Richard W. Richards

Richard Walter Richards, GC was teaching at the Ballarat Junior Technical School in Victoria in 1914, having studied science and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He then joined Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in December as a physicist with the Ross Sea Party under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh. Richards was 22 years old when SY Aurora sailed from Hobart. He was to outlive all other members of the expedition, and became the last survivor of the so-called "Heroic Age" of Antarctic exploration, dying at the age of 91 in 1986.