Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T07:25:59.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Three - Touring the Nation: Shackleton's ‘Marvellous Moving Pictures’ and the Australian Season of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2012

Get access

Summary

In the last of his diaries from the Great War, Frank Hurley recorded his final, hectic days in London in July 1918. From his rooms at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, exhausted and ill with influenza, he was coordinating preparations for the AIF's exhibition of war photographs at the Grafton Galleries. At the same time, he was negotiating to secure distribution rights for three films of Antarctic exploration: his own films of Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition and Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and Herbert Ponting's film of Scott's British Antarctic Expedition. ‘I am keenly anxious to leave,’ Hurley wrote, ‘…but the securing of these films should enable me to form the nucleus of a considerable business in Australia, and so I am doing my utmost to drive a bargain.’ After several years playing second fiddle to Mawson and Shackleton, Ponting, Castle and Bean, this would be the start of Hurley's career as a platform personality in his own right. In this chapter I examines Hurley's emergence as an independent show business entrepreneur, and how he set up that ‘considerable business’ in Australia after the war. It all began with his national tour of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice in the Australian summer of 1919–20.

Exploiting Polar Exploration

Despite their sometimes nominal connections with institutions like the Admirality and the Royal Geographical Society, and with the British, Australian and New Zealand governments, the polar expeditions of the so-called classic era were in fact funded from a variety of sources, including private patronage, commercial sponsorship, and advances for the rights to books, photographs, newspaper articles and films.

Type
Chapter
Information
Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity
Frank Hurley's Synchronized Lecture Entertainments
, pp. 109 - 146
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×