Australia's Unsung Hero

Australian George Hubert Wilkins was highly regarded in the USA, where he was famous for his brave exploits, but he’s still largely unknown in his home country.

- By Jeff Maynard

AFTER WORLD WAR I, when pressed by a journalist to nominate the bravest person under his command, Australian military commander General Sir John Monash named war photographer George Wilkins and likened him to Lawrence of Arabia.

A century later, perhaps one of the most difficult things to understand about the man who came to be Sir Hubert Wilkins, is his place in Australian history. He defies categorisation: he was an outstanding polar explorer, pioneer aviator, war photographer and environmentalist, as well as a mystic – and a champion for the rights of First Australians.

As an explorer, Wilkins went to Antarctica nine times and was responsible for revealing more unknown areas of the most southern continent than all the explorers of the Heroic Age combined. To Earth’s north, he was the first to fly an airplane across the top of the world, and he revolutionised Arctic travel in 1931 when he mounted a submarine expedition to the North Pole.

In his role as war photographer, Wilkins was assigned to work with Australia’s official war correspondent, Charles Bean, at the Western Front in 1917, capturing the photographic record of the Anzacs that Bean wanted. Despite refusing to carry a gun, Wilkins was a war hero who was twice mentioned in dispatches, received the Military Cross for bringing wounded men back from No Man’s Land, and received a bar to the Military Cross for leading American soldiers in an attack against a German machine-gun nest – the incident that earned Monash’s praise. When Monash wanted to nominate him for the Victoria Cross, Wilkins asked him not to, earning Monash’s description as “aggressively modest”.