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.
Primrose Dunlop at Flemington for Derby Day in 1995.
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.
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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.
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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.
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