Bust of Sir Hubert Wilkins

Bronze bust of Antarctic explorer, Sir Hubert Wilkins, created by well-known South Australian artist and sculptor John Dowie.

When drought devastated Wilkins's family's farm he became determined to study worldwide weather conditions to gain a better understanding of climatology. Wilkins studied engineering at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries and photography and cinematography in Adelaide and Sydney. He went to England in 1908 and worked for the Gaumont Film Company as a photographer and also as a newspaper reporter, which allowed him to travel widely. Wilkins also learnt to fly and began experimenting with aerial photography.

In 1913 Wilkins joined Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic expedition which gave him the opportunity to learn about survival skills in extreme conditions and to formulate his ideas about improving weather predictions. On learning of the outbreak of World War I Wilkins returned to Australia in 1917 and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, serving with the 9^th Regiment, Australian Flying Corps as an official photographer. On joining up he stated his trade/calling as 'explorer'. Wilkins was put in charge of the photographic sub-section of the Australian War Records Section in 1918. He was twice wounded in action and was awarded the Military Cross, an award for gallantry, in mid-1918 with a Bar added in 1919. In 1919 he accompanied CEW Bean, head of the Australian Historical Mission, on a trip to Gallipoli to document the battlefields there.

In 1920, Wilkins made his first trip to Antarctica as a member of JL Cope's British Imperial Antarctic Expedition and was subsequently invited by the noted explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton to join his 1922 Antarctic expedition in the Quest. During this trip, Wilkins became convinced that aeroplanes could be used for polar exploration and planned for a survey of meteorological conditions in the Polar Regions.

From 1923 Wilkins spent two years in the Australia's tropical regions to study and collect floral and faunal specimens, fossils and Aboriginal artefacts for the British Museum. His account of this expedition was published as Undiscovered Australia.

In 1926 Wilkins conducted a series of flights over the Arctic searching for possible places to land and for a location for a permanent meteorological observatory. Wilkins and his pilot Carl Ben Eielson completed the first successful flight across the Arctic from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, Norway, in April 1928. Wilkins was knighted for this pioneering flight and received the medals of both the Royal Geographical and the American Geographical Societies.

In November 1928 Wilkins returned to the Antarctic on an aerial exploration sponsored by the American Geographical Society. Here he made the first flights in the Antarctic and in his aerial survey of the Antarctic Peninsula discovered what he believed were a number of large channels breaking it up into a number if islands. Throughout the 1930s he was involved in several more Antarctic expeditions. He also, in 1931, attempted to take a submarine under the North Pole. During World War II Wilkins consulted for the US Army on conditions of extreme cold.

Wilkins lived just long enough to hear that the atomic submarines USS Nautilus and USS Skate had completed under-ice voyages in the Arctic in August 1958, just as he had attempted in 1931. He died suddenly in November 1958. Four months later the Skate, commanded by Wilkins's friend James Calvert, scattered his ashes at the North Pole.

The State Library holds several other pieces of sculpture by John Dowie: a bust of the anthropologist Charles Mountford, on display in the Somerville Reading Room, and a head of Hon. John Bray, Chief Justice of South Australia 1967-1978, in Bray Study Room 1.

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