The true commemorative spirit!

15 January 2012

At 2 am the wind dropped and after waiting a short time … called all hands and started work, sounding the steam whistle as a sign to the shore of our intentions.  By three o’clock however, it had come on to blow again and the launch which had put off was obliged to return without communicating with the ship …

So wrote Captain Davis in his diary on board the Aurora on 15 January 1912, and it is pretty much our own situation today.  Anticipating departing at 4.30 am in the expectation that the fog would lift, we communicated our intentions to the shore by radio.  But because of the persisting mist, all hands on board the Aurora Australis were this morning allowed to sleep on.   As Frank Stillwell put it a hundred years ago, We were therefore also told to turn in, but it spoilt the night’s sleep.  Ditto today.

The Australian Antarctic Division’s commitment to commemoration is clearly very literal and respectful.  There’s no question of just waltzing down here with our modern technology, picking a date and then patronising the past with a few sentimental words of feigned relevance.  Oh no!  Instead, we surrender ourselves to the full commemorative experience…

First you voyage as they did, submitting yourself to the Southern Ocean and all its terrors, not the least of which is the arrival on board of King Neptune with crown and trident to pitilessly initiate those who have just crossed 60º South for the first time.  And you don’t just voyage across the turbulent surfaces of the sea, but you plumb its depths as they did; you trawl the ocean for life and you lower instruments overboard to test its character (and yours), and you sail new waters and recalibrate old ones.  In other words, you satisfy Mawson’s own rigorous scientific expectations by constituting yourself as a fully-fledged marine science expedition as well.

Then you commemorate the Aurora’s anguished wrestle with the ice in early January 1912 by introducing its successor, the Aurora Australis, into an entirely new but equally challenging configuration of ice in the same area in January 2012.  Remove most of the Mertz Glacier tongue, bring Iceberg B9B mischievously into play, and voila! … make disappear the polynya in Commonwealth Bay!

In the spirit of re-enacting the protracted and difficult unloading of the Aurora from January 8 to January 19, why not place your modern ship tantalisingly offshore for many of the same days, stranded from the continent if not by wind then by ice?  Divide your company and form a shore party as well as a ship party, just as they did, and then make the movement between them difficult and subject entirely to the vagaries of the weather.  This ensures a more nuanced understanding of the anxieties of the original landing.  As a masterly theatrical gesture, why not conceive midnight departures on exactly the same date as they did a hundred years ago and then abort them, telling all hands to turn in again, lamenting their spoiled night’s sleep…?

This is indeed a true commemoration!  We wait with some trepidation to see what additional historical flourishes this brilliantly researched tribute has in store for us.