Chapter Fifteen

THE VALUE OF GETTING THE HISTORY

*

Sir John Monash, in his lecture in the Melbourne Town Hall, said that if he had to select at one time the bravest and most useful man in his army, he would select me. What he meant to say was that he was never in a position to do it, but if he was brought down to a point where he had to do it, he would select me. I heard him say that one night. I think it was one third of the way through the lecture, when he was talking about what the men did, and the value of getting the history for building up the spirit of Australia. He was going to show some pictures I had taken. It got me into all sorts of trouble in Australia. He had men with VCs he might have mentioned.

Wilkins manuscript1

Bean arrived in Melbourne on 10 June 1919 and, within weeks, had prepared a paper titled Outline of a Scheme for the Australian War Museum. He was keen for Wilkins, who was still at work in London, to join him so they could start making photographic prints. As always, Bean’s priority was to ensure that every detail was scrupulously accurate. He explained to Treloar that the photographs had to be printed and enlarged:

… by some especially permanent process, and subject to the committee’s rigid rule as to nothing being added or altered. Wilkins’ value in this is that he knows the places — knows what there is in the negatives which should be specially brought out, e.g., where the horizon needs strengthening or a pill box bringing up or where a shell-burst, visible on the negative, can be brought out by increased printing — others might miss the shell-burst altogether.

I think it is a good deal to us to have the photos actually produced by the man who saw most of them taken; knew the battle conditions, and who has a great name in the Force, and to a certain extent is part of its history.2

Wilkins sought a way to travel to Australia to make the prints that Bean wanted, and then, if possible, to return to exploring. In August 1919, he met John Lachlan Cope, who was planning an expedition to Antarctica the following year. Cope was loudly promoting his plan to ‘complete the survey of the coastline of the Antarctic continent and to carry out a hydrographical survey in the coastal areas’.3 For Wilkins, it seemed an ideal solution. Without investigating Cope too closely, Wilkins agreed to join the expedition. He reasoned he could return to Australia, complete his photographic work, and then meet up with Cope and continue south. While he waited for Cope to raise money and find others to join the expedition, Wilkins sought ways to increase his flying experience and get to Australia quickly. As if on cue, a solution presented itself.

The war had greatly advanced aeroplane technology. At the outbreak of the war, planes were underpowered, difficult to control, and capable of only flying short distances. By the end of the war, they were ready to fly around the world. Prime minister Hughes, having witnessed the extraordinary development of aeroplanes, was convinced they were an ideal means of travel in Australia, where capital cities were far apart and the country itself was a long way from Europe. Wanting to encourage the use of aeroplanes in Australia, Hughes announced a prize of £10,000 ($20,000) for the first flight from England to Australia. The crew of the aircraft had to be Australian, and the plane itself had to be constructed within the British Empire.

The Blackburn Company of Yorkshire had produced a successful long-range bomber for the Royal Air Force, which, by lucky coincidence, was named ‘Kangaroo’, because the bombs were held underneath the fuselage, making it the ‘bomber with the pouch’. With plenty of Kangaroos on their hands, the Blackburn Company turned its marketing ambitions to Australia, and decided the air race would be an ideal way to publicise the potential of its plane. Three Australians — Vlademar Rendle, Garnsey Potts, and Reginald Williams — had already formed a team to compete in the race with a Kangaroo. [Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith had originally been chosen to lead the team, but was fired by the Blackburn Company after reports emerged of his heavy drinking and crashing aeroplanes for insurance payouts.] Potts introduced Wilkins to the team and, despite having rudimentary skills, he was appointed navigator.

Wilkins, it appears, approached the air race with his usual earnestness and intensity. According to The Olympian, the staff magazine of the Blackburn Company, his arrival brought the race effort together:

The story of the Kangaroo’s magnificent effort at the flight to Australia is one that seems to have no definite starting point. Negotiations took place for a considerable while before the arrival on the scene, in September, of Capt. G.H. Wilkins, but at this arrival we may date the true beginning of the work. Prior to this, the bulk of the technical estimates had been completed, but the whole of the practical preparation remained to be carried out.4

Wilkins was soon planning a proposed route to Australia, arranging maps, landing fields, fuel supplies, and other practicalities for the adventure ahead.

The altruistic Wilkins was reported in the press as saying that he was not interested in the prize money, but was making the flight so that the knowledge could be passed to other aviators. He wrote to his mother, ‘You appreciate I’m sure, the spirit in which I undertake this enterprise which undoubtedly has risks above the average … to do such things as will be useful to my fellow man’.5

With the team set to leave Hounslow Airfield, near London, engineers from the Blackburn factory insisted on making more checks and delaying the start from Thursday to Friday. ‘Throughout my experiences I have nurtured the superstition that Thursday was my lucky day to start on a new venture’, Wilkins recalled. ‘But with obstinate persistence, each previous event connected with the flight had happened on a Friday … Personally, I thought it was a bad omen.’6

Shortly after 10.00 a.m. on Friday 21 November 1919, the big, ungainly machine lumbered down the runway and, with the wind in their favour, the four-man crew got airborne and crossed the English Channel. Over Amiens, they met a snowstorm and, unable to find a safe passage through it, Wilkins directed the pilots to Romilly, east of Paris. There, Wilkins’ omen about starting a day late proved to be accurate. They were informed the day before had been perfectly fine, but, with the weather deteriorating, they were unable to leave Romilly for three days. Despite this, and further unscheduled landings, the crew continued on a journey that became a series of setbacks and bad luck. Eventually, the Kangaroo took off from Crete on 8 December. The team intended to cross the remainder of the Mediterranean Sea to Cairo, but, about 60 kilometres over the water, Potts noticed that oil was streaming from the left engine. Their only hope was to turn around and attempt to get back to Crete. Rendle tried to gain altitude to give them the best chance of reaching land. Faced with the possibility of death by drowning, Wilkins remembered:

It was interesting to sense my own feeling and observe the other men when it seemed doubtful that we had more than a few hours to live. We all knew when the plane struck the water it would surely sink. We had life-saving suits, but there was no hope of swimming 50 miles [80km] and little chance of being picked up. There was not a boat of any kind in sight — nothing but blue water. My thought was, ‘Well here goes. Only one more adventure, the big one’.7

But aided by a slight headwind, the plane gained altitude and, on one engine, reached Crete. With everyone hanging on grimly, the Kangaroo hopped across the ground, hit a ditch, bursting all four tyres, and slammed into a bank of earth. The plane had stopped a few metres short of the local mental asylum. The four men survived unhurt, but their air race was over.

After the crash, Wilkins opted for the more traditional method of reaching Australia. He sailed there, arriving in July 1920, to find he was in danger of becoming a national celebrity.

Bean, Monash, and many others were already filling theatres to tell entranced audiences stories of the war. ‘For the Illustrated Battle Lectures, in aid of the war museum, at the Theatre Royal last night, the house was again packed’, one newspaper reported. ‘The film which followed the lecture was a notable one, and stands as a monument to the courage and resource of Captain Wilkins, MC, the official photographer with the AIF.’8

Monash’s book The Australian Victories in France had been published in April 1920. In the preface, Monash had singled out Wilkins by writing, ‘The photographs have been selected from a very large number taken, during the fighting and often under fire, by Captain G. H. Wilkins, MC.’ Monash toured and lectured to promote his book, and he illustrated his talks with photographs, praising Wilkins at every opportunity.

Another person touring Australia at the time was American journalist Lowell Thomas, who was lecturing on Thomas Edward Lawrence. In the desert war, Lawrence had incited the Arabs to revolt against the Turks, and Thomas’s writing had transformed the obscure English officer into the international hero ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. In Melbourne, Thomas found himself at a dinner hosted by Monash.

‘I asked Sir John whether Australia had any counterpart to Lawrence’, Thomas later wrote. ‘Any individual who stood out from the tens of thousands who had served under him?’ According to Thomas, Monash replied:

Yes, there was one … He was a highly accomplished and absolutely fearless combat photographer … What happened to him [during the war] is a story of epic proportions. Wounded many times and even buried by shellfire, he always came through. At times he brought in the wounded, at other times he supplied vital intelligence of enemy activity he observed in his work. At one point he even rallied troops as a combat officer … His war record was unique.9

But on his return to Australia, Wilkins contacted Monash and asked him to cease praising him. ‘Wilkins is so aggressively modest that he seems to carry it to a fault’, Monash would later say.10

Bean drew up a list of jobs for Wilkins to complete the work on Australia’s photographs and film, and then wrote to Treloar:

As you know, advantage was taken of Captain Wilkins’ presence in Melbourne recently to get him to revise the titles of some of the cinema films and also to select the photographs of which enlargements are to be made for the museum, and make notes drawing attention of the enlargers to features which should be emphasised.

Though Captain Wilkins has not asked for any remuneration for this work, I know that the time spent on this work could have been devoted to other objects with profit to himself.11

Large collections of photographs started touring the country, and displays were erected in local halls to let the people see what their soldiers had done. Importantly, the careful cataloguing of the photographs and the detailed captions allowed them to be indexed, creating a reference unequalled in the world. E.A. Hodda, who accompanied an exhibition in South Australia in 1921, told a journalist:

Given any sort of clue, if there is a photograph of a man in our collection, we will find it. Only a few days ago a mother called our offices in Melbourne, seeking a photograph of her only son, who had been killed in the action on the Somme. She brought a letter written by him a few weeks before his death, in which he stated that he had been photographed at the door of a ruined cathedral in another sector. That photograph had been indexed under cathedrals. When the print was shown to the mother she was overjoyed …12

After spending three months in Melbourne working on the official photographs, and then making a brief visit to see his mother, Wilkins left Australia on 27 November and travelled to Uruguay. There, he discovered, to his disgust, that Cope’s talk of an expedition to Antarctica amounted to almost nothing. There were no aeroplanes, no money, no equipment, and no plan other than the vague idea that he and Wilkins would find a way of getting to Antarctica. ‘Cope, in my estimation, will never be fit to run an expedition’, Wilkins wrote to the Antarctic sea captain, John King Davis, then went on to give a detailed list of the man’s shortcomings, which included, ‘Unskilful, unnecessary and unwarranted lying, misappropriation of money [and] making payments with worthless cheques.’ Most damning perhaps, in Wilkins opinion, was that Cope was ‘not likely to uphold the prestige of the British Empire’.13

Nevertheless, Wilkins again demonstrated the blinkered loyalty that helped him realise his greatest achievements, as well as contribute to his greatest failures. He had given his word that he would go on Cope’s expedition, so he would do so, despite all the evidence suggesting he should not.

Unsure as to how the expedition — which consisted of just Cope, Wilkins, and two gullible young men — would get to Antarctica, Wilkins spoke to whalers who were preparing to sail to Deception Island off the coast of Grahamland for the summer whaling season. Wilkins offered to make a film of their operations in return for a passage for the four men. The whalers agreed. Cope’s magnificently named British Imperial Antarctic Expedition reached Deception Island on Christmas Eve 1920. The four men borrowed a boat from the whalers, sailed a short distance along the coast, and then gave up. Wilkins and Cope returned to Uruguay, where they parted ways. The other two men spent the winter in Antarctica, returning north the following year.

Disappointed at his first attempt to set up Antarctic bases for weather stations, Wilkins cast around for another opportunity. Sir Ernest Shackleton was planning a fourth expedition to Antarctica while, in the north, Stefansson was trying to raise money to return to the Arctic. Wilkins was offered a position on both expeditions, but chose Shackleton, telling his mother:

It is also important from the point of view of establishing meteorological stations in a ring around Antarctica, from where we may be able to obtain information that would lead to the possibility of predicting the weather conditions in Australia, Africa and South America for many months ahead, thus letting the farmers know what sort of season to expect from year to year.14

Shackleton, who never shied away from making promises he could not keep, agreed to take a plane that Wilkins could use to explore the Antarctic coast. But Shackleton’s final expedition achieved little. It set off late, in a hastily prepared ship that limped out into the Atlantic Ocean, and Shackleton, behind schedule, did not stop at South Africa as planned to collect Wilkins’ plane. On board the Quest, as it made its way south, Wilkins wrote to his mother on 26 October 1921:

I am not very impressed with Sir Ernest [Shackleton’s] leadership. He is far less competent than Stefansson and not such a big-minded man. He cares only for newspaper notices and money, while Stefansson, besides that, does really wish to do some scientific work. We will have a very interesting trip in any case, but I am rather disappointed in the change of program in so far as it does not allow time to do much work in the Antarctic, which was my official interest.15

At Rio de Janeiro, Shackleton suffered a heart attack, but survived. While the ship was being repaired, Wilkins went on alone to South Georgia, where he used his time to collect flora and fauna specimens for the British Museum. When the expedition ship finally reached South Georgia in January 1922, Shackleton suffered another heart attack, and died within sight of the island he had famously crossed six years earlier. Wilkins and the rest of the crew decided they needed to do enough to appease the expedition’s sponsor, so they made a brief voyage to the Grahamland Peninsula.

During the voyage, and at South Georgia, Wilkins demonstrated his usual enthusiasm for knowledge. While the rest of the crew saw the shortened expedition as an opportunity to do some serious drinking, Wilkins took photographs, collected specimens, recorded everything, and threw himself into his work with the same devotion to an uncertain purpose he had shown on Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. The others might have been going through the motions, but not Wilkins. When the expedition returned to England, Wilkins discovered there was little interest in the whole affair, which was a far cry from the heroic adventures of explorers before the war. Nevertheless, he spent weeks at the British Museum cataloguing the specimens he had collected.

But with the death of Shackleton, Wilkins seemed to be out of options. His two trips to Antarctica had not got him past the tip of Grahamland, and no one was interested in sponsoring further expeditions. Wilkins accepted an offer to travel to Russia as a cinematographer, where communism had got off to a bad start. A combination of droughts and mismanagement meant the people were only surviving on foreign aid, and Wilkins spent six months in Russia filming the effects of the international relief effort. When he returned to London, he was offered an opportunity to lead an expedition to the remote areas of Australia.

The British Museum wanted someone to travel to Queensland and the Northern Territory to study the flora and fauna, which was disappearing as a result of European farming methods. Wilkins had demonstrated his talents on Shackleton’s last expedition, and, being an Australian, was an ideal choice. Wilkins saw it as an opportunity to return to Australia, impress the local and international learned societies, and gain support for his idea of Antarctic weather stations. For two-and-a-half years, he travelled around Northern Australia, collecting specimens. At every opportunity, he promoted his idea of polar weather stations, and attempted to raise money to go to Antarctica.

Meanwhile, in America, Wilkins’ old mentor, Stefansson, was being criticised for his latest fiasco. In 1921, he had organised an expedition to Wrangell Island in the Arctic. (It was the expedition that Wilkins had declined to go on, travelling instead with Shackleton.) At the last minute, Stefansson had decided not to go himself and, instead, sent four ill-equipped young men and one Eskimo woman. The four men died, and the woman was rescued at the beginning of 1923. Stefansson was loudly criticised for allowing another tragedy to happen in an attempt to support his notion that the Arctic was ‘friendly’.

To escape the controversy, he decided to go to Australia and join Wilkins in the Outback. Not having seen the Australian Outback proved no handicap to Stefansson’s knowledge of it, and he expressed the opinion that the desert probably possessed unimaginable potential fertility. Before leaving Canada, he declared, ‘Explorers suffer from the rather human tendency to make heroes of themselves by exaggerating the dangers and inaccessibility of new lands … The demand for new territory can only be met by reclaiming the so-called deserts.’16

Wilkins announced ‘there is a great deal in the theory held by Mr Stefansson’,17 and greeted his mentor when he arrived in Sydney on 27 May 1924. Typically, the Australian press believed that because Stefansson had come from overseas he must have been an ‘expert’, and therefore quoted his opinions widely. ‘Dr Stefansson predicted that within the next ten years there would be an airship service across the Arctic Circle from London to Tokyo on a north and south route’, one paper enthused.18

For the next three months, Stefansson travelled about the country, praising Wilkins; and Wilkins, in return, praised him. Monash was still regularly being invited to be the guest of honour at various dinners, and Stefansson got to attend one of them, reporting afterwards:

Sir John Monash has the same good reason to admire Wilkins as I have. I said to Sir John the other night, ‘Why is it that Australia does not know one of its greatest heroes? Why haven’t you told them what he is?’ Sir John’s reply was ‘I notice that you have said that he was one of your mainstays in the Arctic. I can say the same about him in France’.

Sir John pointed out to me that he had mentioned Captain Wilkins in the preface to his book on Australian campaigns in France and added, ‘I would have said much more about him if I had known he was going to be ignored as he has been’.19

After Stefansson left, Wilkins continued to push his idea of exploring Antarctica with a view to setting up weather stations. His plan was to establish a series of bases as close as possible to the South Pole, with a second series of stations on the sub-Antarctic islands that could relay wireless messages. Aeroplanes would supply the stations. Wilkins needed £15,000 ($30,000) for his scheme, which would begin with exploratory flights over the uncharted regions. He promised investors that the proceeds of films and photographs would return that amount or more. The Royal Geographical Society of South Australia (RGSSA) agreed to collect money on his behalf. Hoping his idea would quickly attract sponsors, Wilkins sailed to Europe to purchase a suitable aeroplane.

As he left, he explained to his mother, ‘I will need £15,000 but if I do not get [the money] in Australia, I think there will be no difficulty about it in London.’20

The aeroplane Wilkins wanted was a Dornier Wal flying boat, capable of taking off from water, land, or smooth ice. Roald Amundsen had just attempted a flight to the North Pole with two Dornier Wals. One had crashed, and Amundsen and his team had returned safely in the other. Wilkins arrived in Norway in August 1925, met Amundsen, and promised to buy the surviving plane. He sent notices to the Australian press, hoping that the purchase of Amundsen’s plane would excite sponsors. One Australian paper reported that, ‘Captain Wilkins has an enthusiastic idea that the plane which went “furthest north” will also go “furthest south”. Captain Wilkins expects that the expedition will last six months.’21

Wilkins travelled from Norway to London to await word that the money had been raised to pay for the plane, but the news was disappointing. In fact, the RGSSA was embarrassed to report that two local businessmen had stumped up a mere £600 ($1,200), and that was it. Wilkins felt humiliated, and was forced to apologise to Amundsen and explain that his fellow countrymen were not going to subscribe the money he needed. He told his mother:

There has been very little response so far in Australia and I am not really surprised at this for the Australians, as I came to know them when I was out there last time, have neither the foresight nor imagination to understand the value of the work to be done … 22

Wilkins was also disappointed by the press, which he felt had not supported his idea, or given him enough publicity.

Dejected, and seemingly out of ideas, Wilkins was in London when he received an unexpected message from Stefansson. A group of businessmen in Detroit, Michigan, wanted to sponsor an expedition to explore the area between Alaska and the North Pole, using aeroplanes. Stefansson explained that he had convinced the businessmen that Wilkins, despite being an Australian, would be the ideal person to lead such an expedition. In a frenzy of activity and excitement, Wilkins suddenly proposed to Lorna Maitland and, within 24 hours, had booked a passage to America.

As he sailed across the Atlantic, he wrote to his mother, ‘Perhaps you have seen some things in the paper about my engagement to be married. That is so. I have known Lorna Maitland, the girl I am engaged to, for seven years.’ But, typically for Wilkins, romance could not divert him from his true calling for more than a few sentences. He had not reached the bottom of the page of his hand-written letter before he was qualifying the announcement by continuing, ‘I do not know when we will get married. Perhaps not at all, for I must go on with my polar work, and while I am moving about so continuously I do not intend to get married.’23

Wilkins’ mother may have been getting mixed signals about his intentions, but Maitland, apparently, was not. She booked a passage, and followed Wilkins to America three days later.

Wilkins arrived in New York, and was overwhelmed with financial support. ‘I had hoped when I came to America that I would be able to collect £5000 to enable me to take an expedition to the North Pole areas next March’, he explained to his mother.

‘I already have £18,000 and will probably get another £2000 in a day or so. That means 100,000 American dollars — almost a fortune. [Monetary exchange rates were different in 1925.] It seems a lot of money to spend on an expedition. More than I ever intended.’24

After having spent seven years trying to drum up support in England and Australia to explore the polar regions, Wilkins had, almost overnight, found more money than he needed in America. He wrote, ‘This sort of thing does not make one any more proud of my countrymen or more anxious to do work in the interest of Australia.’25