George goyder book collector5/10/2023 Although he had some schooling, he was largely self-taught, reading voraciously during the day while out ploughing vast paddocks alone with just the horse and dog for company or at night by kerosene lamp in the homestead. Such empathy with indigenous people would later save his life in a far different place. He formed friendships with the local Aboriginal teenagers, camping and living with them, learning how to hunt and live off the land and taking a great interest in their spirituality and mysticism. George Wilkins grew up helping his father and brothers on the property, learning from an early age how to become self-sufficient in a savage climate and an empty land. Wracked by successive droughts and the deaths of children, the family’s venture was fated from the outset to be one of hardship. Unfortunately, Henry’s land was beyond what would be known as Goyder’s Line, the invisible line surveyed a few years later by George Goyder beyond which there is insufficient rainfall for successful agriculture. Eager to find land where they could establish a profitable sheep and cattle farm, the family piled their possessions on a bullock cart and travelled 200 kilometres inland to take up land in the Mount Bryan area. After spending some time on the Victorian goldfields as a teenager, Henry became a successful drover and married Louisa Smith. It’s highly likely that his father, Henry, who was born only three days after the settlement’s proclamation, was the first surviving settler child born in the colony. His grandparents, William Wilkins and Mary Chivers, had arrived in South Australia on board the brig Emma in 1836, one of the nine ships bearing the first two hundred settlers. His birth occurred on Halloween 1888, and he was the thirteenth and youngest child, born when his mother was 50. George Hubert Wilkins’s home was a long way from any ice and snow in a lonely South Australian stone homestead sitting in an open expanse of red dirt and rock behind Mount Bryan East, near Hallett, about 150 kilometres north of Adelaide. He made some thirty-three expeditions to polar regions, and was knighted by the king of England and honoured by the leaders of a number of nations yet, to this day, he remains largely forgotten in his own country. Sir Hubert Wilkins, once described by General Sir John Monash as the bravest man he’d seen, was an extraordinary man who during his life was a war correspondent, polar explorer, naturalist, geographer, climatologist, aviator, war hero, secret agent, submariner, navigator, author and journalist. While Calvert and his crew could celebrate that they were the first submarine to surface at the North Pole, they were also there for a more personal reason: to honour a fellow submariner and visionary explorer who had attempted the same voyage before them. From here, 90 degrees north latitude, every direction was south. As Commander James Calvert looked out from the bridge through a howling gale into the dim twilight, he could barely see the featureless expanse of ice around him. With a sharp crack, the featureless expanse of ice suddenly fractured as a massive black steel pillar thrust its way through it, sending large blocks of ice tumbling over the long, humped hull of the nuclear submarine USS Skate.
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