George Ross Morton was a comic actor, dramatist and journalist. He was the grandson of English playwright Thomas Morton (ca.1764-1838). He appears to have arrived in Australia in the early 1850s, after which he worked on the stage in Tasmania, together with his wife Martha. He came to New South Wales in ca. 1855, where he initially appears to have been connected with a theatre at Maitland. However, later in the decade he was living in Sydney, where he was connected with the Victoria Theatre, and subsequently the Prince of Wales Theatre. During the early 1860s he combined his stage career with journalism, and he was for a number of years on the staff of Bell's Life in Sydney. In ca. 1865, he took over from G.B. Barton (q.v.) as editor of Sydney Punch, a position which he held until his death in 1869. During his time at Bell's Life in Sydney, Morton developed a close friendship with George Ferrers Pickering (q.v.), the newspaper's part-owner and editor, and even after his move to Sydney Punch, Morton continued to write a theatre column and contribute occasional items to Bell's Life in Sydney (which suggests that he might have written many of the anonymous witty, satirical items which appeared in Bell's Life in Sydney during the 1860s). In 1872, his daughter Katherine married Rowland Ferrers Pickering (q.v.), George Ferrers Pickering's son.
