[5] Dufty migrated to Australia with his father in September 1868, arriving in Melbourne aboard the SS Great Britain.

His older brothers, Francis and Edward, had migrated to Australia in 1865, while mother Martha and son Walter arrived in April 1871.

[2] The Dufty brothers produced studio portraits, landscape photographs and a large body of "cartes de visite", which had been popularised in Europe in the mid-19th century.

They photographed missionaries, European settlers, the Fijian hierarchy that naturally gravitated to this centre of power, and even the mountaineers or Kai Colo.[2] Dufty was out of Fiji in Australia and New Caledonia for extended periods of time and learned to speak fluent French in Noumea.

He subsequently removed to Sydney with his large family (six sons), and in 1906 resumed his career as a photographer, setting up a marine photography studio in Erskine Street that he ran very successfully for the next twenty years until his death at the age of 68, in 1924.