His father John Hutchison ( – 1843) of Leith, Scotland arrived in Melbourne, Victoria in December 1839, by the ship St. Mungo, and took up land there for a cattle station. His father died and his mother (née McKenzie) married Andrew Dunn (1819 – 12 December 1901) and moved to Dunnoo Dunnoo near Edenhope, Victoria. After a dispute with neighbors regarding the legality of the land they were occupying, they moved in 1848 to Barooka, near Kingston SE in South Australia. Around 1850 they moved to Woolmit, previously known as Biscuit Flat, from Robe. William was educated at John Whinham's North Adelaide Grammar School. In 1862 Hutchison and Dunn purchased Murra Binna station from "Tommy" Woods, and ran that property, where he was a successful racehorse breeder and Adam Lindsay Gordon was a frequent visitor. In 1876 they purchased Morambro station of from the Oliver brothers. Hutchison acquired considerable additional property by the illegal process known as "dummying", using third parties who owned no property to "select" Government land secretly on his behalf. George Ash, of The Narracoorte Herald in an editorial questioned his fitness to hold the position of Justice of the Peace, and was successfully (and ruinously) sued by Hutchison, whose lawyer, Josiah Symon, QC conducted a masterfully technical case against Ash, which rendered practically all his evidence, including Crown Law documents and Hansard inadmissible.
