[1] He quit his studies in late 1906 or early 1907 to work for the Adelaide Advertiser[2] and in mid-1910 helped out as interim Murray Bridge correspondent for his father's newspaper.
The daily newspaper failed, with a loss of between £120,000 and £150,000 in the first few years, but the Sun News-Pictorial was quite successful, and was purchased by the Herald & Weekly Times in 1925.
[2] Dumas was, with Murdoch's blessing, pleased to be seen as a partisan editor, and throughout the Depression supported those he deemed as offering "sound government".
With the advent of (later Sir) Thomas Playford as Liberal Premier, Dumas found a leader whom he could whole-heartedly support.
Playford had ambitious plans to encourage multi-national companies to establish manufacturing bases in the State, and immediately after World War II, with the support of The Advertiser and an electoral system biased towards country voters, immediately set about implementing his plans, which involved nationalizing and upgrading the Adelaide Electric Supply Company and the various regional electricity providers as the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA) and establishing the Housing Trust to provide austere but economical housing for workers with families, and courting major overseas companies such as General Motors and Philips Lighting and Electrical to establish manufacturing bases in South Australia, as well as encouraging established local companies such as BHP, Pope Products, Perry Engineering, Clipsal, Simpsons, SABCO and Actil to expand,[9] resulting in a vibrant manufacturing sector, later decried as a "rust-bucket economy" and now largely dismantled.
They had three daughters: Dumas, Lloyd Sir (1969), The story of a full life, Sun Books, retrieved 3 January 2015