Alasdair McGregor

Painter, photographer, writer, and sometime architect Alasdair McGregor’s creative interests range from natural history to architecture and design, and the history of exploration. His books include: The Kimberley: Horizons of Stone (1992) and Australia’s Wild Islands (1997), both with Quentin Chester; Mawson’s Huts: An Antarctic Expedition Journal (1998); Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (2004); Antarctica: ‘That Sweep of Savage Splendour’ (2011), and Grand Obsessions: The life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (2009), which won the 2011 National Biography Award. Alasdair McGregor has staged numerous exhibitions of his paintings, and his work hangs in corporate and public collections in Australia and overseas.

Alasdair McGregor reviews 'Aurora: Douglas Mawson and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911–14' by Beau Riffenburgh

June 2012, no. 342 • 22 May 2012

The years 1909 to 1914 were unusually busy in Antarctica. Back in 1900 the continent had barely been walked on, but in the succeeding decade or so, expeditions of scientific and geographical enquiry, often burdened with heavy loads of imperialist endeavour, penetrated to the heart of the last unexplored continent. The attainment of the South Geographical Pole became the emblematic centrepiece of t ... (read more)

Alasdair McGregor reviews 'Marion Mahony Reconsidered' edited by David van Zanten

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

Marion Mahony (1870–1961) was that rare commodity in late nineteenth-century American society: a woman functioning as an equal in a professional world dominated by men. Born to progressive parents, and a household and wider circle of strong and socially engaged women, Marion Lucy Mahony was only the second woman to graduate from an American university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1894 ... (read more)