Diary

Saturday, 18th February 2012

The world is still. I feel I am the only person on the continent, or even the entire planet. The remainder of the landing party is just over 100 metres away, but I cannot hear them. I’ve read about the famed Antarctic silence; the way it feeds on loneliness and drives people crazy. What will it do to me?

•••

After scrambling over the rocky rise and inspecting the bright yellow algae, I edge as close to the ice as I can without cracking through. I ache, fearing hypothermia. The only sound that hits my eardrums is the relentless alien cackle of nesting adelie penguins drifting over from the next ridge. And then the smell hits me, too. Violently. Thousands of excited sea birds are wallowing in their own excrement, raising their fuzzy grey fledglings.

•••

Earlier, while waiting for the helicopter ride back to the ship, the voyage leader, ex-SAS officer Robb Clifton, approached me. I thought he was going to pass on some operational information, but he just smiled. ‘Go over that ridge there and have a look around. Come back when you hear the chopper. You’ve got 30 minutes.’ He paused, and gave me a stern look. ‘But don’t take your camera.’ Just as I was about to protest, his weather-beaten face burst into a cheeky grin. ‘I’m kidding.’

•••

Over the ridge is a bright blue ice lake set among the rock and snow. I’d been drawn to it when I first saw it from the top of Proclamation Hill where, that morning, the laying of the Douglas Mawson time capsule — the purpose of our expedition — had taken place. The shiny, cylindrical capsule contains, among other items, winning entries from a schools competition and a message from the Prime Minister.

•••

As I eagerly clutch my camera and look towards the fast ice that chokes vast swathes of the bay, a skua swoops in and plonks itself on the blue ice next to me. For a brief second the Antarctic creature and I eye each other off. The next moment, the bird’s weight shatters the frozen surface and it flails around in the water and broken ice before taking off again.

•••

The bright orange icebreaker Aurora Australis, my home for the past 11 days, is almost nothing against the paralysing white view, parked 20 kilometres away at the edge of the fast ice. Not for the first time I wonder about the Mawson men 100 years ago, imagining them also staring out to sea. Australia is out there somewhere, while behind me is an endless ice plain. Interestingly, they had less ice but more wind to contend with in 1912. The presence and break-up of the mammoth iceberg B-9-B over the past year has encouraged sea ice growth that has in turn caused problems for ships and wildlife.

•••

Mawson’s men described in their diaries long-running blizzard rages which left them crawling outside the hut unable to see an arm’s length in front of them. As I write my own diary, I am extremely grateful that we had such an easy Antarctic day, with the katabatics — the ‘Herculean gusts’ that Mawson described roaring in at nearly 200 miles an hour from the Antarctic Plateau — mercifully absent, and the sea becalmed. Luckily, we can only imagine what it must have been like for the men in the huts when those infamous winds tore through Commonwealth Bay, threatening to rip the roof off. This isolated, tiny arrangement of Baltic pine was a refuge and home to 18 of them. The main living space is 7.3 metres square and the other workshop is 5.5 metres square. The men worked, cooked, ate, slept and existed here for around two years. I have no idea how.

•••

To enter those huts is to step back in time, although sparkling hoarfrost ages the scene. I can still smell the dirty acetylene and seal blubber fuel, and it is only the white ice crystals and old dates on papers that kill the eerie feeling that this place has only just been vacated. Douglas Mawson’s private room is now a crystal cave. Frost covers the walls, chair and bed, and icicles have formed from the skylight.

•••

Dark, filthy soot is everywhere. It has seeped into the walls and artefacts, and presumably would have coated the men too. A scattering of papers, bottles, candles and spice jars are ours to pore over, 100 years after any purpose they served has expired. Time is running out for us, too, the modern Mawson expeditioners. The fog is returning, hastening our exit.

•••

When Mawson returned alone from his tragic, heroic, awe-inspiring trek on 8 February 1913, the mood in the huts changed. The dead men’s beds were never used again and their friends sobbed during the night as they waited through the long winter for the ship to come and finally take them home.

•••

Back on board, I cry, too. After eight days at sea, three days on a ship parked on fast ice and my few fleeting but intense hours on Antarctica, the silent, icy continent finally catches up with me. There I am, misty-eyed, staring at a featureless wall in my cabin, trying to take in where I’ve been and what I have seen.

•••

I was, and remain, dazzled by the frozen continent. Human beings aren’t made to exist there, and that much becomes obvious every time something goes wrong. The smallest enterprise can require a heroic effort and always you are a slave to the weather. Antarctica is an otherworldly place that draws you in and takes hold of you. Douglas Mawson must have felt that with the first Australasian Antarctic Expedition. That trip truly made him, and maybe, just maybe, I can say the same about me.

Karen Barlow is a journalist with the ABC1’s Lateline.

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