Introduction

THE SOUL OF OUR NATION

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Cameras were banned at the Western Front during World War I, and carrying any sort of camera could result in immediate arrest and a court-martial. The British General Headquarters (GHQ) did not want the public to see images of the enormous human slaughter that was taking place, lest the inevitable outcry slow the steady stream of young men who were needed to fill the trenches and charge the deadly German machine-guns. Instead, GHQ appointed official photographers to take pictures for public consumption. Consequently, when soldiers were depicted, they were usually happily smoking cigarettes, marching in well-ordered lines, or looking eager to get into battle. It was all propaganda. Still, even those photographs had to be approved by the official censor before they could leave France.

From the time the Australians arrived in Europe in 1916 and fought their first battles (at Fromelles and Pozières), Australia’s war correspondent, Charles Bean, wanted a photographic record of the Anzacs in action. Bean had been allowed to carry a camera at Gallipoli, but that had been a sideshow compared to the scale of the fighting taking place in France and Belgium. Bean asked permission to take photographs at the Western Front, but was denied. Fortunately, he was not a person to give up easily. He pestered GHQ until they finally agreed to lend him British official photographers for short periods, but Bean complained that they were not available for long enough and that they were reluctant to go anywhere near the real fighting. Eventually, after the main battles of 1916 had been fought, Bean was assigned a British photographer, Herbert Baldwin, for his exclusive use. Baldwin followed the energetic Bean about, photographing the Australians during the winter of 1916–17; but by the time the serious fighting of 1917 (the Battles of Bullecourt) got underway, Baldwin’s health had deteriorated, and he was hospitalised. Bean complained again that the opportunity to record the Australians in the war had been lost.

Finally, in August 1917, Bean’s persistence paid off. He was assigned two official photographers for his exclusive use. They were James Francis (Frank) Hurley and George Hubert Wilkins. Both were experienced photographers, both were Australians, and both, coincidently, had recently returned from polar expeditions.

Six weeks after arriving in France, Hurley resigned in a huff because he thought it impossible to get close enough to the action to take dramatic photographs and wanted, instead, to stage them. He was talked out of resigning and allowed to produce six ‘faked’ pictures if he also photographed an accurate record of the conditions. Hurley complained bitterly, and, a few weeks later, after repeated arguments with Bean, went to Palestine to photograph the fighting there. He never returned to the war in France.

Wilkins stayed at the Western Front, and went on to produce the most remarkable collection of World War I photographs in the world. He did what no photographer had previously dared to do. He went ‘over the top’ with the troops and ran forward to photograph the actual fighting. In the course of his work he led soldiers into battle, was wounded repeatedly, captured German prisoners, and became the only Australian official photographer, from any war, to receive a combat decoration. In fact, he was awarded the Military Cross twice and was twice Mentioned in Despatches. During the war he refused to carry a gun. Instead, he armed himself with a bulky glass-plate still camera or cumbersome motion-picture camera. An example of the conditions under which Wilkins often worked is summarised in a paragraph he wrote in his usual modest fashion:

The fighting thereabouts was pretty hot. During a burst of enemy machine-gun fire a man on one side of me was riddled with bullets. The man on the other side received one bullet. It killed him outright. Six bullets scored my chest, two went through my right arm and one clipped the tip of my chin. Still I was able to carry on. I had to abandon my camera and help stop a bomb attack. Later it seemed necessary to get a picture of the enemy trench. I recovered my camera — one that needed a tripod, especially as the light was bad, but before I could get the picture the tripod legs were shot away. I set the camera on my knee and the enemy, I believe, seeing me make the second attempt did not then try to shoot me. In fact they shouted and waved to me as I slithered back to my own trench.1

Within weeks of arriving in France, Wilkins’ exploits were legendary. Both the British and the Canadians wanted him to work for them, but Wilkins stayed loyal to Bean’s vision of a complete and truthful photographic record of the Australians in the war.

After the Armistice, Bean spent two decades writing and editing the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 so that the work, courage, and sacrifice of every battalion could be studied, remembered, and honoured. Bean didn’t embellish and he didn’t write in glowing prose. He preferred to record the facts accurately and in detail. The result of Bean’s work and vision is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. In 2013, the director of the memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, wrote, ‘The Australian War Memorial represents all that is precious to Australia. In my view it represents the soul of our nation’.2

Within that ‘soul’ is a collection of images that have become part of the Australian consciousness: images of dazed soldiers walking along duckboards through the devastated Chateau Wood; Anzacs skylarking by climbing down the barrel of the massive Chuignes Gun; Diggers in a French village where they’d cheekily erected a street sign saying ‘Roo de Kanga’; men slumped beside the Menin Road, with their slouch hats covering their faces while they snatch a few minutes rest; and, so often, Anzacs in trenches — tired, bloody, hungry, knee deep in mud, and surrounded by bodies, yet always staring back at the camera with a resolve to push on.

Australia’s official collection of World War I photographs is a national treasure. The man largely responsible for those photographs is George Hubert Wilkins, a polar explorer whose life, even today, remains a mystery.

I began researching Wilkins in 1998 after he had been dead for 40 years. Nevertheless, I was fortunate because there were many people still living who had known him and were able tell me about him. Often their descriptions were so much at odds that I wondered if they were talking about the same person. At other times their descriptions were so fantastic that I thought they were joking.

Jim Waldron, a former US Navy pilot, who had been in Antarctica a year before Wilkins had died, told me that he had returned from a flight one day to find an additional bunk had been added to his quarters. The bunk consumed the space where his desk had been, and Waldron admitted he was annoyed with the intrusion. His annoyance changed to curiosity when he learnt that the bunk was for the famous polar explorer from the Heroic Age, Sir Hubert Wilkins. Waldron remembered:

I got to talk several times with Sir Hubert and he proved to be a very interesting person, however, a very strange man. He told me that he had no permanent home. He said he had so many friends around the world that having a place to live wasn’t a real problem. It seems that he went from one friend’s abode to another. As his welcome wore out in one place he switched to some other. He always seemed to be reading from a Bible-sized book and when I questioned him about it he told me that he belonged to a ‘religion’ that welcomed only a handful of members from each world throughout the universe. He considered himself to be one of the fortunate few who had been selected to belong to this extraordinary cult. He believed that the various members of this religion communicated telepathically over the vastness of space. He was more than convinced that this religion was no hoax. Of course, I didn’t challenge his beliefs.3

Other people told me Wilkins had been a member of the Urantia Foundation and that he believed he was a ‘thought adjuster’ — a kind of messenger from another galaxy sent to Earth to raise mankind to a higher state of civilisation.

But not all the descriptions of Wilkins pushed the boundaries of credibility. Many people described a very sensible, practical individual. Wilkins had died in a cheap hotel room at Framingham, Massachusetts, where he had lived alone, off and on, for five years. His body was found on the morning of 1 December 1958. I interviewed Al Greco, the hotel owner, who was thrilled that someone had come from Australia to ask about his famous tenant. When he showed me Wilkins’ room, Greco lay on the floor and folded his hands on his chest to demonstrate how he had found the body, explaining:

He was fully dressed, lying on his back with his hands neatly folded over his chest. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking Sir Hubert knew that he was going to die, so he got dressed and lay down on the floor, so that he didn’t mess up the bed. He was that sort of guy.4

Patrick Dunne, who worked at a US Army base where Wilkins had designed polar clothing in the 1950s, told me:

The issue of polar survival was a big one for the army after World War II, because everyone was worried about Russia and, of course, we were looking towards the Arctic. Anyway, and I can’t remember exactly which year it was, but they brought all the experts together and had a conference about polar survival. Sir Hubert Wilkins was on the panel of experts and they were up on a stage, while the auditorium was filled with officers. I remember this pompous general said, ‘Tell me Sir Hubert, what would you say is the biggest problem facing our fighting men in the Arctic today?’

Sir Hubert thought about it for a moment as he walked to the lectern. He looked out at all these officers, then said slowly and deliberately, ‘I’d say the biggest problem facing our fighting men in the Arctic today is, how do they get a four-inch penis through six inches of insulation so that they can take a piss?’5

Was Wilkins an interplanetary traveller or wandering mystic? Was he a laconic, down-to-earth Australian? It seemed as if the more people I spoke to, the further I was from knowing the character of the man.

Archives and written material about Wilkins proved equally problematic. Throughout his life he kept detailed diaries and notebooks, along with copies of his correspondence. He also kept films, photographs, artefacts, and scrapbooks full of press clippings — in fact, everything associated with his remarkable career.

Today, the Ohio State University (OSU) in the United States holds the ‘Wilkins Papers’. It is a daunting amount of material to confront a researcher. Photographs, correspondence, and printed records alone fill 75 archive boxes. Regarding Wilkins’ work during the war, the collection held at OSU is revealing for what it contains, and frustrating for what it does not. When Wilkins took his photographs at the Western Front, each negative had to be assigned a title and number for the official censor before it could be sent to the Australian War Records Section (AWRS) in London. It was the same for film footage, where detailed shot lists were compiled. The censor gave Wilkins a copy of these lists and, typically, he kept them. They are at OSU, still in the coarse brown cardboard folders in which they would have been filed at the time, and still held together by the same pin (now rusting) that was pushed through the leaves of flimsy foolscap paper 100 years ago. They are evidence that Wilkins preserved absolutely everything.

Yet important documents, such as Wilkins’ diary from World War I, are not at OSU. Nor are there many personal letters or journals offering insights into what he was thinking. Laura Kissel, the polar curator at OSU, despite almost two decades of managing the Wilkins Papers, says that it is difficult to hear his ‘voice’. The man remains elusive.

Complicating the issue of missing primary-source material is the fact that, in his latter years, Wilkins began to reflect on his life, not so much as a series of physical events but as a spiritual journey. He began to believe his earthly experiences might have been a memory, or a series of thoughts, which had been implanted in his brain. So, when he came to write about his adventures, he was not so much concerned with dates and facts as he was with impressions. He began one unpublished autobiography by writing:

Rising through the mist of years are memories thrilling and enthralling. The very dimness of some of them, at first, enforces concentration and because of this they are fascinating. Are they entirely the memory of modern years, I wonder, or are they responses to thought forms, to which I have added impulse?

Who knows but what intangible, indefinable something — the compelling force that drives each individual to action — may not have received its original impulse aeons before our present physical being burdened that indestructible ego, the ‘I’, of which we are conscious.6

In another autobiography, Thrills, written in the 1950s, Wilkins teased his audience by wandering back and forth between fiction and fact, adding dramatic events that never happened. Unfortunately, after his death, Thrills was mistakenly published as a true account of his life. [Thomas, Lowell, Sir Hubert Wilkins: his world of adventure, McGraw-Hill, London, 1961.]

Wilkins wrote in Thrills that on his first trip to Europe he was captured by slave traders in Algiers and carried off into the desert, only to be rescued by a beautiful maiden. He also wrote that when he covered the Balkan War in 1912 he was put in front of a firing squad, made a hairbreadth escape, and ended up in a harem. These adventures are fictitious. Other stories in Thrills are harder to authenticate or dismiss because the papers at OSU are incomplete.

Yet another factor partly masks the truth about Wilkins, particularly during World War I: he was modest to the point of being secretive. He continually risked his life to capture the images of the Anzacs that Bean wanted for the official record, but then went out of his way not to claim credit for those photographs. In some cases, this allowed Frank Hurley, who was hell-bent on self-promotion, to claim as his own images that Wilkins had taken. As a result, there are many questions surrounding Australia’s official photographs that may never be answered. An example is the famous photograph of dazed soldiers walking the duckboards through Chateau Wood. [Australian War Memorial official photograph E01220.] This image has been used so many times, in so many publications, as to be considered iconic. It has appeared everywhere, from the lids of biscuit tins to children’s jigsaw puzzles. It has always been credited as taken by Hurley on 29 October 1917, but Hurley’s diary reveals he was not at Chateau Wood that day. Either the diary is wrong, the date is wrong, or Hurley did not take the famous photograph.

After Hurley left for Palestine in November 1917, Wilkins began to train other photographers, so the official photographs from the Western Front continued to be credited simply ‘Unknown Australian Official Photographer’. For almost a century, no one has known which photographs Wilkins took and which were taken by other photographers.

Before 2013 I thought that the combination of mysticism, misinformation, and missing records would make it extremely difficult to present an accurate portrait of Wilkins during the war. That year, however, I was fortunate to make contact with Dr David Larson, who has about 200 letters written by Wilkins, as well as related documents and photographs, which he had never shown anyone previously. The letters begin in 1913, when Wilkins left on his first trip to the Arctic, and continue to World War II. Wilkins wrote the majority of them to his mother, who died in 1928, and to his wife, Suzanne Bennett, a singer and actress he married in 1929.

I visited Larson at his home in the United States, where he allowed me access to his collection for the purposes of this book and helped me clarify some of the stories about Wilkins. In some cases, I discovered that stories I previously thought were fantasy were, in fact, true. Larson’s collection also revealed aspects of Wilkins’ personal life that have not been common knowledge, such as his four-year engagement to Lorna Maitland, an artist whom he met during World War I, and how their friendship continued long after Wilkins married Bennett.

Larson explained how he came to be in possession of the letters, and he patiently answered my questions about the bitter disputes and court cases which had led to Wilkins’ legacy of film, artefacts, and records being split up and destroyed, or, in some cases, hidden away. Armed with this knowledge, I then traced Michael Ross, the son of Wilkins’ personal secretary, Winston Ross.

Michael Ross lives in Michigan. I visited him in September 2014, and he produced fifteen boxes of Wilkins’ correspondence, records, speeches, books, photographs, and other material. Among Ross’s collection were letters that Wilkins had written to his mother from the Western Front, as well as a detailed account of his time as Australia’s official photographer. Importantly, too, I discovered Wilkins’ personal copy of Volume XII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, in which he had initialled the photographs he took. Not only can 178 photographs previously credited to an ‘Unknown Australian Official Photographer’ now be attributed to Wilkins, but, by matching photographs in Volume XII with those taken at the same location and at the same time, it is now possible to attribute many more photographs to Wilkins.

After studying the collections of Ross and Larson, I finally felt confident I could tell the story of the man who, when the facts are examined, can lay claim to being Australia’s greatest polar explorer, as well as its greatest war photographer.