Abstract
THE first volume of the “Scientific Reports (Series A) of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14” has now been published (Sydney, Government Printing Office, 1942. £3 17s. 6d). The long delay was due to many causes, of which the most important was the usual difficulty that scientific expeditions have to face, namely, lack of funds. This large volume contains 350 pages of text, more than a hundred illustrations and nine maps. The text is mainly the narrative of the expedition by Sir Douglas Mawson, and most of it has been long anticipated by the same author's popular volume entitled “The Home of the Blizzard” and Captain J. K. Davis's “With the Aurora in the Antarctic”. Nevertheless, the official record of voyages, sledge journeys and discoveries should be valuable to future explorers. Most important, however, are the maps of various parts of the coast-line of Antarctica showing in full the details of the expedition's work. They include a large-scale plan of the surroundings of the expedition's main base at Cape Denison in King George Land, and maps of Queen Mary Land, King George Land, and the Charnockite coast east of Commonwealth Bay, and also track charts of the several voyages of the Aurora. Another useful feature is the inclusion of gazetteers of all names, giving not only the character of the feature, but also the origin of the name. The latter will be most useful for the future historian of the Antarctic. Only too often the origin of names given to features in polar regions is lost for want of such records by the explorers themselves.
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Australian Antarctic Expedition. Nature 151, 500–501 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151500d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151500d0