Talk:Australasian Antarctic Expedition

Free expedition images at Flickr

The State Library of New South Wales has listed on Flickr a set of photos from the First Australian Antarctic Expedition with no known copyright restrictions. The images are available here: http://flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/sets/72157607350816312. Maralia (talk) 03:23, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Alfred James Hodgeman

http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/History/biography/hodgeman_alfred_james.htm

The date of birth and death are clearly incorrect. It seems he designed and oversaw building of some of the main base huts. He was a cartographer, and architect. He was one of very few who stayed at the main base for the second year. The Hodgeman Islands are at -67.0167, 144.25, their weather forecast is at http://www.yr.no/place/Antarctica/Other/Hodgeman_Islands/forecast.pdf

Depth of Article Content, especially Communications section

G'day Guys — I am relatively inexperienced in Wikipedia, less so in the history of wireless and broadcasting; presently focussed on developing History of broadcasting in Australia. But it seems to me that we have a lot of AAE material in the Douglas Mawson article and precious little in this one. I will expand the material on Communications here, but it will leave this article unbalanced. Hopefully SKS will step forward and expand the article generally. Alternatively the Communications material could be developed into a separate article. My preference is for the former. I will use the the Communications material here as sections within the individual articles on Hannam, Jeffryes, Bickerton, Sawyer and Sandell, also for subsubsection in the ever-growing History of broadcasting in Australia. All comments welcome--Samuel.dellit (talk) 19:51, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

List of Participants

G'day Guys.— I am tempted to expand the list of participants to include the hardworking crew of the SY Aurora and SS Taroa (as many as can be identified), the several administrators who made it all flow smoothly back in Australia and the sponsors, without which the expedition would never have left Hobart. This would clearly be too much for this article and would best be a separate Wikipedia List. This might best be handled as a Table with sortable columns by Name, Primary role, Primary location. Could be a handy reference. I will wait a month or two to see if there is any reaction to this from the Wikipedia community--Samuel.dellit (talk) 22:56, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

(Nineteen months on!) There's a separate list, now, List of members of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911-14. It includes reference to, but not a detailed list, of the Aurora crew members (they chopped and changed, and there were around 100 of them over the various voyages). I don't think the sponsors qualify as "members of the expedition", and their contribution should be recognised in the main expedition article, which is decidedly substandard at the moment but is in my sights for an overhaul. Brianboulton (talk) 17:34, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Article expansion

As indicated above, I've been considering for a while how this important article might be expanded and improved, to bring it closer to the standards of other WP articles on the major Antarctic expeditions of the heroic era. Here are a few thoughts:

Current situation

The present article consists of 2,230 words (excl. lead), of which more than half (1,206) relate to "Communications", as a result of the expansion of this section explained above by Samuel.dellit. Everything else - background, preparations, the work of the bases, Aurora's oceanographic work, etc – is dealt with, if at all, in barely 1,000 words. There's lots of scope for developing these sections. I note there is a stub article, Western Base party, not very informative at present, which could be the means of expanding this particular section of the expedition account.

Sourcing

• Much of the present text is unsourced, hence the maintenance tag. Current cited texts, of varying quality, are all from online sources. Citation, where it exists, is usually scanty, sometimes no more than acknowledging the existence of the source, and often unpaginated.
• Important books about the expedition are listed as "Further reading" but not used as sources; these include Mawson et al's Home of the Blizzard, Davis's account, Turney's long chapter in 1912, Roberts's Alone on the ice. Books not listed include Beau Riffenburgh's comprehensive (2008) Racing with Death; Peter Fitzsimmons's Mawson and the Ice Men of the Heroic Age; Leif Mills's biography of Wild contains a long account of the doings at the Western base; Rorke Bryan's Ordeal by Ice (2011) is a detailed history of the Antarctic expedition ships of the Heroic age and beyond, inc. useful information on Aurora. I have all these (except Roberts which I'm trying to get hold of), and others besides.
• There are other useful articles online not being used at present, including an early (1915) summary of the expedition's achievements, appearing in the American Geographical Society bulletin available via JSTOR.

Proposed article construction and organisation

A possible article construction plan:

• Background: Mawson's early ideas, his interactions with Scott and (more significantly) Shackleton; Shackleton's withdrawal; expedition aims and objectives.
• Preparations: fundraising, sponsors, selection of key personnel, purchase of ship & equipment, planning and replanning of bases, etc
• Expedition:

• Departure, establishing the bases
• Work at Main base over 2 seasons
• Work at Western base – maybe a shortish summary with the detail contained in the (expanded) stub referred to above
• Work at MacQuarie Island over 2 seasons. I'm inclined to think that this, too, could be briefly summarised, with details covered in a new dedicated article.
• Oceanographic work carried out by Aurora in the course of five voyages

• Appraisal - achievements, impact, aftermath.

I have access to plenty of material covering all these areas in reasonable detail.

Reconstruction will be quite a lengthy undertaking, and it would be useful to have any other practical ideas & suggestions as to how we might approach this task. Meanwhile, I'll continue researching. Brianboulton (talk) 20:54, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

I shall shortly begin posting my revised version of the article, which I have prepared on the lines indicated above. For the reasons I've given, mainly lack of sources and imbalance of material, I've gone for a rewrite rather than an amendment to the present text. I have taken due account of existing subarticles, and there is scope for further subarticles to be written, though I'm unlikely to attempt this myself. I hope that the rewrite period will not be too extended, and that the disruption to the article will not last long. Brianboulton (talk) 17:55, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Dear Brian,

Thank you for your update, and for all your efforts in drafting your rewrite behind the scenes. I too had wanted to improve this article for some time but did not have enough sources, other than Mawson's Antarctic Diaries by Jacka & Jacka. I therefore look forward to welcoming your contributions in the fullness of time. Until then, good luck and best wishes with the final stretch. With kind regards for now;

Patrick. ツ Pdebee.^{(talk)(become old-fashioned!)} 20:37, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Patrick. You are welcome to read my working draft, on User:Brianboulton/Sandbox10. When it comes on to mainspace, I expect quite a bit of amendment – it will not be the finished polished product for a while. Brianboulton (talk) 20:51, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Landforms discovered/named

hi all, should there me a section that lists the landforms that this expedition discovered/named (i note that a few have been included at Australasian Antarctic Expedition#Appraisal) and/or a breakout list article if it would be too large for this article? Coolabahapple (talk) 02:24, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Notes for this article

I have come across User:Brianboulton/Sandbox13 and User:Brianboulton/Sandbox10, the notes Brian made before and during his development of this article. A lot of it he incorporated but other parts may still be relevant to reviewers. Thincat (talk) 10:44, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I used both of those when I was going through it. Sandbox10 is pretty close to what Brian originally copied over and I think most of the bits Brian (and I) omitted to incorporate from the notes in Sandbox13 are too detailed for this article. The Mawson sledging journey is already covered in detail in the FA Far Eastern Party and think that other subarticles are probably the way to go for other aspects. The oceanographic work of Aurora and the studies on Macquarie Island by themselves could easily overwhelm this article. Yomangani^talk 11:04, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Well done, Yomangani; I admire your forensic approach in going over Brian’s earlier notes, and identifying the potential for sub-articles. Thank you once again for all your efforts, occasionally peppered with your trademark, entertaining edit summaries . With kind regards; Patrick. ツ Pdebee.^{(talk)(become old-fashioned!)} 13:30, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

That's fine. These days some people go round improving WP by blanking other users' unattended sandboxes so I didn't want these to get lost. Many thanks for seeing to all this. Thincat (talk) 20:55, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

TFAR

Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Australasian Antarctic Expedition --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:01, 2 March 2020 (UTC)