In 1964, following their marriage, Russell Drysdale (Tass) and Maisie Purves Smith travelled to Queensland. The works that followed from this trip were to form much of his critically acclaimed Leicester Galleries exhibition in London in 1965. Tass and Maisie were in England for the exhibition, and visited Europe, America and Canada before returning to Australia in 1966. Christmas 1965 was spent in Italy.

In his catalogue for Russell Drysdale: Drawings, Lou Klepac noted that Drysdale would often conjure sketches from memory and gift them to friends for their birthdays and Christmas (such as the present work). In the same catalogue Geoffrey Dutton wrote 'Russell Drysdale is a superb draftsman, and he has a great knowledge of, and sympathy for, the outback people he particularly likes to draw. ... One of Drysdale's greatest gifts in the art of drawing is his ability to draw children, without sentimentality, or patronizing them, or confining their high junks to incipient larrikinism in the Norman Lindsay style. The toughness and vulnerability of country children, their ability to make a boat out of an old bath in a parched plain, or to dance in the near-desert with arms held high like the stopped windmill behind them, all these are the measure of the potential that Drysdale always sees in children who have grown up in isolation and under acute difficulties of education. ... [Drysdale's drawings] are to be treasured, great works of our time and place.' (Geoffrey Dutton, 'The Drawings of Russell Drysdale' in L. Klepac, The Drawings of Russell Drysdale, Perth 1980, pp.22-23)