Professor Batchelor is an Australian by birth and early training who has spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge. There he built up a notable Department which has attracted successive generations of students and postdoctoral workers from Australia, and those who have returned to senior positions here acknowledge his strong and continuing influence on the development of applied mathematics and fluid mechanics in this country and around the world. His personal research and more general contributions to his field have been widely recognised by the award of a Royal Medal of the Royal Society and many other international awards, elections and honorary degrees.