Frank Hurley OBE

Frank Hurley (1885-1962), photographer, first made his name on Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. On this trip he made many stills and the film Home of the Blizzard (1913). In April 1914 he set out from Sydney for four months' filming of Into Australia's Unknown, depicting outback stations, camel trains, wild boars and anthills. While he was in the NT he was named official photographer for Shackleton's British Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. On this trip he made the film In the Grip of the Polar Ice (1917) and took hundreds of technically demanding photographs of the dramatic journey. For the remaining year of World War I he was an official photographer and cameraman in France and the Middle East. After making the documentaries The Ross Smith Flight (1920) and Pearls and Savages (1921) (hand-coloured and re-released as With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua in 1923) in 1926 he made two feature films, The Jungle Woman and Hound of the Deep. He returned to the Antarctic as a filmmaker with Mawson for the BANZARE of 1929-31, making With Mawson to the Frozen South. In the 1930s he made more documentary and fiction films for Australasian Films, Cinesound and the British Ministry of Information - among them Symphony in Steel, a dizzying documentary about the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, including footage of the span closure, shot in the early hours of the morning using flashlights. In World War II he served as an official war photographer in the Middle East again, taking the only footage of the British advance in North Africa and becoming head of the Department of Information unit in the Middle East. He spent the rest of his career photographing and writing popular books documenting life in Australia.