To paraphrase Tennessee Ernie Ford, another day older and closer to death.

Other then that typo the article is well written.

My interest in Wilkins was piqued some time ago by an inquiry I received via a website that I run for a 19th-century mountain gold-mining ghost town in the foothills of the south-east Australian Alps. A woman had written to me asking after “Susie Evans”, who’d been a playmate of her grandmother and often sung with her at school concerts. She’d been told that she “married a politician and moved to Sydney”, but the reality was that she’d become a Melbourne showgirl, married (and soon divorced) a man named Oscar Bennett in 1915, studied voice under Dame Nellie Melba, and sailed off for a career in opera at La Scala in Milan. She changed her goals en route, and instead became a celebrated Broadway showgirl, in which capacity she was introduced to the famous explorer, whom she eventually married at Cleveland Registry Office in late August, 1929.

Neither got in the way of the other’s career all that much, and you get the impression that that arrangement suited them both quite well. She purchased the farm on which they lived in N-E Pennsylvania, and died some 16 years after her husband, in a nursing home in California, having had no children. Her ashes were also scattered at the North Pole, from the nuclear submarine USS Bluefish, on 4 May, 1975, as a further mark of respect by American submariners.

Wilkins was a strange man in many ways. When knighted in 1928, for example, he foreswore being called Sir George Hubert Wilkins, the name by which he was christened, and styled himself instead as “Sir Hubert” in a craven token of excessive deference to England’s then King (South Australians can be like that sometimes). For a further and more extensive treatment of his life and times, I would recommend Simon Nasht’s “The Last Explorer” (published by Hachette Australia, 2007). Reading about his earlier exploits, you will be left with the impression that his crash-through-or-crash attitude often meant that he was a very dangerous man to be standing too close to when the balloon went up.

Wilkins has been called one of the greatest undiscovered explorers of the 20th century, and one who is especially little known in his own home country, because of what Vilhjalmur Stefansson characterized as his “aggressive modesty”. In Nasht’s book, Stefansson is quoted as saying of Wilkins that “it ought to be enough to hide your light under a bushel, without threatening to knock anybody down who wants to take the bushel away.”

That’s when Men were very bent on hardship to obtain a Goal.

Captain Stephen