Sir Ernest Shackleton, famous for his expeditions to Ross Island and the Trans Antarctic Expedition, came to Sydney in 1917 and assisted the Australian recruitment drive by writing the pamphlet A Call to Australia:
Here in Australia the call to service sounds loud and clear. I speak to you men as one who has carried the King’s flag in the white warfare of the Antarctic and who is going now to serve in the red warfare of Europe. I say to you that his call means more than duty, more than sacrifice, more than glory. It is the supreme opportunity offered to every man of our race to justify himself before his own soul. Love of ease, love of money, love of woman, love of life – all these are small things in the scale against your own manhood. The blood that has been shed on the burning hills of Gallipoli and the sodden fields of Flanders calls to you. Politics, prejudices, petty personal interests are nothing. Fight because you have the hearts of men, and because if you fail you will know yourselves in your own inner consciousness to be for ever shamed. And to the women of Australia, I would say just this: be as the women of Rome, who said to husbands, brothers, and fathers, ‘Come back victorious, or on your shields’.
Some of these men died while in the war. Bob Bage, a fellow expeditioner of Webb and Hurley, was killed at Gallipoli. Twelve days after the landing, he was shot by Turkish machine gun fire as he laid out trench lines near Lone Pine. His scientific field books are preserved in the Mitchell Library. In these, his careful measurements of the progress towards the south magnetic pole are recorded in a tight, precise hand.
Leslie Russell Blake, another of the men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, died on 3 October, 1918 just weeks before the Armistice. He was courageous, and was awarded the awarded the Military Cross. Blake’s beautiful and carefully drafted map of Macquarie Island is one of the most accurate representations of that remarkable island.
Others served in different ways. Morton Moyes, meteorologist with Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was a naval instructor during the War. Despite attempts to leave this post and go on active service in the Navy, he was considered too valuable as a trainer to go to war. In 1917, he sailed south with the Aurora on the relief expedition for the Ross Sea party with Shackleton as his cabin mate. The official log of this voyage and an oral history by Ross Bowden with Moyes are both in the Mitchell Library collection.
After the war Hurley wrote in the Australasian Photo-Review (14 February, 1919)
What a contrast to the ice fields of Antarctica! It would be impossible to find in the vast domain of photography two branches of work more divergent. In the latter – everything beautiful, reposeful, and of infinite charm; the former, filled with horror – it was all action and suffering.