Australia has never been so prodigal of great men that it can afford to let even one slip into oblivion; yet George Hubert Wilkins (1888–1958) is now hardly a household name. In a life of ceaseless activity, he was a photographer, naturalist, meteorologist, geographer, aviator, submariner, war correspondent, religious thinker, and writer, but he was best known as a celebrated polar explorer. His first biographer, John Grierson, a professional writer, dealt adequately enough with the many lives of Wilkins in 1960, at a time when his subject was still well known. Four decades later, Simon Nasht, a documentary film-maker, offers the Australian reading public an expanded version of Grierson’s biography. Nasht has the advantage of a growing library of polar studies, and his book appears at a time when climatology and extinction of species are subjects of scientific and popular concern.

Nasht also faces considerable problems, admitting at the start that Wilkins’s story is ‘remarkable, at times implausible’. The implausibility surfaces early in his career, in the two accounts (one more highly coloured than the other) of the way in which he reached Europe. Was he the sort of explorer who by nature made florid stories out of banal facts? Doubts were not settled by the style and language that Nasht employs to describe each of the remarkable adventures. His use of hyperbole overheats the prose and, far from convincing this reader, left niggling uncertainties. These doubts were settled, not by the author’s powers of persuasion, but by an appeal to an authoritative biographer. The latter agreed that part of the scientific establishment treated Wilkins as a suicidal amateur, lacking formal training, with a flair for publicity, but that Wilkins himself was not a fantasist. Perhaps a more sombre style may have made the achievements more credible.