Hurley was the third of five children born to parents Edward and Margaret Hurley and was raised in Glebe, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. He ran away from home at the age of 13 to work on the Lithgow steel mill, returning home two years later to study at the local technical school and attend science lectures at the University of Sydney. When he was 17 he bought his first camera, a 15 shilling Kodak Box Brownie which he paid for at the rate of a shilling per week. He taught himself photography and set himself up in the postcard business, where he gained a reputation for putting himself in danger in order to produce stunning images, including placing himself in front of an oncoming train to capture it on film.
At the age of 25, in 1908, Hurley learned that Australian explorer Douglas Mawson was planning an expedition to Antarctica; fellow Sydney-sider Henri Mallard, in 1911, recommended Hurley for the position of official photographer to Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, ahead of himself. Hurley asserts in his biography that he then cornered Mawson as he was making his way to their interview on a train, using the advantage to talk his way into the job. Mawson was persuaded, while Mallard, who was the manager of Harringtons (a local Kodak franchise) to which Hurley was in debt, provided photographic equipment. The Expedition departed in 1911, returning in 1914. On his return, he edited and released a documentary ‘Home of the Blizzard,’ using his footage from the expedition.
Hurley was also the official photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition which set out in 1914 and was marooned until August 1916.
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Hurley had to fight with Shackleton on keeping the images he had taken during the expedition. In the end the two compromised and he kept 1/4 of the glass plates. He found this a hard earned reward, considering he had dived into freezing waters to save a portion of them.
It was this act that had him being Turned by Shackleton.