Dr Law led the first thorough exploration of the Australian Antarctic Territory's coast, directed an occupation unbroken now for 56 years and fostered a global reputation for Australian science on the ice.

His family described his death as marking the end of the heroic era of 20th-century Antarctic exploration, and Environment Minister Peter Garrett said Dr Law was among the continent's true pioneers.

Born in Tallangatta in 1912, Dr Law and his family moved to Hamilton, where he attended Hamilton High School.

He studied at Ballarat Teachers' College and worked as a secondary school teacher in Hamilton and Geelong before beginning further study at the University of Melbourne. He received his MSc in physics in 1941.

Dr Law said he was able to ride the wave of post-World War II international Antarctic endeavour, making 23 voyages to the region and 28 first landings along the 5000-kilometre coastline of the Australian Antarctic Territory.

"Scott, Shackleton, Mawson and these men,'' Dr Law told The Age in 2008. "I explored about 10 times as much as them all put together.''

He said his early exploration was not spurred by science.

"The motivation in the early days was territorial expansion.''

In the depths of the Cold War, he described racing the Soviet Union to be the first to erect cairns and take possession of pieces of rocky coastline exposed from the ice.

Using war surplus ships and supplies, he led the construction of the longest-established Antarctic continental base, Mawson, in 1954, when his group was the only one in eastern Antarctica.

"It was an extremely hazardous operation,'' he said. "If anything had gone wrong, there was no one in the world who could have come down to rescue us.''

Now Australia has three year-round continental bases, a $114 million federal Antarctic budget and shipping and air links. There are also 46 Antarctic Treaty member nations, half with permanent bases, and up to 40,000 tourists a year.

Antarctic historian Tim Bowden said one of Dr Law's great contributions was not only to lead exploration but to devise scientific programs that endured. Today's glaciology yields valuable data on global warming through ice cores and observations of ice shelves.

Dr Law said conservation in Antarctica was "completely overdone'' and a reasonable balance would have resulted in the approval of a 1980s attempt to establish a system of controls over mining. Instead, he said, mining was banned and the rules were thrown out.

He made his last visit to Antarctica in 1998 at the age of 85 and strongly believed more tourists should go there. He claimed in his book You Have to Be Lucky to have escaped mortal danger 20 times. "I wrote the book because I got annoyed at always being considered not to have taken any risks because I'm not dead,'' he said.

His family said he died peacefully in a Melbourne nursing home on Sunday. A memorial gathering will be held, probably on April 21, his birthday.

- THE AGE