Captain George Hubert Wilkins, ca 1918. Australian War Memorial, P03171.003.

The career of Sir George Hubert Wilkins has been described by some as the most successful of any 20th century explorer. He took the first moving pictures from an aircraft and filmed the first footage of actual battle. He was the first to fly an aircraft over the Antarctic, the first to fly an aeroplane across the Arctic and the first to discover new land using an aircraft. He seemed to revel in risk; as war correspondent Charles Bean wrote: “I sometimes doubted whether any course of action was for long agreeable to him unless it led eventually to danger.” Despite this, Wilkins is little known to most Australians.

by Roderick Eime