Frank Hurley

The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.

From his precocious youth in inner-city Sydney until his death – still in harness at the age of seventy-five – the Australian photographer Frank Hurley lived for ‘adventure and romance’. By any standards, his was an extraordinary career. Yet the individual delineations of its great landmarks have blurred in the factual catalogue of Hurley’s achievements in two Antarctic expeditions during the cradle period of exploration in that great southern continent; in his work as an official photographer during the two world wars; in his pioneering of filmed documentaries and as a cinematographer in the making of major Australian feature films in the 1930s. In the last twenty years of his career, Hurley travelled the length and breadth of his own country, celebrating its people and eulogising what he saw to be the heroic Australian landscape. Always restless, always yearning for the next challenge, Hurley was a citizen of the world. He was drawn to record the cultures of the ancient world and, closer to home, aspects of New Guinea and the Pacific.

During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.