Photographer, filmmaker, writer, adventurer. Controversial, passionate, audacious. Frank Hurley was an extraordinary Australian, possibly most famous for his Antarctic photographs captured alongside expeditioners Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton. From the early twentieth century until his death in 1962 Hurley created a stunning visual archive that chronicled the major events of the twentieth century, and Australia's achievements both home and overseas. This book and the Hurley Collection in the National Library of Australia make clear this outstanding contribution and the lengths to which the man would go in order to convey the gravity of events. For Hurley, image-making and exploration went hand-in-hand and he sought out experiences as a pioneer documentary film-maker, official photographer in two world wars, early aviator, and adventure and story-seeker in both the natural environment and in rapidly disappearing non-western worlds. In this readable, definitive and wonderfully illustrated re-issued biography, Alasdair McGregor describes Hurley's life and character in all its richness.

The definitive collection of Frank Hurley's amazing photos from Shackleton's Antarctic expedition is the first book to reproduce all the surviving expedition photos, some of which have never been published. Over 450 photos.

Hurley's Australia showcases his impressive visual celebration of Australia in the period immediately after the Second World War. In his mission to capture Australia for Australians he travelled throughout the country photographing its vast landscape, its modern cities, its industrial strength and its agricultural riches. The vision he created captures, the essence of a younger, more innocent nation.

‘Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity’ is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker. The focus of this volume surrounds the media events that encompassed these various creations – what Hurley called his ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’. These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry that was constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley’s photographic and filmic texts – which were often produced and presented by other people – and about their ontology, as they were often in a state of reassemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life enjoyed by Hurley’s creations amidst the complicated topography of the early twentieth century’s rapidly internationalizing mass-media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space, and of the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.

James Francis Hurley was born in 1885 in Glebe, son of Edward Harrison Hurley and Margaret Bouffier. He was at 15 a steelworker in Lithgow, brought his first camera a "Box Brownie", became a gifted photographer and darkroom expert. By 20 he was partner in a picture-card business. Was official photographer fro Douglkas Mawson on the first Antarctic expitition. Five more visits south would follow, squeezed into a career of 58 years which took him to two world wars as officila photographer.

Frank Hurley's Papua New Guinea photographs, taken on expeditions along the Papua coast and hinterland between 1920 and 1923, provided for the world a unique record of a way of life unhindered by the white man's civilisation.