Almost exactly 60 years ago, an intrepid team set sail from Australia on an adventure that would take them more than 6000 kilometres to what has been called the world’s loneliest island.

Led by celebrated adventurer Warwick Deacock, the team hoped to be the first expedition to climb Big Ben, a mountain on Heard Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean between Australia, South Africa and Antarctica.

It was such a hazardous undertaking, they could have died many times. However, they not only summited a peak more than 500 metres taller than Mount Kosciuszko, but all returned home safely after four months away.

Adventure filmmaker Michael Dillon, who helped the crew prepare for the trip as a Sydney schoolboy, calls it “one of the least known, yet most audacious Australian adventures of the 20th century”.

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Dillon has drawn on a remarkable archive of 16-millimetre film shot during the expedition to make the documentary, The Great White Whale, which was how they referred to their Captain Ahab-like obsession to climb the mountain after an earlier failed attempt.

It was an adventure from another era, with the gentlemanly crew, including three medical doctors, a teacher and an engineer, chartering a 20-metre gaff-rigged schooner and recruiting famous mountaineer-turned-sailor Major Bill Tilman​ as skipper.

“Most of them hadn’t even sailed before,” Dillon says. “The bravest of them all couldn’t swim.”

With polite letters, they convinced Kellogg’s to supply enough breakfast cereal “to last 10 men four months”, NZ pie makers Big Ben to send 2000 pies, CSR to provide two barrels of rum, Rolls-Royce to service the boat’s engine and Rupert Murdoch’s new newspaper, The Australian, to buy the rights to their story.