The Many Lives of Douglas Mawson by Emma McEwin

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Wear to book corners and edges, with back cover tail left corner bent back. Sticky tape on half title page, the interior is still very good.

A national hero, Douglas Mawson (1882-1958) is famous as an Antarctic explorer who narrowly escaped death on the ice. Many books have been written about him. Artefacts from his expeditions are on public display, and Mawson's Huts at Cape Denison in the Australian Antarctic Territory have been preserved as a heritage site. His exploits are known to us, and yet he is enigmatic and cloaked in controversy. In this book, Emma McEwin, Mawson's great-granddaughter, reflects on her forebear's public and private persona.

Inspired by letters, portraits, and other material traces of his legacy, she writes intimately about his effect on generations of his family and the making and unmaking of myths about him. Fortunately, Mawson was a great hoarder of all kinds of things, from letters to books to scientific specimens, all of which reveal something about the kind of person he was or how he is remembered.