Born on 3 June 1901 at Charleville, Queensland, Duncan-Kemp was the daughter of William and Laura Duncan (née Davis).
She elected to remain on the remote property, raising cattle with the assistance of local Aborigines, hired hands and, when they were old enough, Duncan-Kemp and her two sisters.
[1] Well ahead of her time, she believed that "Aborigines were the true owners of the land"[1] and understood the devastating effect that white settlement had had on them.
[1] Yvette Steinhauer, in a 2009 review of Kemp's work, praised the "value of her books as cultural products" providing "rare documentation of the frontier conflict and the Aboriginal resistance movements" operating near her home.
[1] In 2020, her daughter-in-law, Dawn Duncan-Kemp, published Those Bloody Duncans: A history of Mooraberrie, 1860–1998,[3] using unpublished material written by Kemp, including "The Days of My Years" (1942).