Chapter One

THE FLICKERING FILM

*

The study of electrical engineering was, when I started, a comparatively new and interesting thing. About this time the flickering film was captivating the public fancy and I concerned myself with the projection of moving images. Showing them was not enough for me. I needed to buy a camera and take them, seeing the thing through from A to Z in fact.

Wilkins’ unpublished autobiography, circa 19551

Wilkins is not a reliable witness to his own childhood. Like many of his stories, the one about his upbringing changed throughout his life. Visiting his former family homestead at Mount Bryan East, South Australia, in 1938, Wilkins told a reporter that his father was a cheerful man who believed ‘a glass of beer was the best thing to warm one up’ and who delighted in taking his son to the Bon Accord Hotel in nearby Burra, where the pre-school Wilkins would sit at the bar and drink with the men. ‘So I always say that I learned to drink beer when I was four years old’, Wilkins boasted.2 At other times, Wilkins described his parents as stern religious people who forbade him playing the piano or pursuing his passion for music:

To my strict Methodist parents, the piano was an instrument associated with amusements in the public house and cheap music halls. I was permitted to play an organ, but a piano was supposed to be as immoral as a deck of cards.3

Compounding this confusion are stories that Wilkins clearly invented for publicity purposes. In 1930, when he was promoting an expedition under the Arctic ice in a submarine, Wilkins claimed descent from John Wilkins, a 17th-century English bishop, who foretold submarine travel at the North Pole. In truth, little is known of Wilkins’ ancestry before his grandparents arrived in South Australia with the first European settlers. From that time onwards, caution must be exercised, because — as we have seen — Wilkins often told contradictory stories.

Wilkins was most likely born on 31 October 1888, in the simple stone cottage that his parents, Harry and Louisa, built at Mount Bryan East. Wilkins would always claim he was the youngest of 13 children, some of whom died at birth. This may have been so, but the fact remains that the registry of births, deaths, and marriages shows that 11 children were born to Harry and Louisa Wilkins. None of them were named either George or Hubert. This lack of a record of his birth, at a time when his father was 52 and his mother 50, has led some people to speculate that Harry and Louisa may not have been his birth-parents. Nowhere is there evidence to support the theory, but the superstitious Wilkins always took a cheeky delight in observing that he was the thirteenth child and born on Halloween: ‘Spooks and unlucky numbers. What a handicap, but it was more than offset by the sturdy manhood of my parents and their healthy moral influence.’4

Wilkins grew up watching his parents work long hours to provide a meagre existence, hoping that their tiny property might reward them for their hard work and their devotion to God. It never did. The area could barely support farming. Two seeds were planted in Wilkins’ fertile mind during his childhood. One was a curiosity about the weather, and whether it was possible to predict or understand it. His parents’ life was one of near-poverty and hardship, in which it was a constant struggle to grow their crops. Yet a 30-minute horse ride to the south, farms flourished and people prospered. ‘Our living was precarious because we never knew what nature held in store for us’, he later reflected. For Wilkins, the ability to be able to predict the weather, from one year to the next, became an obsession.5

The other seed that was planted in his mind was a curiosity about what it meant to be ‘civilised’. As a boy, he watched his parents praying every Sunday in a small stone church, holding their bibles and waiting for God to send them rain. And he watched the Aborigines who had lived successfully on the same land for thousands of years. Who were the more civilised? Who were the more righteous? Whose God was the more powerful? He later acknowledged:

The Aboriginal people believed in a Supreme Controller of the Universe, and they believed in spirits here on Earth. While they were supposed by our most-learned anthropologists to be mere savages, among the most primitive people on the face of the Earth, it seemed to me that their moral standards were truly admirable. I always found them chaste, law-abiding and kind. I still think that their behaviour was superior to much of ours in our supposedly high state of civilisation.6

These two themes would merge during World War I to instil in Wilkins the elements of his life’s work.

Other than Wilkins’ descriptions, little survives from his childhood to give posterity an independent view of his personality. A ‘Certificate of Merit’ shows that he passed five school subjects in 1894, when he would have been six years old. Another certificate shows that seven years later he passed six subjects at the same school.7 Other information about his schooldays is scarce because an eccentric teacher destroyed the school records around 1926. Decades later, one of Wilkins’ sisters, Annie, tracked down students who had gone to the Mount Bryan East Primary School, to ask if they could recall her brother.

T.J. Dunn, who still lived in the district, remembered Wilkins as a steady, hardworking student: ‘He was resourceful and ingenious, and I remember one of his mates, Harry Willmott, telling me how he used the frames of two old bicycles and riveted them together to make one serviceable bike.’ Dunn also remembered that Wilkins carried a small bore rifle to and from school, so that he could shoot rabbits or parrots and take them home to his mother to cook. He would also gather ‘wild rhubarb’ for his mother to make pies.8

Another school friend, C.E. ‘Buzz’ Simmons, explained that Wilkins, like most of the boys in the district, would have to spend time ploughing the fields, but in Wilkins’ case he guided the plough with one hand and held a book in the other. ‘He would walk alongside [the plough] all day reading. He told me he intended to be an engineer. He kept studying from then on.’ Simmons also added, ‘George was always very aggressive. I don’t mean quarrelsome, but he would always have a go at anything’.9

In 1905, when Wilkins was sixteen, his parents finally gave up their struggle on the farm and moved to Adelaide. Wilkins was apprenticed to the engineering firm of Bullock and Fulton, and enrolled to study electrical engineering at the Adelaide School of Mines (now Adelaide University).

More than 30 years later, Caspar Middleton, an early pioneer of the Australian film industry, spoke at a dinner to honour Wilkins. Middleton told the attendees of the circumstances in which he first encountered Wilkins, when he was working in Adelaide in early 1906. He explained that a businessman had started a show in a large tent, with the idea of touring throughout South Australia. Middleton said that the show’s proprietor had purchased a portable engine to generate power for electric lighting in the country towns, but the engine constantly gave trouble. It would run and make an awful noise, splutter, stop, and prove difficult to start again. Middleton continued:

One day during the struggle an old chap looking on said, ‘There is a boy round there putting electric wires into the new theatre who could make her go.’

A young chap, a bit younger than myself, walked in and asked to be shown the engine. He was like a schoolboy who had been on a dirty job. He was shown the engine and the others who were there quietly strolled inside the tent or went on up the street. They had all had enough of this engine.

Without a word this youngster got to work. I was thinking to see a bit of fun, or see the thing blow up. I asked if he thought she would go and he said, ‘Yes, she is all right’.

In a very short time he did something and she gave a cough and a bang and away she went. We then passed inside the tent and he wanted to look at the cinema machine. Off came the cover and, saying nothing, he had a good look. The operator came along and explained the details. In his quiet way the boy took it all in with nothing to say. That was how I met George Wilkins.10

Middleton’s story marries with Wilkins’ version of how he entered the world of show business. Wilkins wrote that he was installing engine wire in a new theatre in Adelaide when someone told him there were travelling show people in a tent nearby who were having difficulty starting a motor-driven generator.

‘Always keen on tinkering with engines, I walked over to the tent. Sure enough, the show people were in a stew over that balky generator’, Wilkins recalled. ‘This chance introduction to the wonderful world of cinema was to lead me into a series of adventures shaping the future course of my life’.11

Recalling the events more than 30 years later, Middleton also told his amused audience:

[Wilkins] used to come round to see the show and was always very quiet, although very interested. Our show consisted of pictures and vaudeville acts. Sentimental and illustrated songs were popular. If anyone fancied they could sing the boss would let them have a go and we were always trying to get someone from our staff to have a try. We talked to George and told him how good he was and at last he said, ‘Right, I will have a shot at it’.

One of the favourite songs then was called In the Valley Where the Bluebirds Sing. We had picture slides for that. The great night arrived and on went George — no stage fright. We boys had gathered together with the idea of giving him an encore and making him sing again. It was a good joke to applaud someone who is a rotten performer and bring them on again. The music started and … in a very quiet voice he plugged through the song. We did our part and clapped and roared and brought him back. He was no better the second time.12

Wilkins later wrote conflicting accounts of what he did next, and often there is a three-year discrepancy between when he claimed he did things and the time indicated by the evidence that remains. Wilkins was probably covering his tracks because he did not want it known that he ran away from home to join the travelling show, nor did he want to reveal the distress it had caused his parents. That he ran away is revealed by Charles Bean who, writing in his diary a few months after Wilkins arrived at the Western Front, recorded:

Wilkins, our younger photographer, is a remarkable chap. He was passionately fond of music as a child. But his people would not hear of his studying unless he learnt another profession first as his main preoccupation. [He] cleared out I believe — studied music until he could get some engagements of his own. He became a singer and began to get engagements, [and] broke it to his people. He then had to have an operation on his throat, which spoiled his voice, but he studied the cello for three years.

Originally, Bean wrote that Wilkins was ‘not his real name’ and that he had changed it when he ran away. But Bean and Wilkins stayed friends for three decades after the war, and Bean had the chance to clarify his diary entry. He later wrote next to the original entry:

I believe Wilkins is his real name but he took an assumed name in Adelaide. He worked as an electrician in a picture show there as a boy, and first got into the picture business through his ability to make a stopped engine go.13

Details of South Australia’s early travelling shows are sketchy. If Wilkins took an assumed name, as Bean said he did, then finding him in the infant industry becomes doubly difficult for researchers. Wilkins wrote:

The carnival carried about one hundred people — singers, dancers, acrobats and roustabouts. One big feature was popular songs illustrated with coloured lantern slides. Sometimes I sang the songs myself, though my real job was to handle the gasoline engine and electric lighting. This was a new world to me and I liked it. For eighteen months we toured all the big towns of South Australia and part of Victoria.14

Some time during 1907, Wilkins returned to Adelaide and settled back into his electrical-engineering studies. But the heady mix of travel and show business had fired his restless imagination, and he could no longer feel content with any work that did not lead to excitement. After a year in Adelaide, Wilkins was compelled to follow his creative instincts again. This time he travelled by ship to Sydney.

Wilkins later wrote that his mother was disappointed he did not become a Methodist minister. Certainly, one senses from his correspondence that Wilkins’ pragmatic parents, who had successfully raised a solid, hardworking brood of farmers, tradesmen, and homemakers, never approved of young George’s career choice. For the next 20 years, in his letters home, Wilkins regularly sought to apologise for, or justify, his decision to go into show business. As a cinematographer, accompanying his first Arctic expedition, he wrote to his parents, ‘hoping that you will agree with me that this is a great opportunity and a great honour for me to be chosen as official photographer for the expedition, which is the largest scientific one ever sent to the North’. Then, after explaining how he had helped operate a ship’s engine, he added, ‘so you can see that I am keeping up my engineering practice’.15 It was the type of comment he made often.

Wilkins arrived in Sydney in June 1908. One of his first jobs was as an electrician with Frank Waddington, who ran Waddington’s Pictures in Parramatta Road, Petersham. Wilkins recalled:

Waddington had a small engine, which furnished electric light for a small moving picture theatre. The engine had broken down and four or five mechanics had failed to fix it. I told him that if I didn’t fix it I didn’t want any pay. So he went away and left me with it.

Wilkins repaired the engine, and gained a full-time job. Three days later, Waddington’s projectionist and usher went on strike, demanding higher wages:

Waddington asked me if I could run the projector. I said I thought I could. He sacked [the projectionist] for going on strike and that night I ran the projector. Then [Waddington] wanted me to stay on and run both the projector and the engine, at a better salary. The job was all right, but it left a lot of idle time on my hands. For amusement in my spare time I took up photography. I liked playing with light and shadow and colour, experimenting and trying out new ideas in taking pictures, enlarging them and [hand] colouring them. They were mostly photographs of my girlfriends.

Wilkins bought a second-hand cinematograph and began making his own films, remembering, ‘in a little while I grew accustomed to turning the crank at a steady speed, taking only a few feet of film at a time’:

Another company came out from London with a … cameraman. They were going to produce moving pictures in Australia. The cameraman had been hired to take the films, develop, cut, title — everything. They had so much trouble with him that finally they gave him the sack and begged me to take his job. I was [soon] taking these films and developing, cutting and titling them. We made such pictures as Ned Kelly, Miner’s Gold and The Gentleman Bushranger.16

It was an exciting time for the 21-year-old Wilkins. He bought a car, photographed his girlfriends, and travelled about Sydney and the surrounding countryside, making movies. It was a far cry from the austere remoteness and strict moral code of Mount Bryan East. Of his time in Sydney, he fondly recalled:

What days they were. When Jack Gavin, Gaston Mervale, Caspar Middleton and others produced screamingly funny melodramas and sobering comedies. We occupied a studio at North Sydney and sometimes visited country stations. We photographed race meetings and worked the scenes into our pictures. We pursued made-up smugglers and bandits in motor boats through Sydney Harbour and, one day, when we dashed beneath the bow of HMS Encounter, madly firing at a fleeing motor boat, the harbour police joined in and the unrehearsed scene that followed was the most realistic acting of the film, for I kept my camera moving throughout the piece.17

The unrehearsed chase on Sydney Harbour was for Gambler’s Gold, which Wilkins named, and was described in a contemporary newspaper as, ‘full of the most adventurous incidents possible … including an exciting motor-boat chase across Sydney Harbour’.18

By 1910, the Australian film industry was producing a string of thrilling melodramas with car, train, and boat chases, and Wilkins was at the centre of it, constantly taking his camera into the action and popping up in frustratingly brief references.

By early 1912, though, even Sydney wasn’t big enough to satisfy Wilkins’ taste for adventure. When he met a representative of the Gaumont Company, who promised him a job as a cinematographer in London, Wilkins did not hesitate. He packed his camera, sold his car, and, in March, sailed for Europe. From Fremantle, Western Australia, he dashed off a consoling note to his parents, saying, ‘it may not be long before I am back’.19 Brief cards and letters show he travelled comfortably in the company of an Italian count who was making his way home. The count took the young Australian under his wing, and introduced him to the excitement of world travel. Wilkins soaked it up: ‘We wandered together through the fascinating Oriental bazaars of Colombo, poked into Buddhist temples, visited the sacred elephants … sipped tea at the Hotel Oriental and … danced at the Galle Face Hotel.’ To the young man from the edge of the Australian Outback, desperately seeking a life of excitement after an upbringing of austerity, the colour and noise of the world was intoxicating.

Wilkins arrived in London at a time when Gaumont was one of the biggest names in the motion-picture industry. Frenchman Leon Gaumont was making movies to be shown in picture arcades across Europe, and had appointed Alfred Bromhead as his English agent. Bromhead quickly expanded the English side of the business and, by 1912, was planning a huge indoor production studio at Shepherd’s Bush. Bromhead was also employing cinematographers and encouraging them to find the most exciting films to feed the public’s insatiable appetite for movies. Wilkins met Bromhead and showed him the footage he had shot on his trip from Australia. According to Wilkins, Bromhead and his fellow directors were impressed:

‘Go out’, they said, ‘and show us what interests you in London’. It took me fourteen days to get my bearings and another fourteen days to record the scenes from an angle that appealed to me. The directors met again and viewed my pictures. ‘Would you treat thus, the principal cities of the continent?’ they asked. I was only too willing, and in their service I visited the capitals of Europe. Paris, Brussels, Switzerland, St Petersburg, Scandinavia, the northern towns in Scotland and Ireland from North to South, were visited in turn.20

In a short time, Wilkins had demonstrated that he had an ability to travel and live under a variety of conditions, that he was an expert technician and able to maintain his delicate cinematograph in the field, and that he could produce pictures of stunning quality. On one occasion, he even straddled the fuselage of a flimsy plane to take what was, arguably, the first aerial film footage. He was a young man going places.