Landscape painter and printmaker, born in Adelaide, South Australia, who studied engineering and architecture at the South Australian School of Mines and while painting at Hahndorf in his spare time met the artist Hans Heysen. After commercial surveying in New Guinea, in 1949 he began a four-year full-time painting course at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, winning among other awards the Hugh Ramsay Portrait Prize. After exhibiting in Australia and in the Pacific Loan Exhibition, in San Francisco, America, in 1956, in 1957 Daws won an Italian Government-Flotto Lauro-Dante Alighieri Scholarship, enabling him to work in Italy, leaving for London in 1959 after European travels and a show at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. The 1960s onwards saw Daws travelling extensively worldwide, with periods in London, among early highlights being his inclusion in Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1961; a first solo show in London at the Matthieson Gallery in 1962; an Hon.