SCOTT'S MEMORY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 43, 20 February 1940, Page 5

SCOTT'S MEMORY.

EXPLORERS' TOAST. SYDNEY COMMEMORATION. TWELVE COMRADES DIKE. SYDNEY, February 15. On the twenty-eighth* anniversary of the conquest of the South Pole by Captain Scott, 12 Australian Antarctic explorers sat down to dinner in Sydney and toasted Scott's memory. One of the diners, Captain Frank Hurley, veteran Polar photographer, whose pictures of the Antarctic adorn so many memoirs of adventures in the Great White South, was a member of four Antarctic expeditions, and his life is linked with some of the most heroic deeds in the history of Polar exploration.

It was Captain Hurley's party which erected the cairn containing a bag of food which was discovered by Sir Douglas Mawson worn out and despairing of life, he was struggling back alone 200 miles to his base after the deaths of Lieutenant Xinnis and Dr. Mertz in Adelie Land.

Hurley, too, was on the ill-fated Endurance when that famous Polar ship] was crushed in the pack ice in the Wed-I dell Sea during Sir Ernest Shackleton's| expedition of 1914-17. The crew escaped' on to an ice floe which carried themj over an ocean two miles deep to lonelv Elephant Island, where Captain Hurleyl and 21 others were marooned for five : months, sheltering under an upturned boat resting on an exposed ledjre of rock 200 paces long by 30 yards wide. ! Xear Captain' Hurley sat Mr. L. A.| Hooke, who was wireless operator in the! Aurora when, disabled in a gale, she drifted hopelessly for 11 months in the! ice-packed Ross Sea. Mr. Hooke is now; general manager of Amalgamated Wire-' less (Australasia) Ltd. I

Dr. S. E. Jones, medical officer in' Mawson's 1911-14 expedition, is now]

medical officer at a psychiatric clinic in Sydney. Dr. J. G. Hunter, biologist with Mawson's 1929-31 expedition, is general secretary of the Australian Council of the British Medical Association. Dr. W. W. Ingram, medical officer with the 1929-31 expedition, is now a medical specialist in Sydney. Mr. H. O. Fletcher a biologist with that expedition, is now' palaeontologist at the Australian Museum. Professor Harvey Johnston, the senior biologist, is professor of zoology at the University of Adelaide. Mr Alfred Howard, the analytical chemist, is attached to the research station of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research at Griffith.

Others present included Messrs. W. W. Hannam, George Dovers and C F Laseron. Sir Douglas Mawson himself] was detained by business affairs in Adelaide and could not "be present.