Douglas Mawson

These individual and group projects build on your research of Douglas Mawson and encourage a range of creative responses.

The National Portrait Gallery invites you to share your projects online by uploading images, video, audio and text to the Portrait of a Nation: Australian Schools Portrait Project website.

Visit the projects page for more information on how your school can contribute.

Explore the biography and links to find more information about Douglas Mawson.

Use a combination of text and images to create a timeline of Mawson’s life.

The National Portrait Gallery collection includes paintings photographs, drawings, sculptures, prints, textiles and multimedia portraits.

Experiment with a range of materials to create your own portrait of Douglas Mawson.

Create a short performance about Douglas Mawson.

This could be a play, a song, an interview or a dramatisation of an event. Make a video of your performance or document your activity in a series of photographs.

And though you come out of each gruelling bout,
All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try — it's dead easy to die,
It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

These are the final lines from The Quitter by English poet, Robert Service. Service was one of Mawson’s favourite poets and it was these words he recited when facing the possibility of his own death in Antarctica in 1913.

Compose a poem, speech, story or song based on the life of Douglas Mawson.

The Canberra suburb of Mawson is named after Sir Douglas Mawson. The streets in Mawson reflect the suburb theme ‘Antarctic Exploration’.

What do you know about the place names in your area? Select a town, suburb or street name and write a news article about what you discovered.

Suburbs in Canberra are named after Australia's local and national high achievers, its geography, heritage and history. Each suburb also has a theme by which its streets are named.

Imagine your group has the opportunity to plan a new suburb. Create a map of your suburb with street names based on your chosen theme.