In the Australian context, a twenty-nine-year-old geologist from Adelaide, Dr (later Sir) Douglas Mawson, led one of the most ambitious and successful expeditions of the era. Distinct from his Antarctic contemporaries, the attainment of something as abstract as the South Pole was not part of his exploratory agenda. Mawson’s ambitions were, first and last, scientific. His Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) of 1911–14 established two widely spaced exploratory bases on the Antarctic continent directly to the south of Australia, as well as a base on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island. In all, more than 6500 kilometres of continental terrain was explored for science and mapped, and extensive oceanographic research was undertaken aboard the expedition’s sturdy former Newfoundland sealing vessel, the 386-tonne Aurora.

As might be expected, the recent run of expedition centenaries has been marked by a slew of biographical and historical tributes to the men (and they were all men) of the Heroic Age. Mawson’s expedition alone has spawned the publication of several new books, including biographies or journals of several of the lesser lights – the men under Mawson’s command. Taking up a large corner of the main stage is Peter FitzSimons’s colloquially voiced, voluminous account set in the present tense: Mawson And the Ice Men of the Heroic Age: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen (2011).In the opposing corner is British-based American polar historian Beau Riffenburgh’s scholarly and dense Aurora: Douglas Mawson and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911–14. This is Riffenburgh’s second book dealing with Mawson. His first, Racing with Death: Douglas Mawson – Antarctic Explorer (2008),covered much the same ground with the additional rounding-out of Mawson’s last Antarctic venture: the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions of 1929–31.

In his epilogue to Aurora, Riffenburgh cites the polar historian J. Gordon Hayes, who, as far back as 1928, wrote that ‘judged by the magnitude both of its scale and of its achievements, [Mawson’s] was the greatest and most consummate expedition that ever sailed for Antarctica’. But success has not guaranteed fame. Given that the expedition occurred on the cusp of war, its compelling tale of sacrifice, endurance, and achievement was quickly swept aside by the mammoth tide of international events, and even within Australia, the name of Mawson was persistently overshadowed by the likes of Scott and Shackleton for much of the last century. Books that serve to assert the rightful place of Mawson in the pantheon of Antarctic explorers are therefore welcome.

Aurora offers a crowded, warts-and-all account of the AAE. For the first time, the breadth of the audacious young man’s Antarctic vision is given comprehensive and detailed coverage – from its genesis in Mawson’s Antarctic initiation on Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition of 1907–09, to the fate of the AAE participants in war and beyond, and Mawson’s protracted battle in seeing the scientific results through to publication. Riffenburgh quotes extensively from all primary sources, from ‘both participants and those tangentially involved’. As he states in his preface, ‘these sources have allowed a new focus, not just on Mawson, but on the entire expedition. In that sense, this is a new story.’ The diaries and letters of Mawson’s group of young men reveal that, while the expedition was generally a cohesive one, there were the inevitable malcontents and shirkers. The more opinionated the quotes, the more interesting is Riffenburgh’s portrayal of life in extremis. Of particular poignancy is the story of wireless operator Sidney Jeffreys, who suffered a complete mental collapse at the expedition’s main base at Cape Denison.

On the downside, Riffenburgh’s application of exhaustive detail, while admirable in its thoroughness, sometimes blunts the true drama of the expedition’s various exploratory sorties. What is lacking is a consistent filter and emotive voice from the author. One thinks of Roland Huntford’s masterly Shackleton (1985) as a contrary example. On Mawson’s own ‘Far Eastern’ sledging journey, where his two companions Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz died, and Mawson himself struggled on alone in a desperate bid for the sanctuary of the hut at Cape Denison, Riffenburgh concludes with a lengthy discussion of the well-known theory that, following the death of Ninnis, the desperate and starving Mawson and Mertz suffered from hypervitaminosis after consuming the livers of their slaughtered sledge dogs. The discussion unravels with the non sequitur: ‘the argument is best concluded in the book that provides the most in-depth look at nutrition in exploration, with the statement: “there is very strong, if not almost irrefutable, evidence that their illness was vitamin A hypervitaminosis”’. While devoting a good page-and-a-half to earlier authors on the subject, the identity of this ‘most in-depth look’ is only revealed through a footnote citing the author and title and no detail. Curious – it is as if Riffenburgh could not bear to leave out anything.

The illustrations for this book come from the collection of the Mawson Centre, South Australian Museum, but no individual photographic credits are provided. This is rather puzzling in a book where the written documentary sources are meticulously referenced. Given that Mawson’s expedition was the proving ground in the career of the soon-to-be-famous Frank Hurley, this oversight is disappointing. As a talented professional and also the official expedition photographer, Hurley’s work easily outshone that of his peers. Consequently, he is often mistakenly thought of as the only photographer – at least at the expedition’s main base at Cape Denison. But other expedition members were also competent photographers, Mawson among them, and it is a pity that their photographic efforts are not acknowledged. Even the cover illustrations remain anonymous. One has to delve into the heart of the book to find the setting for the image on the front cover, a view from the Aurora of eight silhouetted figures (actually the Western Party led by Frank Wild) standing near the edge of the Shackleton Ice Shelf.

Aurora is a noteworthy and impressive book, meticulously researched and commendable for its airing and intertwining of so many voices. Tighter editing would certainly have eased the flow of Riffenburgh’s prose, and occasional lapses, such as in the phrase ‘studies by imminentclinical researchers’, are a minor annoyance. However, like Mawson’s AAE, where much new ground was trodden in the service of science, Riffenburgh’s Aurora provides a valuable ‘new focus’ on a particularly Australian chapter in Antarctica’s history.