Park Laurie

James Park Dawson Laurie (1846 – 2 December 1928), generally known as "Park Laurie", was a pastoralist and politician in the colony of South Australia.

Park was born at Kangatong station, near Warrnambool, Victoria, the third son of the (Presbyterian) Rev. Alexander Laurie (c. 1817 – 5 February 1854).

The Rev. Laurie, of Covington, Lanarkshire, and his wife Janet Laurie, née Nicol, (c. 1822 – 25 July 1903) had been sent out to Portland, Victoria to establish a church there in 1841. In 1842 he founded a Presbyterian school, run by J. S. Stewart.

In 1848 Rev. Laurie left the church and founded the Portland Herald, of which he was sole proprietor and editor, making a few enemies in the process.The Portland Herald and Belfast and Warrnambool Advocate (to give its full name) folded in 1855. Sons Andrew and Park were educated in Portland and later learnt much of the art of printing.

The widowed Janet Laurie and her four sons moved to Gambierton (now Mount Gambier) and set about founding a newspaper, The Border Watch, whose first issue came out on 26 April 1861 as a 4-page, single broadsheet weekly. John Watson (ca.1842 – 13 December 1925), another Scotsman and later Mount Gambier's first mayor, joined in 1863 as editor, and he and A. F. Laurie as publisher managed the company for the next 50 years.

Park divested himself of his share of the newspaper around 1870 and took up pastoral leases Charkut Station and Laurie Park, and purchased Mailman Station on the Lower Darling, in partnership with his brother-in-law, A. McEdward, of Melbourne.

He was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly seat of Victoria on two occasions and sat from 14 April 1870 to 6 December 1871 and 29 May 1873 to 21 February 1875. He had two colleagues for the first term: William Paltridge and (briefly) Neville Blyth. In his second stint his colleague was T. Wilde Boothby.

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