Australian History: Brilliant stories from Australia's past.
Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition concluded, and the last of the expeditioners arrived back in Adelaide in February, 1914. A lot had happened, both on the frozen continent and across the world, in the years they had been away. We wrap up the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” in this...
Douglas Mawson’s expedition was well underway, and the teams from the Cape Denison base had returned after completing their various research programs. All except Mawson and his team. They had undertaken the most ambitious and distant trek, and were now overdue. We turn our attention to the trek Mawson, Ninnis...
After returning from Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition and rejecting any idea of returning to Antarctica, the trauma of his polar trekking faded and Douglas Mawson began to consider all the exploration & discovery that still lay waiting there. He set about planning the “Australasian Antarctic Expedition”, to undertake an ambitious scientific...
Douglas Mawson, who would later become the leader of Australia’s first Antarctic expedition, undertook his first trip to Antarctica as part of Ernest Shackleton’s “Nimrod Expedition”, 1908. Though he was young and this was his first foray in to the icy territory, his obvious intelligence, robust constitution and leadership skills,...
Australia’s first formal expedition to Antarctica in 1911, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was led by Douglas Mawson, a geologist from Adelaide University. This episode we’ll look at what brought Mawson to the Antarctic, and at the earlier British expeditions that helped scaffold Mawson’s later venture. The following episodes will focus...