Cyril Dunstan Shaw was the son of Alfred Moss Shaw, a chartered accountant, and Amanda Shaw (q.v.) nee Cormack. The parents lived in New Zealand and then Vancouver, British Columbia from 1900. They took up residence in Pasadena, California in 1939 where Amanda Shaw died in 1941. Cyril Shaw had a brilliant scholastic career in Sydney before studying law at Lincoln's Inn Fields in London and qualifying in 1909. He did not practice law but in the 1920s wrote a textbook on the American constitution. Shaw spent many years travelling the world in tramp steamers and returned to Australia in 1950. He settled in Southport, Queensland.
(Source: Foreword by N. H. Poyitt, Sydney in Cyril Dunstan Shaw and Amanda Shaw Christmas Trees and Other Verses (1959): 3)
