George Ernest Morrison

George Ernest "G. E." Morrison (4 February 1862 – 30 May 1920), also known as Morrison of Peking or Chinese Morrison, was an Australian adventurer and The Times Peking correspondent.

Morrison was born in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. His father George Morrison (brother of Alexander Morrison) was headmaster of The Geelong College at which school he was educated. It was at The Geelong College that Morrison won a gold medal, in 1876, for Scripture History. The medal (5.4 cm in diameter) is handcrafted and engraved by an unknown maker. The gold disc medal is surrounded by a chased Scottish Thistle and Oak wreath and attached with a blue ribbon. During a vacation, before his tertiary education, he walked from Geelong to Adelaide, a distance of about 600 miles (960 km). He initially studied at the University of Melbourne. After passing his first year medicine he took a vacation trip down the Murray River in a canoe from Albury, New South Wales to the mouth, a distance of 1650 miles (2,640 km), covered in 65 days. Bypassing his next examinations, Morrison shipped on a vessel trading to the South Sea islands, discovered some of the evils of the Kanaka traffic, and wrote articles on it which appeared in The Age and had some influence on the eventual suppression of it. He next visited New Guinea and did part of the return journey on a Chinese junk. Landing at Normanton, Queensland at the end of 1882 Morrison decided to walk to Melbourne. He was not quite 21, he had no horses or camels and was unarmed, but carrying his swag and swimming or wading the rivers in his path, he walked the 2043 miles (3270 km) in 123 days. No doubt the country had been much opened up in the twenty years since Burke and Wills well-funded failure, but the journey was nevertheless a remarkable feat, which stamped Morrison as a great natural bushman and explorer. He arrived at Melbourne on 21 April 1883 to find that during his journey Thomas McIlwraith, the premier of Queensland, had annexed part of New Guinea, and was vainly endeavouring to get the support of the British government for his action.

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