sketcher, missionary, haberdasher and banker, was born on 19 March 1800, the twenty-first child of John Walker by his second wife Elizabeth, née Ridley. George’s mother died when he was young and his father found employment in Paris leaving the boy to be raised by his grandmother at Newcastle. Apprenticed to a linen draper, Hawdon Bragg, a member of the Society of Friends, in 1827 George too became a Quaker. Four years later, despite recurring ill-health, he accompanied his friend James Backhouse on a nine-year mission to Australia and South Africa. His journal for the voyage out, undertaken in the latter part of 1831, contains several rough pencil coastal profiles, including Distant View of South and South-West Cape, Van Diemen’s Land and Distant View of Coast between d’Entrecasteaux Channel and Tasman’s Head, Van Diemen’s Land (Mitchell Library).
Walker and Backhouse began their mission in Van Diemen’s Land, to which they returned in 1835 and 1837, in the interim travelling (mainly on foot) throughout New South Wales, Queensland, South and Western Australia. In 1838-40 the pair were in South Africa, during which time they travelled 6000 miles and visited all eighty European mission stations. Walker always kept a journal; his South African diaries document, in clumsy pencil and watercolour sketches, the appearance of many of these mission outposts as well as local scenery and dwellings. The drawings are often unfinished, possibly a reflection of what must have been scant leisure hours.
Walker’s sketchbook (Dixson Library) contains fifteen pages of pencil sketches of Norfolk Island, Australian and South African scenes (1832-38) although, as in his South African journal, many are unfinished and some are merely bare outlines. Government House and Military Barracks, Norfolk Island (April 1835), however, is a full-page pencil sketch which displays a neat draughtsmanship, while a coastal profile View of Macquarie Harbour, from the Tamar, off Wellington Head (7 July 1832) is also more sophisticated than his usual work. The remaining sketches (mainly scenes in South Africa, with few of Australian interest) have little to recommend them artistically.
On leaving Cape Town in September 1840 Walker and Backhouse parted, never to meet again, yet maintaining a life-long correspondence. Backhouse returned to York and Walker to Van Diemen’s Land, where he married Sarah Benson Mather to whom he had been engaged for over six years. They had ten children. In 1841 he successfully returned to his original trade of draper, although his refusal to cater to Hobart Town’s 'vitiated taste for finery and display’ proved somewhat restrictive. His shop also functioned as a Welfare Centre, Bible Depot and the headquarters of Walker’s Temperance Society; in 1845 it became the base of his successful Hobart Town Savings Bank.
W.H. Harvey met Walker in March 1855 and went on local botanical excursions with him. By then, Harvey commented, Walker was 'fairly bitten with the phrenological mania’. Having been invited to attend a phrenological party at Walker’s house one evening where he paid 10s to have his head felt '& got a sheet of gammon & spinnach in lieu thereof’, Harvey decided that he 'was rather tired of the “Savant” in a very brief time’. Towards the end of 1858 Walker’s health deteriorated and he died on 2 February 1859.
.
