This was a formative experience for both. Nothing they saw or experienced on their travels overseas had such a lasting impact on their imaginations as the time they spent in the Kimberley, participating in station work, and walking in the bush with the Aboriginal women. As biographer Brenda Niall argues, for the rest of their lives the north was the creative inspiration for Mary’s writing and for Elizabeth’s art. Elizabeth often returned there to paint, even after the properties were sold off after their father’s death in 1950. In later life, each of them lived for a time in Broome, which provided a different history and images of northern Australia.

Both sisters lived long and productive creative lives, which often intertwined. But the circumstances of their personal lives were as different as their temperaments. Mary was ‘the good daughter, even-tempered and reliable’, and maintained this reputation through her adult life as the mother of a large family in Perth, keeping up communications with the far-flung Durack clan around Australia, assisting other writers, and helping her sister organise her art exhibitions. Her long marriage mirrored her mother’s, with a mostly absent husband (this was Horrie Miller, a pioneer of outback aviation) and six children to bring up. Elizabeth played a typical younger sister’s role of rebel and dissident; her letters reveal wilfulness and anarchic humour. She married Sydney writer, Frank Clancy, and had a daughter and a son, but separated from him. After several peripatetic years moving between Sydney, Melbourne, and the Kimberley, she brought the children back to settle in Perth.

Different as they were in temperament, the two sisters’ creative lives were closely connected. Their first creative collaboration was the monthly magazine sent to their father when they were schoolgirls, written by Mary and illustrated by Elizabeth. At Ivanhoe they produced All-About: The Story of a Black Community on Argyle Station, Kimberley (1935). A series ofcollaborative books about Aboriginal children addressed to white child readers followed, culminating in The Way of the Whirlwind (1941).

Mary published a novel, Keep Him My Country (1955), which echoes the tragic plot of Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929) as it explores the possibilities of black and white ‘sharing’ country. But it was her epic family history, Kings in Grass Castles (1959), that made Mary Durack’s name a household word. Inspired by family stories of emigration from Ireland to Goulburn, thence to western Queensland, and in the 1880s overlanding cattle to the Kimberley, she drew on her skills as a fiction writer to shape the epic and create characters from the material of letters and diaries. Beginning with Mary’s sense of loss after her father’s death, Kings addressed the question of what all that striving had accomplished: it was by no means a ‘triumphalist’ work, writes Niall. The book was a brilliant success, both in London (where it was published) and Australia, and it has been reissued in many editions since.

Well before Mary made her national and international début with these two books, Elizabeth had taken the Durack name into the art world with several exhibitions in the eastern states. She was one of only three women represented in the landmark London exhibition of Australian painting in 1961. She felt a particular affinity for Aboriginal subjects, and in the 1940s her large paintings ‘Broome Madonna’ (illustrated in True North) and ‘Ord River Venus’ made an impact. Aboriginal art in modern media had not yet been recognised, but Elizabeth’s early experience, at Ivanhoe, of working on her art with a traditional man, Jubul, was crucial in her development. She wrote: ‘I moved from oils to watercolour and developed in this medium the intricate relationship between the Aboriginal people and the landscape.’ Yet trying to earn a living for herself and her children by her art meant that she had to produce prints, sentimental images of large-eyed Aboriginal children, which she regarded as ‘potboilers’. Elizabeth undertook numerous innovative projects over her career, culminating in the beautiful ‘Aboriginal’ paintings executed in her eighties (also illustrated in this book). It was a fatefully ill-judged decision to present them to the world as the work of an invented Aboriginal man, ‘Eddie Burrup’.

Aboriginal people and cultural traditions featured centrally in Elizabeth’s images and Mary’s stories, and it was perhaps inevitable that this would eventually involve them both in controversies over white attitudes to Indigenous Australians. But when they began their creative lives in the 1940s and 1950s, there was an eager audience in urban Australia for such images and stories, and the Durack sisters felt that they had privileged access to this material – not as ‘owners’ of the land (as Niall makes clear they were not) but as lifelong friends of the Aboriginal people they knew in Broome and the Kimberley. Like their brothers Reg and Kim, who worked to restore the land that had been ruined by overstocking cattle, they were concerned about their inheritance of exploitation of the land and its people. Mary, characteristically, felt a responsibility to make their lives known and, in the case of the budding young writer Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo), to rescue him from the life in and out of prison that seemed to be his destiny. She sent him off to Melbourne, and played a major role in editing his first manuscript and finding a publisher for what eventually became Wild Cat Falling (1965). Her Foreword, hailing the book as ‘the first attempt by someone of Aboriginal blood to express himself in this form’, was later criticised for its racist attitudes, but as Mudrooroo himself has recently written: ‘then Western Australia was racist and I was glad to escape that awful scene for many years. I thank Mary Durack for this.’

Brenda Niall has produced a graceful and perceptive biography of two extraordinary creative women. She treads carefully through the minefield of controversies about their family’s exploitation of Aboriginal labour, as well as their own interventions in Indigenous art and politics. Her brief portraits of other members of the family, especially the two brothers who dedicated their lives to improving the land up north and their Lear-like father, are an additional bonus of this absorbing book.