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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australasian Antarctic Expedition | 7/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_Antarctic_Expedition | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T12:36:55.277031+00:00 | kb-cron |
On 26 February 1914, Aurora reached Adelaide to an enthusiastic welcome. For the next month, Mawson was engaged in a busy round of receptions and scientific meetings, before sailing for London on 1 April, accompanied by his bride, Paquita Delprat, whom he had married the previous day. In London, he lectured to the Royal Geographical Society, visited the parents of Ninnis, and was received at Marlborough House by Alexandra, the Queen Mother, and her sister, the Dowager Empress of Russia. On 29 June, before his return to Australia, he was knighted at Buckingham Palace by King George V and was later the recipient of many further honours, including the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in 1915. In Australia, Mawson faced the reality of the expedition's debts. He proposed that the Australian government should purchase Aurora and the other artefacts and equipment from the expedition for £15,000 – an amount, he reckoned, that would not only meet all outstanding debts but would finance the production of the scientific reports. The government turned him down. Instead he sold Aurora to Shackleton for a mere £3,200, for use in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (ITAE), and hoped to settle the balance of the debt through the sales of his chronicle of the expedition, The Home of the Blizzard, and with the profits from Hurley's film and photographs. The outbreak of war later in 1914 delayed the book's publication, while the distribution of the film was hampered by contractual problems and by a shift of public attention towards the war. As a result, the scientific reports were produced piecemeal over the next 30 years, the last appearing in 1947. Many of the expedition's personnel enlisted in the armed forces when war broke out; Bage – already an officer in the Royal Australian Engineers – was killed during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and Leslie Blake, the cartographer and geologist of the Macquarie Island party, died after being badly wounded by a shell in France in 1918. Several would return to the Antarctic: Mawson as the leader of the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) in 1929–1931; Davis, as captain of Aurora for the relief voyage for the Ross Sea party in Shackleton's expedition, and as captain of Discovery during the first stage of BANZARE; Hurley joined the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and also signed on to BANZARE. Wild joined ITAE as well, and in 1921 he accompanied Shackleton on his final expedition, taking over as leader following Shackleton's sudden death in January 1922. Charles Harrisson, who had been a member of the Far Western Party, visited Macquarie Island in 1914, but his ship disappeared without a trace on its return voyage to Australia. Two days after arriving in Adelaide, Jeffryes took a train heading to his home in Toowoomba, but he never arrived; a month later he was found near Stawell, Victoria, wandering in the bush. He spent the next year in asylums, but after an assault on a member of staff, he was committed to a criminal asylum in Ararat, where he died in 1942. His family were highly critical of Mawson's lack of care and sympathy; they wrote him numerous letters apparently without response. In 2018, Jeffryes was finally honoured by the erection of a plaque in the Ararat Cemetery, near the site of his unmarked grave.
== Appraisal and legacy ==
The scientific work of the expedition covered the fields of geology, biology, meteorology, terrestrial magnetism, and oceanography, with the vast amounts of data filling multiple reports published over a period of 30 years. These reports provided an extensive description of Antarctica's extreme weather and of its animal and plant life. It also provided the first studies and mapping of the island. Its eight major sledging parties travelled for a total of 4,180 kilometres (2,600 mi), while Aurora sailed along 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi) of uncharted coastline, mapping the continental shelf through 55° of longitude. Hurley's photographs and film provided a comprehensive pictorial record, and along with Mawson's and other books produced about Antarctica helped to raise public awareness of the importance of preserving Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands from exploitation. Mawson and Hurley were horrified at the widespread killing of seals and whales by sealers and whalers, and subsequently used their influence to attempt to bring the penguin oil industry on Macquarie Island to a halt. The island was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1933, and in 1997 was listed as a World Heritage Site. This was the first expedition to successfully establish wireless contact between the Antarctic continent and the Australian mainland, through the relay station on Macquarie Island. The Macquarie Island radio base continued to transmit meteorological data to the Melbourne weather bureau daily for two years. Many Antarctic features bear names paying tribute to expedition members, including Cape Mawson, Mawson Coast, Mawson Peninsula, Madigan Nunatak, Mertz Glacier and Ninnis Glacier. The expedition was the first step towards Australia's later territorial claims on the Antarctic continent, and was on a greater scale than any of its predecessors in the field. Frank Hurley summed up the character of the expedition: "Shackleton grafted science on to exploration – Mawson added exploring to science". According to the historian Gordon Hayes, "Mawson's expedition, judged by the magnitude both of its scale and of its achievements, was the greatest and most consummate expedition that ever sailed to Antarctica." In 2012, the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra held a commemorative exhibition, called Extreme Film and Sound, to celebrate 100 years of Australian Antarctic expeditions on the anniversary of the AAE.