Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a Dalmatian (i.e. Balkan) immigrant.

1940		F. Sargeson ‘The Making of a New Zealander’ in A Man And His Wife (1944) 10: The man was one of two young Dallies who ran an orchard.
1956		T. Sutherland Green Kiwi 135: There was plenty of work for the ‘Dallys’.
1965		M. Shadbolt Among Cinders 190: You fellows guess I am bloody Dally from Dalmatia, eh?
1975		F. Sargeson More Than Enough 43: He was young, tall, strong, handsome, with cut of features besides dark eyes and colouring which suggested Croat descent what an earlier generation of New Zealanders would have called Austrian before the latter-day settling for Dally or Dalmatian.
1988		McGill Dict. of Kiwi Sl. 34/2: Dallie a Dalmatian New Zealander whose forebears came in the 1890s, before there was a Yugoslavia back home, to dig gum in Northland, and then founded our wine industry.
1991		N.Z. Geographic Apr.–June 42: Northlanders were gumdiggers, Maori and ‘Dallies’, and none of these epithets was a compliment.
2003		McGill Reed Dict. of N.Z. Sl. [as cit. 1988].