Richard W. Richards

Who was Richard W. Richards?

Richard Walter Richards, GC often referred to as Dick Richards, born at Bendigo, Victoria in 1893, was an Australian science teacher who joined Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in December 1914 as a physicist with the Ross Sea Party under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh. Richards was barely 21 years old, and had just completed his studies at Melbourne University, when SY Aurora sailed. 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 1985.