Sir George Russell Drysdale (1912-1981), artist, was born on 7 February 1912 at Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, son of George Russell Drysdale, a gentleman of private means and Scottish ancestry, and his wife Isobel, née Gates, who was English. George Russell Drysdale was his grandfather. Having relinquished a commission with the Black Watch, his father returned in 1919 to Pioneer, the family's sugar farm on the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. The family moved to Melbourne in 1923 and young George Drysdale, known as `Tas', went to Geelong Church of England Grammar School. When his father acquired Boxwood Park in the Riverina district in 1926, Tas was introduced to the inland plains that had been memorialized by novels of Tom Collins [...