George Hubert Wilkins recorded a changing world with a camera and courage
George Hubert Wilkins’ camera caught history’s seminal moments. He dived in, mostly recklessly, often swimming ahead of these sweeping tides in the affairs of mankind.
History got a hurry on at the turn of the 20th century – in short order powered flight was invented, as were submarines, so too radio and sonar, the world went to war, Russians revolted, the first photographs appeared in newspapers, and humans began to explore our planet’s polar extremes.
George Hubert Wilkins might have been growing up a hemisphere away in South Australia’s marginal farming wastelands, but he wasn’t about to stand still and have all this history to flow about him. He dived in, mostly recklessly, often swimming ahead of these sweeping tides in the affairs of mankind.
He learned to operate the bulky cameras of the new medium, and then how to fly an aeroplane, and filmed early battles of the Balkan War in 1912, a preliminary bout to the looming European conflagration. He stepped between the walking warriors of World War I to film and photograph the men – Germans and Australians – in such a nonchalant manner that the bemused enemy troops called him “dieser verruckte Fotograf” – that mad photographer – and discussed if they should shoot him.
He would photograph soldiers carrying injured men on stretchers taking them back to relative safety accompanied by a raised Red Cross flag. But Wilkins – burdened by weighty gear, often a 3kg Gaumont camera encased in polished mahogany, with a brass lens and on a sturdy wooden tripod – had no flag. And no weapon. Ever.
General Sir John Monash witnessed courage and heroics in the battlefield daily, but always referred to Wilkins as “the bravest man I’ve ever seen”.
A decade later, flying across the North Pole, Wilkins and pilot Carl Eielson covered more than 4000km in 22 hours navigating their way in Lockheed Vega, its plywood fuselage being battered by Arctic storms. The Vega was in any case so noisy that Wilkins and Eielson communicated by passing scribbled notes back and forth. They had just enough fuel for a direct crossing and Wilkins had to adjust the compass bearing to take into account the changing magnetic field of the Earth.
Last century’s most acclaimed explorer, Roald Amundsen, said of this risk: “No flight has been made anywhere, at any time, which could be compared to it.”
And Wilkins caught so many moments now lost to the world: an Aboriginal man spearing a dugong from a dugout canoe (while the photographer and his gear are in another); Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s burial on South Georgia; the Zeppelin era; the almost hand-to-hand combat of trench warfare; gassed soldiers; leather-faced Inuits clothed in sealskins and caribou hides; camel trains transporting stores across Arnhem Land; and American aviator Amelia Earhart.
Of course, many of his wartime photographs capture the bedlam of human conflict, but at those moments there is usually drama on both sides of the camera, with Wilkins (and an assistant carrying the plates) having to set up the tripod, mount the camera before focusing and taking a single shot.
Ironically, one of his most moving images of war involved no danger to anyone and was calmly photographed in a wallpapered lounge room in controlled conditions, Wilkins even taking his time to position his camera on the floor. It was taken in December 1917 at Halinghen in northern France. Brave Australians of the 3rd Battalion – their weary eyes had seen the worst of the blood, sweat and fears of the Western Front – silently line up to vote No in the second of Australia’s divisive conscription ballots. They didn’t want their countrymen to witness what they had, to do what they had done, to feel like they did, and to be standing in much thinner ranks, not that Wilkins needed to add any of that to the caption – their faces told it all.
Despite Wilkins’s towering achievements – for which he was knighted – he remains relatively unknown, and Adelaide playwright, filmmaker and producer Peter Maddern sought to address this with a documentary – Eye Of Wilkins – that he completed for this year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival. Now he has trawled through those thousands of astonishingly varied photographs and newsreels and edited the best of them into a large-format book of the same name. These photographs tell the chapters of Wilkins’s life. The early London years working for the Gaumont newsreel company, the Balkan War, his 1913 Canadian Arctic expedition, France during World War I, Antarctica with Shackleton in 1921, the Outback two years later, the 1926 return to Antarctica and journey across the world to New York on the Graf Zeppelin, his voyage beneath the Arctic ice in a submarine and the adventures beyond.
Maddern collected the images from across the globe including the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Centre in Ohio, the State Library of South Australia, London’s British Natural History Museum, the British Film Institute National Archive, the Museum of Canada, the State Library of NSW and the Australian War Memorial.
“Photography wasn’t considered an art until the 1930s,” Maddern says. “So he’s taking these photographs and conceiving of them in his eye before he takes them with a view to them as pieces of art – decisive moments – well before these events had been identified and written about.”
Another strength of Wilkins’s work is the fastidious captioning of almost all the images, other than in battles where that was impossible. Maddern believes this was at the urging of Charles Bean, the war correspondent turned historian and founder of the AWM.
“Having taken these photographs and developed them I suspect either at the time or next day he goes back and finds these guys and gets the people to identify themselves,” Maddern says.
It dawned on Bean at Gallipoli the significance of the events for a country just 14 years into its federation. He understood what they meant and knew they needed to be comprehensively documented.
“This was our first big stoush,” Maddern says. “For everybody else – the English, the Germans, the French – this was just business as usual, just slightly worse than usual.” According to Maddern, Wilkins sometimes said he would hear a voice in his head in dangerous times reassuring him that “this will all be OK”. It must have been a constant chatter.
On his various missions Wilkins was shot at, injured, gassed, stranded on ice floes, a prisoner of war, attacked by a bear and stalked by cannibals. And he met and spoke to extraordinary people including – Benito Mussolini, Walt Disney, King George V, who knighted him, and Vladimir Lenin, who told the Australian he regretted the slow development of the post-revolutionary Russian economy. Wilkins was more remarkable than every one of them.
The Eye of Wilkins: The Complete Photographic Retrospective of George Hubert Wilkins by Peter Maddern (Peacock Publications, 120pp, $79.95).
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