Eric Douglas

Gilbert Eric Douglas (1902-1970), pilot and air force officer, took part in Sir Douglas Mawson's British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) of 1929-1931. Melbourne-born Douglas joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a technician in 1921 and graduated as a pilot six years later. In April 1929, he flew to the Northern Territory as part of a team looking for the crew of a plane called the Kookaburra, which had crashed while itself taking part in a search for aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm. Douglas was recommended for the Air Force Medal for his part in the mission and promoted to pilot officer. As one of two pilots selected by Mawson for the BANZARE expedition, Douglas made reconnaissance flights in the expedition's Gypsy Moth sea-plane, flying ahead of the expedition ship Discovery to identify routes through the pack ice and making sightings of land. Mawson's diary records Douglas participating in landing parties and regularly making 'flights for photographs - both cine and still' with expedition photographer Frank Hurley. Mawson considered the pilots and the aircraft as 'a most important factor' in the expedition's geographic programme, and that its success owed much to 'the determination and skill' of Douglas and flight lieutenant Stuart Campbell. In 1935 Douglas returned to Antarctica again to search for the American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth and his pilot Herbert Hollick-Kenyon. Awarded the Polar Medal for his part in the BANZARE expedition, Douglas returned to military service in the 1930s and retired from the RAAF in 1948. Douglas's papers and his log book of the 1929-31 Antarctic expedition are held in the manuscripts collection of the State Library of Victoria. A selection of Douglas's own photographs of the expedition are held by the State Library of Tasmania.