The Geelong Doctor George Ernest Morrison’s Quiet Walk Across Southwest China
In February 1894, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian dressed in Chinese clothing boarded a Yangtse river steamer in Shanghai. He spoke almost no Mandarin, carried no weapon, and had no particular plan for what would happen if anyone asked him a question he couldn’t answer. He was heading into the interior of Qing dynasty China — through the great river gorges, across the mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, through the Shan States, and over the Kachin Hills to Burma. Around 4,800 kilometres on foot.
His name was George Ernest Morrison. He had grown up in Geelong, dropped out of medical school, and couldn’t get a job at the Melbourne Argus. Within three years of this walk, he would be the Peking correspondent for The Times of London — the most influential journalistic post in Asia — a position he would hold for the next two decades.
The Geelong Doctor is the story of that journey: the gorges, the famine country, the opium dens, the river pilots, the porters, and the country that quietly dismantled everything Morrison thought he knew.
Published by Three Family Press, 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-7646790-0-8
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