What do you do with a restless surveyor?

 In the second week of August, still fretting over who would be going with him on the Southern Journey, and still waiting for Phil to give permission for that trip to proceed, Bill gave Syd permission to do another short reconnaissance trip out onto sea ice, this time heading west.

Six men were going, this time taking two weasels. I’ve never seen Bill’s diaries but I get the impression he’d have given Syd permission to mount a lunar expedition if it meant getting the restless young surveyor out of everyone’s hair for a while. Just for good measure, Syd was scheduled to take the night watch before he set out.

 

This is Richard Ruker’s photograph of a much later expedition in 1960 but you can see the size of the weasels

Tues 7^th August 1956

 The day was rather knocked about by last night’s watch. Got up at midday, ate and did a skyline trace for fun and am now drying the negatives. Have crawled into my bed nice and early so that I shall be set for tomorrow. The weasels will have to be loaded and gear checked over for a seaice trip to the west. It is a combination work and filmic trip. … it will be quite pleasant on the sea-ice with weasels to live in.

Weds 8^th August 1956

All set for a flying start tomorrow.

If a man’s going to die …

July 1956

Previously on the dark sea ice: Their first expedition in the dark winter was a dangerous journey on the treacherous sea ice high way, to find a group of islands discovered by Douglas Mawson in 1930 but never again seen. Dark omens snapped at their heels as they set out. They found the islands and turned for home. A wild storm blew in and the dogs refused to pull. The men yoked up, crawled on all fours and led the dogs onward.

Now, camped at the top of the cliff, with the dogs below them, they heard the sea ice break ….

 

 

 

 

A horizontal spray blasted, and ice broke into bombarding weapons while they clambered down to the dogs. Staked on the breaking ice, the dogs were wild with fear.

There are rules for taking huskies up cliff faces. Mostly, it is done one dog at a time. It’s unorthodox (to say the least) to pull seven dogs, still on their mooring line, up a cliff.

They all knew it was a bad idea, made worse by the fact that Denny, the one bitch in the team, was in season. Of course, there was the blizzard to make the climb up the cliff a bit more exciting. Just the same, they decided that that was the plan they’d put in place.

Peter was on the front of the trace; Nils was in the middle; and Syd was on the tail end, going diagonally up the steep cliff. Halfway up, Peter slipped and let the dog line slacken.

In the midst of a life-threatening manoeuvre, in a blizzard, the dogs used the slack to investigate whether this allowed them to get to Denny. She stepped backwards into space and fell over the cliff, hanging on her collar, taking two dogs with her.

Now the three men had 120 kilograms of tethered, struggling husky, hanging off a trace in space. Have I mentioned that huskies are directly descended from wolves? They are enormous and they can be a bit moody!

Peter eventually secured a hold of his end of the trace while Streaky, whose nose was simply too close to Denny’s tantalising hindquarters, came up with a new plan of his own. “Ah, well,” Streaky reasoned as he hung in space by his neck. “If a man’s going to die, he might as well die happy.” Swinging in the wild wind, he attempted to mount Denny as they hung in space.

Three expeditioners dragged seven enraged huskies up a sheer wall of exposed rock and tethered them carefully. Around the tent the animals ate, while the men wondered at their own foolhardiness.

 

 

 

When good expeditions go bad.

15 July 1956

 

Robbie’s dream that Syd was about to find his vocation as dog food might have been an omen. The trip on sea ice in the winter dark was difficult.

They really had very little idea where they were going. The maps were poorly sketched and Douglas Mawson’s notes show that he thought the islands were about forty miles from Horseshoe Harbour and ten miles out to sea.

Syd and the team sledged out as ghostly forms in the ethereal gold-tone light, aided by a gentle, lunar-ray path. Within hours they thought they were very clever boys indeed! They were pretty sure they’d found the illusive crystal quartz isles.

They conducted block searches (I might describe this in another post) until a dark, rocky outline against a pale horizon, about twenty miles off the coast, revealed the lost islands—lower in the sea than Mawson’s description had suggested.

Sea spray, whipped into a meringue, had coated the rocks and obscured their edges.

The Douglas Islands were an inhospitable campsite but they must have been very tired for they overslept in the morning, and it was almost noon before they were on the move.

The dogs pulled well, and they made twelve miles due north during the afternoon, stopping at a couple of small islands where they “puttered about and got the camp up and started a star observation at five.” They slept well again, but another shambling, uncoordinated decamping had them departing late again, headed for Welch Island. The journey had already taken a day longer than planned.

Then it all went a bit hay-wire.

Heavy ground drift pushed by fifty-knot winds impeded their progress. For a while the dogs ran well, and the men could see through the drift to the peaks on the ranges, but then the wind intensified. The huskies turned their heads away from the blizzard’s blinding fury and refused to pull.

Two men (down on hands and knees, with the lead dog tethered to their belts) performed as lead dogs. Visibility was less than an arm’s length, and they could feel cracks opening as the sea ice swelled. Syd navigated using Mawson’s notes, and after five hours of crawling on the shifting, cracking surface, they felt the land of an islet beneath them. It was “a most inhospitable spot,” skirted by sea ice with a sheer forty-foot cliff face. But they were off the sea ice.

They staked the huskies out, on their nightline, on the footing at the edge of the rock wall. It took time and energy to climb the cliff and almost three hours to get the tent set up and a primus lighted.

They were high up on an exposed tabletop. Their uneasy slumber was interrupted by ferocious gusts snapping the guy ropes. The tent fell inwards with its corner poles flailing. Outside before he was awake, Syd took a serious tumble and fell heavily on an elbow and knee. Through the hectic night they were forced to go out twice more. Briefly, on Wednesday morning, the wind stopped while Peter cooked breakfast, but then “all hell broke loose again.”

The tide crack in the sea ice opened wide, and the ice shoulder around the islet, where the dogs were staked, started to crumble.

 

 

 

The Russians in May 1956.

Syd’s party in 1963 stand in front of a weasel. In the image below, compare the dimensions with the Russian vehicle

The Australian teams in Antarctica created maps of one half of that enormous continent. Their equipment, especially during the years of greatest expansion of new knowledge from 1956 – 64, were dog teams and sand weasels.

The Russians also pushed the barriers of scientific exploration but their equipment was a little more sophisticated.

Through the first half of May, 1956 the Russian explorers pushed on to the South pole. The convoy stopped 375 kilometres due south of Mirnyy, 2,700 metres above sea level. The sledge-tractor convoy was left in place—to form the foundation—three weeks later on the return trip, for the offi­cial inauguration of Pionerskaya research station.

In 1956 the Soviet explorers were unable to reach the geomagnetic pole to establish Vostok research station; the C-80 tractors were inadequate.

In December 1957, a convoy of ten Kharkovchankas (wide caterpillar-tracked monsters equipped with special 520 horsepower, V-12 diesel engines) reached the geomagnetic pole and founded Vostok. They flew out, leaving the Kharkovchankas at Vostok. Photographs taken in 1962 by an Australian six-man traverse expedition from Wilkes base in a snow tractor, show the roofline of the Aussie vehicle level with the top of the track of the Soviet behemoths.

A scientist standing on top of the kharkovchanka provides the scale. In the photograph of one of Syd’s parties standing in front of a Weasel, you can compare the different dimensions of the two vehicles.

 

 

The cover – reworked

The Biography is definitely reaching completion. Shelly reworked the cover after I received a much higher definition version of the portrait and found a mistake – yes, really, a grammatical error in the back cover blurb. Here is a low resolution version of the high resolution cover.

I also found four new mistakes in the page proofs and it cost $110 to fix, so that’s it, no more mistakes. If you find any when the book is out, they were in there to make sure you were all paying attention.

So I think, advance copies will be available from late June through Amazon. Getting the book into Australian bookshops will take a while as the distributor needs a copy of the book before deciding to distribute for me.

The official launch will be in Perth in September. The next post update will be about an exciting event that will coincide with the launch. Then I’ll do a real post and you can catch up with the gang at Mawson as the days grow short.

 

 

Update on book publication

I’ve just updated the home page of Quills and now it features the front cover of Fixing Antarctica. If you click on home, you’ll see it.

The cover illustration is drawn from a huge hyperrealist portrait of Syd, painted by Tom Macbeth. The original was purchased by Syd’s old school, Hale School in Western Australia. Tom kindly gave me permission to use the portrait as a cover.

Tom is an internationally recognised, multi-award winning, self taught, Australian artist working in oils. He focuses on photorealistic portraits and has been a finalist in both the prestigious Archibald Prize and it’s associated Salon Des Refuses as well as the Black Swan Prize.

You can see other photographs of Tom painting this portrait of Syd, which he entered in the Archibald Prize competition and see other example of his work on his website:

http://www.macbethart.com/#!/page_servicesTom

What do mature scientists do on a Saturday night in Antarctica?

The bunks inside the dongas all looked like this, but this is the special one for the OiC. He had his own desk.

Why, they pull out their weighty and learned science text books, brush up on their quantum physics and double check all their instruments are working before retiring early to do the same again on Sunday. Yeah, right!

Let me set the scene in this little base in Antarctica for our first Saturday night in early March 1957.

There are twenty scientists and mechanics and the cook. The Kista  docked on  Friday 17 February 1956 and left 12 days later. (1956 was a leap year).

While the departing team was packing and getting on the ship, the wintering team was unpacking the cargo holds and getting off the ship and there were several days of blizzard when none of the above was happening.

At the time Mawson station was composed of Biscoe Hut. The  A-frame Norwegian hut arrived with the pioneers in 1954 and served as mess hut, kitchen and accommodation. The first team in 1954 also brought four dongas that served as laboratories, and the power station where the diesel generator was housed. It supplied electricity to all five huts until it burnt down in 1959.

Bisco had eight square metres of space. The 1954 pioneers put five bunks down each side, an AGA stove and sink at the western end, a table in the centre and there was a porch on the eastern end which contained the toilet and meteorological equipment. That was pretty cramped but there were only 10 of them.

I’m not sure if the1955-6 winterers brought any buildings with them (perhaps someone can write in and tell me).

Our 1956-7 winterers were positively bristling with buildings. The 1957 winterers are a team of 20, so their priority was to find the packing cases which contained the four pre-fabricated laboratory and accommodation huts.  Three days after they arrived, on 20 February 1956, Syd Kirkby reported that the huts were “going up like steam. The blokes put up the outside shells of two today and another two days should finish them, afraid the hangar will be a different story.”

Inside each of these tiny, the prosaic, bolted together, plywood dongas, six men slept in two rows of triple decker bunks.  The doctor slept in the surgery, which was also a donga. No doubt you’ve already done the maths. They hadn’t been planning on having twenty in the party, so someone had to sleep in the cold porch of one of the huts. There are only so many places where pee bottles can be stored so it wasn’t a great honour to be the man on the porch.

The new buildings allowed Biscoe Hut to become just the mess hall.  It was lit through four skylights or at night by a thin stream of electric lights.  Biscoe is lovely again thanks to the restoration work of the heritage carpenter Mike Staples who began restoration work on it from ruin in 2006. I was extremely lucky to be chosen as an Arts Fellow in the 2007/08 season and it already looked wonderful then.

The 1957 winterers also brought with ANARE’s first and the pre-cut metal plane hangar. For years the plane hangar was the biggest building in Antarctica and it was all put together by the 1957 winterers, none of whom had been employed as builders. They worked with with spanners in roaring winds, without any heavy machinery.

They started the hangar while the Kista was still in harbour, while two other teams worked on the dongas.  On the Sunday, 26 February 1956, under an overcast sky driven, in intermittent forty-knot winds, the metal plane hangar began to take ghostly form: with “one bay up and the mast moved to the second position.”  The planes were stored on the ship for as long as possible to protect them against the weather. The hangar was finished in March.

So back to my opening question. What do you think this team of overworked winterers did to celebrate their first Saturday in Antarctica?

On that, as with every Saturday night, there was a formal dinner (complete with shirt, tie, and jacket), followed by movies that were accompanied by lashings of home brew. That year the camp had ten feature-length films to last the year, supplemented by wartime propaganda films on how to build spitfires, how to defeat the beastly Germans, and how to gain the advantage in hand-to-hand combat. From the BBC came a collection of greatly-loved, shellac audio disks of Churchill’s wartime speeches.

On that first Saturday night, on Sat 10^th March 1956, it was Jim McCarthy’s birthday. After the dinner, they pushed back the tables and played  insanely boisterous indoor football. That night it was “Rugby versus Australian Rules. In the morning the doctor cheerfully dealt with: a cut cheek, a split lip, a cut requiring two stitches over one eye, a swollen nose, one black eye, and a ‘marked face.”

“I guess we will make this a regular ding feature, I reckon it is the best way in the world to help a mob living happily together, we work off steam that otherwise may come out as blues and being as we are, the more we knock each other about the better mates we become,” was the young surveyor’s philosophical summary of the event.

This is your invitation to a year in Antarctica.

Date: 1956.  (It is the height of the cold war so let’s hope we can all get along).

What should you wear?  Warm clothing because Mawson base is very cold and very windy and we’ll be travelling there on the Kista Dan  which is not an ice breaker and it’s not very big.  The sea journey should be over by mid-February and then we’ll spend fifteen months at Mawson Base  so bring solid gloves because you have to help build the accommodation.

Who’s going to be there?   Fourteen scientists, radio operators and mechanics, a cook, doctor, and a four-man RAAF crew.

What is the event? We’ll be part of the International Polar Year in which scientist drawn from sixty-seven nations will study the earth’s gravitational field and Antarctica’s meteorology, geophysics, geodesy, cosmic ray and ionospheric physics, glaciology, oceanography and seismology.

Our year in Antarctica on the good ship Quills will accompany the publication of my latest book Fixing Antarctica, published through CreateSpace. It will be available for purchase in paper and electronic formats from the winter solstice which, as you know is June 21.  Each week I’ll post details about our 1956 crew in Antarctica, about what the papers were saying about Antarctica.

January 2, 1956. Today, after a delayed departure from Melbourne at the end of December  1955, we’re in the pack ice, steaming along nicely towards the great frozen continent.  Around us, in the dense thick pack ice as we drift past seals, penguins, kestrels and skuas, we know that out there somewhere are the other IGY ships. No-one has reached the continent yet, not even the Russians with their massive fleet. Where are they heading? Didn’t I say? They are planning on setting up a massive base called Mirnyy (Peaceful) Station smack bang in Australian Antarctic territory. Were they invited? Nope, but do you want to go to war over it? Interesting times are ahead ….