Australian socialite left at the altar lived a life of parties, privilege and scandal

PRIMROSE DUNLOP March 11, 1954-February 5, 2025

The death of Primrose Dunlop, at 70, recalls a life of great privilege, parties, high living, fundraising, scandal, contentment and, finally, tragically, premature degenerative illness.

The scandal – 35 years ago – occupied only a few weeks in a life of seven decades, but such was the media eruption that it must be part of her story.

In short, what began as a jape between friends developed into being one of the grandest celebrations of the decade. Engagement parties in Melbourne and New York, an annulment and Catholic conversion, the gift of a Bentley, a rented palazzo and a patriarch and basilica waiting in Venice. But the rub was that the groom was gay.

The nature of this relationship was apparently unknown to most of the cast in the saga (although this now seems improbable) – his fiancee, her formidable mother, the lachrymose man who was to give her away, her furious father who wasn’t, her affable stepfather who was to pay for the wedding, and perhaps quite a few of the guests – but it was only hinted at in the press and never admitted publicly.

The fact that the groom, a Qantas steward, claimed “courtesy titles” bestowed on him by his maternal grandmother from the vanished Ottoman Empire – Prince Giustiniani, Count of Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia, Baron Alexandroff – added glamour to the match. The fact that the groom’s mother was illegitimate may have stretched the concept of even a courtesy title and may have caused the bride’s mother some last-minute disquiet.

But four days before the wedding, with the bridal party already in Venice, the groom claims an argument erupted about him paying for “a rather large meal”. He and his best man fled to Paris, prompting sensational claims of “elopement”, despite the men having been together for two decades.

Both bride and groom retreated – he and his partner back to their pink terrace in Woolloomooloo, she to a new life in Melbourne.

Anne-Margaret Primrose Dunlop was born in Sydney on March 11, 1954, the only daughter of Roger Dunlop, a former army doctor who would practise as a GP for 61 years in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Primrose’s mother was Primrose Anderson Stuart, granddaughter of the founding chair of anatomy and physiology at the University of Sydney, Sir Thomas Anderson Stuart, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Primrose), a great-granddaughter of the fourth Earl of Rosebery – a link of which she was proud.

Young Primrose (known to her family as Pitty Pat) grew up in Bellevue Hill until 1970, when her mother met Melbourne stockbroker and philanthropist Sir Ian Potter at a party hosted by Bill and Sonia McMahon. “The spark was immediate and everlasting”, and Primrose snr moved to Melbourne.

On leaving school (Ascham), Primrose went to Italy to learn Italian and travelled with her mother and step-father, from the Atlas Copco copper mines in Africa to London and New York.

In 1975, 20 years after his third divorce, Potter wed Primrose snr, who had divorced Dunlop five years earlier. She became Lady Potter, and gained two step-daughters. The younger, Carolyn Parker Bowles, is the sister-in-law of Andrew, who at the time was married to Camilla, now the Queen. The following year, in February 1976, young Primrose married Roger White, but it did not last.

By the 1980s Primrose was a social columnist for The Sun-Herald. It was during this time that she met Lorenzo Montesini and Robert Straub, who were friends of her mother. Montesini, born in Alexandria, Egypt, he joined his father in Melbourne, where he was educated by the De La Salle Brothers, and in 1984, by now a Qantas steward, he joined Straub in Sydney. They had met in Vietnam in 1967 during National Service, and soon joined the Sydney social elite.

By the end of 1989, Lorenzo and Primrose were engaged and she was working for Lord (Alistair) McAlpine, then chairman of the British Conservative Party, owner of the Intercontinental and laird of Broome. He was to be among the 70 guests in Venice. So was Barbara Taylor Bradford, author of Secrets from the Past and Hold the Dream.

The most direct accounts of the match that didn’t happen in Venice in Holy Week 1990 can be found in Montesini’s memoir, My Life and Other Misdemeanours (1999) and Dunlop’s autobiography, The Nowhere Place (2011).

In Melbourne in the early ’90s, young Primrose lived quietly. She met George Kirk, a Polish-born commercial real estate agent in his 50s who had jumped a Royal Navy ship in Tasmania and come to Melbourne. Not long before their wedding at St Peter’s Eastern Hill in March 1993 (described as “quiet” – albeit with 200 guests at the Melbourne Club), it was revealed George was actually Count Jerzy Krasicki von Siecin, scion of a 15th century noble family from Masovia.

So the bride who was almost Countess of Phanaar became Countess Krasicki.

She lived with George in South Yarra and Brighton East and from 1994 with their daughter, Zofia. Primrose remained in the orbit of her mother, whose philanthropy and patronage of the arts after Potter’s death, in March 1994, earned her a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2003. Potter, fond of his stepdaughter, left her $50,000.

The years took their toll. Straub succumbed to AIDS and died in 1995. Dunlop died in 2012, leaving two sons, James and Thomas, from his second marriage; and after 25 years with Primrose, Krasicki died in 2018.

Primrose was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and entered full-time care in 2022.

A week after Primrose’s death on February 5, her mother, who, with Zofia, survives her, announced a donation of $1 million to one of her charities, The Florey, in honour of her daughter.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.