Sir Douglas Mawson was born in England in 1882 and moved with his family to Australia at the age of just two years. At the age of 16 he commenced his Engineering and Science Degree at the University of Sydney and after graduating commenced work at the University of Adelaide lecturing in the origin and structure of rocks and often visited the Flinders ranges as part of his field studies. At the age of 26 Mawson joined the expedition by the well-known British explorer Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic. The Team was to climb the Antarctic�s active volcano, Mount Erebus and also to trek to the Magnetic South Pole. After the success of this expedition, Mawson then returned to the Antarctic with his own expedition in 1911 to explore and map the Northern most coastal area. After nearly dying himself and the rest of his small expedition passing away Mawson managed to survive what has been termed one of the great Antarctic expeditions and made two more trips to the bleak continent, which resulted in the claiming of almost half of the known mass of Antarctica as Australian Territory. Sir Douglas Mawson passed away in 1958 at the age of 76.