George Hubert Wilkins

George Hubert Wilkins was born in Australia on 31 October 1888. After training at the State School and School of Mines in Adelaide, he reached Europe as a stowaway and spent four years wandering in Europe and America, eventually serving as an official photographer to the Turkish army during the Balkan war of 1912. In 1913, he joined Vilhjalmur Stefansson's expedition to the Canadian Arctic spending three years in the field as photographer and correspondent for the London Times. Returning to Britain in 1916, he enlisted with the Royal Australian Flying Corps as air and field photographer. He saw service in France, was wounded and awarded the Military Cross with bar. In 1919, he attempted to fly back to Australia as navigator in an air race, but the aircraft crashed in Crete and he returned to England.

Wilkins joined the British Expedition to Graham Land, 1920-1922 (leader John Lachlan Cope), which initially promised opportunities for flight and aerial photography in the Antarctic Peninsula. However, insufficient finance curtailed the expedition, and Wilkins and Cope withdrew. Homeward bound in Montevideo, he encountered Sir Ernest Shackleton, who invited him to join his Shackleton-Rowett Antarctic Expedition, 1921-1922, as naturalist and photographer on board the expedition ship Quest . When Shackleton died on South Georgia in January 1922, the expedition continued for a few months under Frank Wild, briefly exploring the South Sandwich Islands and the Weddell Sea before returning to Britain. While he was working on the specimens brought back by Quest in the Natural History section of the British Museum, Wilkins was selected by the trustees to lead a collecting expedition to northern Australia between 1923 and 1925.

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