FOREWORD

Dr Brendan Nelson

Director, Australian War Memorial

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By any standard, the life of George Hubert Wilkins was an extraordinary one. From humble beginnings in rural South Australia, Wilkins became a renowned photographer and cinematographer, aviator, war correspondent, scientist, author, and, above all else, polar explorer. Wilkins Sound, the Wilkins Ice Shelf, and the Wilkins Coast in Antarctica were all named in his honour. He won awards from a number of international geographic societies, including the Royal Geographic Society’s Patron’s Medal and the Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal of the American Geographical Society. He was knighted in June 1928. Celebrated in his lifetime, he is regrettably little remembered in Australia today. Yet Wilkins was truly one of the great adventurers of the 20th century.

Wilkins’ greatest passion was for polar exploration. He first experienced the Arctic in 1913, when he joined Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. The expedition was not a success. Wilkins was with Stefansson when his brigantine, the Karluk, had to be abandoned in the pack ice. Wilkins remained undaunted, and covered thousands of miles in the Arctic by foot over the next three years. In fact, Wilkins conducted expeditions to both polar regions over and over in his lifetime. He was with the legendary Ernest Shackleton in 1921–22 on Shackleton’s last expedition to Antarctica, and made another six expeditions there between 1928 and 1939. But Wilkins was perhaps most familiar with the Arctic, which he visited every year for the 16 years before his death.

In his lifetime, Wilkins compiled a stunning list of ‘firsts’. Combining his love of flying with his love of polar exploration, he became the first man to conduct aerial explorations of the Antarctic, and indeed became the first man to fly over the Antarctic continent. Although not the first to fly over the North Pole, he was the first to fly over the Arctic Ocean, earning his knighthood in the process. He later became consumed with the idea that it would be possible to take a submarine beneath the Arctic pack ice, although this idea was ridiculed at the time. The American submarine he leased to attempt it was plagued with problems and did not reach the North Pole, but Wilkins nevertheless succeeded in piloting the partially disabled machine under the ice in 1931, becoming the first man to do so.

Wilkins’ love of adventure extended far beyond his polar exploration, although the fame he achieved from his icy adventures opened doors for him. In 1919, he was the navigator in an aircraft competing for £10,000, which the Australian government offered for the first all-Australian crew to fly from England to Australia. The enterprise was sadly abandoned in Crete after the plane crash-landed, terminally damaging its port engine. Four years later, Wilkins was contracted by the British Museum to conduct a comprehensive survey of northern Australia, which took him two-and-a-half years. He was a passenger on the Graf Zeppelin on its around-the-world voyage in 1929 and, in 1935, he and his wife were guests on the Hindenburg for the zeppelin’s maiden voyage to America.

But it is perhaps in his role as war photographer and correspondent in the First World War that Wilkins left his greatest legacy for Australia as a nation. Wilkins had first experienced war as a special correspondent for the Gaumont Film Company during the Turkish–Bulgarian war of 1912. This experience formulated his approach to recording war, which he applied to his work in the First World War. Giving his trade or calling as ‘explorer’, Wilkins enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in May 1917, after returning from the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Originally commissioned into the Flying Corps, he failed as a pilot because of partial colour blindness. Instead, he was appointed official photographer to the Australian Imperial Force, and would serve in that capacity to the end of the war.

Wilkins’ approach to war photography was to get as close to the action as possible. He was wounded twice in 1917: a gunshot fractured his tibia mid-year, and a few months later he was shot in the thigh and foot. He remained undaunted. He often had to pass through artillery barrages to obtain the best photographs, and regularly had his equipment broken by shell blasts. Yet he continued to try to obtain the best record of war he could. On one occasion, he was blown off some duckboards by an explosion, but after treatment for wounds went back to work. For his work with the Australians in late 1917 he was awarded the Military Cross. He was later awarded a Bar to his Military Cross in 1918, when he went over the top with attacking troops of the Australian Corps at least six times and was in the front line at some point every day between 8 August and 3 October. On one occasion, as he was advancing, he found some American infantry under German fire. He worked his way to their position under machine-gun fire himself and took command of the Americans who had lost their officer, directing operations until they could be relieved. Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, wrote that ‘Captain Wilkins has probably been in the fighting more constantly than any other officer in the Corps’, and yet all through this period Wilkins produced some of the most enduring images of Australians in the Great War.

Wilkins’ service to the Australian memory of the war did not end in 1918. The following year he accompanied Bean’s party to the Gallipoli Peninsula, where he recorded the battlefield for a nation in mourning. He was then involved in editing the 12th volume of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918: the photographic record. He tried to enlist again for the Second World War, but was turned down by both Australia and Britain because of his age. Again undaunted, he applied to the American army, and served by training men in Arctic survival skills. He continued as a consultant to the US army for many years after the war ended.

In 1958, Hubert Wilkins died suddenly in his hotel room in Framingham, Massachusetts. In him, Australia lost a grand adventurer from an era that had passed. Eight months before his death, Wilkins appeared on What’s My Line?, the American television game-show in which contestants tried to guess the identity of a special guest. Wilkins could not hide his enjoyment, and his eyes sparkled as contestants tried to guess who he was. Asked if he was a scientist, he modestly answered, ‘Depends on who’s making the judgment’. But scientist he was. From his beginnings as a farmer’s son with a partial education in music and engineering, Wilkins became a geographer, climatologist, botanist, and even an ornithologist. From a runaway who travelled Australia showing motion pictures in makeshift cinemas in rural towns, he became a photographer and cinematographer who created some of the most compelling and important visual records of the twentieth century.

George Hubert Wilkins is an Australian to honour and remember. The Unseen Anzac does justice to this man and his life, where to do so is such a difficult task.