Wilkins: His World of Adventure

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SECONDHAND ADVENTURES

Ahead Of His Time Sir Hubert Wilkins: His World of Adventure (1961) Few Australians will know of the American author, broadcaster, raconteur and adventurer, Lowell Thomas, yet most will know of his subjects. Men like Lawrence of Arabia, General “Jimmy” Doolittle and Rudyard Kipling all feature in one or more of his 50 books and biographies. Yet one character whose exploits eclipse many of these famous swashbucklers is a little known Australian, George Hubert Wilkins.

STORY Roderick Eime

THOMAS’S 1961 BIOGRAPHY,

published three years after Wilkins’s death, is an outrageous tale of death-defying adventure, combat, romance, exploration, survival, discovery, despair and ultimately bizarre spiritualism. If it were fiction, it would be dismissed as palpable nonsense.

Thomas, famous for making people famous, learned of Wilkins after consulting with General Sir John Monash, Australia’s great homegrown war hero, who described him as “the bravest man he’d ever met.” Thomas eventually met Wilkins some years later in New York and the two became good friends.

Wilkins’s list of “firsts” and notable achievements is never likely to be surpassed. He is credited with taking the first moving pictures from an aircraft as well as actual battle scenes. He was the first to successfully deploy an aircraft in the Antarctic, cross the Arctic in one and discover new land from one. His greatest attempt; taking a submarine below the polar icecap in 1931, turned out to be his greatest folly and seriously damaged his credibility, not to mention his finances.

His thinking was well ahead of its time and Wilkins firmly believed he could improve the lot of farmers and mankind generally with better long-term weather forecasting and ecological management. He proposed a series of weather stations throughout the Arctic and Antarctic to facilitate advanced forecasting, a theory for which he was largely derided, particularly by his rival and academic, English-born Sir Douglas Mawson, who crudely remarked “Crazy … Wilkins knows nothing about science,” when asked to comment.

Born at Mount Bryan East in South Australia on 31 October 1888, he joined a generation of British Australians whose childhood spanned Federation. He shared the stage with such local luminaries of the so-called “Golden Age of Exploration” as Australians Captain Frank Hurley (b. Sydney, 1885) and Sir Douglas Mawson (b.

England, 1882).

His large rural family, stricken by an historic

8 0 ou ter edge

drought, sold up and moved to Adelaide in 1905, but young George, fascinated by the world as a whole, gave up his studies and stowed away to Sydney in 1909 where he began working as a newsreel cinematographer in the busy period when Australia briefly led the world in silent film production.

During 1911, he met an executive of the famous Gaumont Studios - probably Alfred Bromhead - and was soon under contract to the studio after another adventurous stowaway passage that included a kidnapping, romance and escape in Libya.

Another landmark year for Wilkins was 1912 and it delivered his first taste of war. Gaumont sent him to cover the short but savage Balkan War were he escaped a Turkish firing squad and numerous brushes with death, including a Bulgarian artillery shell that knocked him out and smashed his gear but failed to explode. His footage from 31 October captured the bloody defeat of the Ottomans at Lule Burgas in ghastly detail.

While on a lazy assignment in the Caribbean filming a cocoa documentary, he received an irresistible invitation.

“WOULD YOU GO IMPORTANT ARCTIC EXPEDITION … REPLY CABLE URGENT” Wilkins was sure this would be the muchtouted Shackleton Expedition, but on his return

to London, he learned he was to join the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition mounted by the notorious Vilhjamur Stefansson. In a controversial act, he and Stefansson would later abandon the rest of the hapless men on the Karluk, stuck fast in the polar ice. The story of their shipwreck and rescue is a tale on its own.

Subsequently, in a drawn out, risky adventure that saw him spend many months in the Arctic, Wilkins did not reach civilisation again until 1915 whereupon he learned of both the death of his father and the outbreak of war. Via a circuitous and dangerous route that included surviving a torpedo attack, he eventually returned to Australia. After disguising his medical shortcomings, he eventually received a military commission and returned to his earlier vocation of war correspondent despite listing his vocation as “explorer.” He worked alongside Hurley and official historian, Charles Bean, but unlike the more famous Frank Hurley, Wilkins was twice decorated for bravery while filming forward of enemy lines on the Western Front in 1917. On one occasion he actually photographed himself being blown up.

After such distinguished service and a brag bag full of wounds and narrow escapes he maintained his steadfast modesty and was mortified at the lavish praise heaped on him, especially that by supreme commander, General Sir John Monash, who described him as the bravest soldier in his army. Typically it was left to others to describe his exploits and by all accounts the praise was widespread and unanimous. Tall, confident and inspirational, Wilkins commanded men by instinct and they seemed drawn to his natural sense of leadership.

After the war, a nationalistic Billy Hughes announced The England-to-Australia air race carrying a 10,000 pound reward from the Australian Government. The 31-year-old Wilkins was co-opted into an all-Australian crew, ironically in place of Charles Kingsford Smith, who was denied a start because of lack of navigational experience. Bert Hinkler was also excluded because he intended to fly solo. His aircraft, a Blackburn long-range bomber named Kangaroo crashed in Crete with engine trouble that was widely suspected to be the result of sabotage. On 10 December 1919, Ross and Keith Smith landed their Vickers Vimy bomber in Darwin and claimed the prize.

Even before the 1919 race, Wilkins dreamed of exploring Antarctica. But, his first efforts began badly with the ineffectual Cope Expedition of 1920 and Shackleton’s untimely, tragic death aboard Quest in 1922 thwarting his second.

During the interlude, Wilkins was “shanghaied” into the role of photographer for the Quakers who wanted to publicise their relief efforts during the great famine then sweeping Eastern Europe and Russia. He met and interviewed both Lenin and Stalin in a mission that many believe was thinly disguised espionage. The record of his work exists as “New Worlds for Old,” a 1923 35mm silent film now held at the British Film Archives.

Thanks to his growing international reputation, Captain Wilkins was able to leverage contacts enabling him to gain lift on the first of his real aviation adventures. It was this next exploit that gained him real international acclaim - and his knighthood. After years of planning, aircraft testing, navigational training and a string of inevitable and expensive mishaps, Wilkins and pilot, Carl Ben Eielson, eventually flew a single-engine Lockheed Vega

from Alaska to Spitsbergen in April 1928 in a flight lasting 22 hours. This widely covered feat was the first trans-Arctic flight, made all the more remarkable by the rudimentary navigational aids available at the time.

“No flight has been made anywhere, at any time, which could be compared with it,’ wrote Roald Amundsen who would later disappear on a polar flight in June while searching for the downed airship Italia. In another ironic twist, one month later Charles Kingsford-Smith flew the heavy Fokker Trimotor Wilkins had rejected for Arctic duty across the Pacific Ocean into the history books. 1928 was a busy year for pioneering aviation.

Despite completing one of the most famous journeys of all time, Wilkins was embarrassed to be feted by none other than King George V and in another act of self-deprecation declined to be named “Sir George.” Rather than presume to adopt the King’s name, he chose instead to be known as Sir Hubert thereafter.

Wilkins found it difficult to gain backing from the Australian Government for his endeavours and instead found willing and enthusiastic support from playboy adventurer, Lincoln Ellsworth and newspaper giant, Randolph Hearst, who profited shamelessly from their adventures.

After another history-making, around-the-world journey aboard the Graf Zeppelin in 1929, Wilkins embarked on his most ambitious and perhaps foolhardy attempt in 1931. He long believed polar exploration by submarine was the future and he wanted to prove this by taking one not just one under the Arctic ice

cap, but all the way to the Pole. Unfortunately his choice of craft, a pensioned-off ex-WW1 US ‘O’ Class submarine, renamed Nautilus, was not up to the task.

Preparations were drawn out, expensive and demoralising. The journey from the shipyards

across the Atlantic to Norway was fraught with mishap and the submarine had to be towed into port in a most inauspicious arrival. Thanks to his newfound financier and fair-weather ally, Randolph Hearst, his difficulty was all too obvious.

His ragtag crew, upon learning of Wilkins’ plans, partially disabled the craft to prevent, what they reasonably believed, would be a suicide mission. Not to be outdone and with nothing more to lose, Wilkins was, however, able to prove that a submarine could work beneath the polar ice by having the craft rammed against the floe and forcing itself under. Almost thirty years later, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, appropriately named Nautilus, did reach the North Pole completely submerged.

But Wilkins failed to reach the Pole and Hearst made good his threat to withhold payment, a decision that ultimately crippled him financially.

In his later years Wilkins met with some members of New York Explorers Club and others to develop a secret theology based on “The Book of Urantia”. Despite Wilkins’s down-to-Earth and matter-of-fact persona, he privately maintained deeply spiritual beliefs. He believed in ESP, precognition and that he could receive radio signals, a skill he discovered by accident and often demonstrated to amazed crew. For a man who experienced so many uncanny escapes, such a belief was understandable. One astute listener at

these gatherings, L Ron Hubbard, could see value in Wilkins’s beliefs.

Fittingly, when tinkering under the hood of his car and feeling a pain in his chest, he knew what to do. He washed his hands, straightened his tie and lay down on his bed in anticipation of the last great adventure. Sir George Hubert Wilkins passed away quietly in his Massachusetts hotel room on 30 November 1958.

Despite a truly remarkable career, described by some as the most successful of any 20th Century explorer, the proudly patriotic Wilkins remains sadly overlooked by a country apparently oversupplied with heroes.

w w w. o u t e re d g e m ag . com.a u 81