Pop and rock historian Glenn A Baker, who also wrote The Beatles Down Under, tracing their 1964 Australian tour, revealed last night Harrison had a love-hate relationship with this country.
"Australia had embraced the Beatles like no other country in the world," he said.
"In 1964, they played to 350,000 fans in Adelaide. When they played New York the same year, they only got 10,000 people."
"All the adulation and the outpouring of hysteria from the Australian fans sat very uneasily with George."
"He found it difficult to take adulation on that scale. He didn't want to be in Australia when they toured. He was homesick."
Still, Harrison returned Down Under on several occasions. He helped launch a friend's book at the Sydney Opera house in 1982 and was a high profile, yet reclusive regular at the Australian Grand Prix.
"You couldn't remain indifferent to any Beatle," Baker said last night.
"George was part of that astonishing musical and cultural force that wiped clean the face of pop music and drew it again."
"He remains intriguing to me because of what he had to endure in the course of finally doing what he did."
"The pressure of being between the wry, cynical and ascerbic John (Lennon) and the polished, optimistic, PR driven Paul (McCartney), to be in the middle of all that and try to make your own way is an astonishing achievement."
Baker says Harrison had his moment of "supreme victory" when in the midst of Lennon and McCartney's infamous post-Beatles bickering, he released the 1970 masterpiece All Things Must Pass.
"It was the best solo Beatles record ever," Baker said.
Baker met Harrison at a 1982 launch for Derek Taylor's book 50 Years Adrift. "I found him a bit guarded," Baker said. "Ringo was much more jolly."
Bruce Hamlin, manager of the Beatles Records Information Service and a local authority on the Fab Four, said last night: "George Harrison was a man who believed in happiness, the goodness of everybody, his privacy, his family and his friends."
"He was an integral part of the Beatles in the same way (drummer) Ringo Starr was. John and Paul could not be who they were without their two partners."
"The Beatles would not have been the same without George or Ringo."
Music guru Ian 'Molly' Meldrum met Harrison in 1969.
"I was gobsmacked," Meldrum said last night.
"I mean, he was one of the Beatles. I have always been amazed, not only by his music, but his passions in other areas, like film, Formula One racing and anything else he wanted to pursue."
Meldrum never reintroduced himself to Harrison at the Australian Grand Prix.
"In all truthfulness, I was too frightened to do it. He was a very private man and it didn't seem right to bowl up to him going 'blah, blah, blah...'."
Indeed, Baker says the reclusive Harrison would not tolerate small talk.
"It wouldn't have been easy being George Harrison," Baker said, "bearing that mantle of being a Beatle, being one of the most famous people of the 20th century and going through the second half of your life known in every corner of the world."