George Ainsworth

George Frederick Ainsworth (20 June 1878 – 11 October 1950) was an Australian meteorologist, public servant and businessman who headed one of the component parts of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911–1914).

Ainsworth was born in Lambton, a suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales. At the age of 15 he joined the NSW Department of Public Instruction as an assistant teacher, but transferred to the Meteorological Branch of the Department of Home Affairs in the Australian Public Service in 1910. He was then seconded to Mawson’s Antarctic Expedition in the course of which he was in charge of the subantarctic Macquarie Island party for nearly two years – from December 1911 to November 1913. His responsibilities on Macquarie included the establishment of a weather station, as well as a radio relay station on Wireless Hill which pioneered the first radio communications between Antarctica and the outside world.

In 1915 Ainsworth was commissioned in the Australian 62nd Infantry Battalion. In 1917 he joined the Counter Espionage Bureau and was made an honorary captain. In the same year he married Mary Catherine Statham at Murwillumbah. Following demobilisation in 1918 he became an inspector in the Commonwealth Police in Queensland. Transferring to the Prime Minister’s Department in 1921, he served as foreign-affairs officer with the Australian delegation to the Imperial Economic Conference in London in 1923, as well as being the sole Australian delegate attending the International Labour Organization meeting at Geneva the same year.