What Book to Read?

The Last Explorer (2005) has the sub-title Hubert Wilkins – Australia’s Unknown Hero. And before reading this book I had never heard of him. As Nasht points out, even though he was born in South Australia, he hasn’t even been accorded the honour of a commemorative plaque on Adelaide’s historic walk. Yet Nasht makes a convincing case for his heroism that should have made it impossible to ignore him. Why then is he so little known in the country of his birth?

One explanation is suggested by a review of the book in The Age by Bruce Elder, who puts Wilkin’s relative anonymity down to the fact that Wilkins ‘spent most of his life being either unsuccessful or living in the shadow of others’. Nasht certainly works hard to refute this view, and Wilkins’s life gives him plenty to work with. You can read the Wikipedia summary here and his somewhat underwhelming biography in the ADB here. Born in 1888 in the mid-north of South Australia to a family struggling to make a living on a farm on marginal land with patchy rainfall, he dreamt early of improving meteorology, a passion Nasht says informed the rest of his life. Falling almost by accident into the dangerous career of aerial photography, he took part in various Arctic expeditions, and became an official Australian war photographer in the First World War.  He was decorated for bravery and praised by General Sir John Monash as ‘a highly accomplished and absolutely fearless combat photographer’. After the war he took part in scientific expeditions to the Southern Ocean, and in northern Australia. But his passion was exploration in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, which he believed could best be undertaken from the air. After a number of hair-raising brushes with disaster, he succeed in 1929 in flying across the Arctic from Alaska to Norway, a feat for which he was knighted.  His next major expedition involved trying to sail an American First World War submarine named Nautilus under the Arctic ice, but the Nautilus was ill-equipped and possibly sabotaged and the mission failed. Wilkins kept busy, but never again attained the hero status he had previously held in America.

I don’t think Nasht has overstated his outstanding bravery, or his tenacity. But Elder is right that despite these qualities, he didn’t make major discoveries, and the submarine venture was a dangerous folly.

The explanation which is offered by Nasht for Wilkins’s relatively unknown status in Australia is that on the expedition to northern Australia, he criticised both the treatment of Aboriginal people and the wholesale destruction of the local flora and fauna. This he suggests, was considered unforgivable by the Australian government and public alike. This seems unlikely to me. More important was the fact that after the war, Wilkins lived and worked in America, and was famous there, rather than in Australia, because several of his expeditions were financed and publicised by the Hearst newspapers, which had no reach in Australia. He’s probably also right that Wilkins was a modest man who disliked self-promotion, unlike several of the other explorers operating at the time. Nasht emphasises his commitment to scientific exploration rather than the simple race to be the first to be somewhere or to do something which dominated the media reporting of exploration up to the Second World War. But then he would, wouldn’t he.

Given that the risks of polar exploration were so great, I was hoping that Nasht would shed light on what motivated Wilkins to put his life in danger so often, especially after his marriage. He quotes Wilkins as follows:

Is it the primitive thirst for adventure, the desire to penetrate the unseen and unknown; to experience the thrill that comes from the presence of danger and the satisfaction one feels at facing and narrowly cheating death that takes me again and again to the polar regions? Yes, it is, to a certain extent, but the experienced know that there is a thrill greater than that of adventure. It is the thrill of worthy accomplishment.

What are we to make of this? It sums up for me the reason for Wilkins’s lack of recognition; he is ‘worthy’, but dull, and this makes it hard for Nasht to tell a good story about him. Indeed despite the daring things Wilkins did, I only occasionally found the book gripping. Furthermore there is something a bit pedestrian about Nasht’s writing; it does not inspire. This is not an evaluation of Wilkins’s achievements; Nasht rarely criticises him, and seems determined to prove him a hero. Elder suggests the book would have been improved by being shorter, and he may be right; Nasht seems to have included material from every source he could find, leading to an unnecessarily detailed account.

For all that, I think Wilkins does at least deserve one of those commemorative plaques in Adelaide.

Nasht is a journalist, and film maker in partnership with the entrepreneur Dick Smith. I wondered if he felt a sense of affinity with Wilkins in having to scrounge around to get funding for his projects, which you can read about here. One notable one is the ABC documentary I Can Change Your Mind About Climate (2012) in which he placed together a climate change activist and a climate change denier, allowing them both to discuss their views with people they claimed as authorities on the topic. Many people thought it presented the reality of climate change as a debatable topic rather than something for which there is overwhelming scientific evidence. You can read his defence here. In the book, he highlights the ways in which Wilkins had an early understanding of climate change, perhaps another reason why he deserves to be better known.