clad, immaculately coiffed, well-spoken, and cosmopolitan. Together with Whitlam, he had changed the ALP by attracting middle-class and intellectual voters. His legislation was innovative, making South Australia a beacon of reform, and he had driven the lengthy campaign for democratic constitutional and electoral reform in the State.