watercolourist, explorer, squatter, amateur scientist, botanist, palaeontologist and author, was a descendant of the Duke of Atholl on his father’s side and his mother was a daughter of the Scottish Lord Forbes. His family owned a property at Lugate, Midlothian, where George was born. As the third son and hence unlikely to inherit land, he was educated to make his own way in the world. He attended Rugby School where he was taught to draw by Edward Pretty, a minor topographical and landscape artist. A knowledge of the rudiments of topographical drawing was thought useful for a career in the army or the navy at that time in order to make drawings to accompany reconnaissance reports.
In 1839, aged seventeen, Fairholme worked with his childhood friends, the Leslie brothers, on a sheep station in New South Wales. He helped Walter Leslie and the Dalrymple and Leith-Hay brothers bring up their sheep to the Condamine so that they could squat on suitable grazing land on the Darling Downs. On the pioneering trek to Queensland they were often under attack from Aborigines and the journey took several months. Fairholme worked with the Leslie brothers at their Canning Downs Station until his father advanced him money to purchase his own Darling Downs property from them at South Toolburra, which he ran until 1852. Ludwig Leichhardt records in his letters a series of expeditions he made with Fairholme on the Condamine to search for fossil bones when staying at South Toolburra. He was so impressed by Fairholme that he invited him to join his expedition. Fairholme declined.
Fairholme was a guest at the neighbouring property of Coochin-Coochin when Conrad Martens visited in 1851. Martens dedicated two pencil sketches to him (Mitchell Library) and may have given Fairholme drawing instruction at the same time. Two years later Fairholme inherited the substantial property of Old Melrose from his childless uncle Adam Fairholme. He sold South Toolburra and his second property, Bromelton, on the Logan and Albert rivers, and returned home. Contemporary journals described him as 'the most handsome man ever to come through Cunningham’s Gap’ and 'a very intelligent and gentlemanly man … the most intelligent of any of the squatters’.
Now wealthy, Fairholme travelled extensively in Europe. The Macarthur family recorded meeting him in Paris, and in Austria he met and married the young Baroness Pauline Poellnitz-Frankenberg. He spent the rest of his life either in Scotland or on the Baroness’s estates at Wellenau, near Bregenz in the Austrian Alps, where he continued to write and illustrate books. His account of his early life on the Darling Downs, published privately for the benefit of his friends under the title Fifteen Views of Australia in 1845 by G.K.E.F. , contains some of the earliest views of Brisbane and the Darling Downs, each hand-coloured at the time of publication. Although his sense of perspective and figure drawing is somewhat rudimentary, Fairholme’s sketches of Queensland pastoral life and early Brisbane Town have charm and vitality.
