5 January 2012
The Aurora Australis arrived safely back in port, and now the ship is almost ready to head south again. We embark this afternoon and depart at 10.30 this evening. I feel very fortunate to be on board. When I first visited Antarctica in the summer of 2002-03, I was part of a re-supply voyage to Australia’s Casey station. I was a Humanities Fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division and I was thinking my way into writing a history of Antarctica, which was published in 2007 as Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (UNSW Press). I was still unsure whether I wanted to write about Australians on the ice or about humanity in general – and being there helped me to understand that one of the inspiring aspects of Antarctic experience is that humanity is so marginal and vulnerable that narrow nationalism appears both comic and inapt. Furthermore, to make nationalism itself a subject of study on the ice, one has to draw back and see it comparatively. So my historical perspective in that book is international and human but with an unashamed Australian bias.
On this centennial voyage, by contrast, I am voyaging – literally – to the heart of Australian identity and nationhood in Antarctica. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Douglas Mawson and the huts at CommonwealthBayare the foundations of Australian Antarctic science, politics and culture and we are honouring their legacy. We are undertaking a pilgrimage. This time, therefore, I cannot help but think about nationality on the ice more as an engaged citizen than as a wry observer. In my book I made a bit of fun of ‘planting flags’ – after all, claiming something as slippery as ice is laced with comedy. And now I find myself involved in the ritual myself…
The AAE expeditioners were filled with such excitement as they contemplated their mission. It was also one of the youngest expeditions to sail south – most of the men were in their early and mid-twenties, most had university or technical training, and most of them were Australian. Their intellectual commitment and energy levels were high and they would need every ounce of both.
I can hardly realize that I am absolutely off on a Polar Expedition, wrote the enthusiastic, 23 year old Belgrave Ninnis on the Aurora in 1911. [Mawson is] a splendid fellow. He is quiet, and a scientist all over; also a gentleman, ditto. My respect for him increases daily… I am having the time of my life. I feel an object of envy to everyone… I cannot realise my luck; at times I lie awake simply hugging myself for joy … Here I am practically in my second childhood…
Charles Laseron, one year older and trained in geology, agreed: It was with beating hearts, and a strange feeling of exaltation that we started on what will probably be the greatest adventure of our lives.
George Dovers, just 21, was completing his training as a Licensed Surveyor when he joined the expedition. He wrote to his family: …everything is just ripping, we are landing in a place that will make the whole civilized world wonder … when I think of all the fellows slaving in offices in cities when there is all this beautiful God’s world to explore & all its wonders to see, I pity them, this is living not merely existing, I cannot do justice to my subject on paper, it is too wonderful.
And what of Douglas Mawson? Known amongst his men as ‘Dux Ipse’, meaning ‘the leader himself’, he always led from the front. His men were impressed that he did not ask them to anything he would not do first. How did Mawson anticipate this expedition? It seemed to me, he wrote, that here was an opportunity to prove that the young men of a young country could rise to those traditions which have made the history of British Polar exploration one of triumphant endeavour as well as of tragic sacrifice. And so I was privileged to rally the ‘sons of the younger son’.
These are the words of a man born in England who came to Australia at the age of two, whose first visit to Antarctica was as a member of a British expedition, who while sledging towards the South Magnetic Pole in 1908 began to harbour a desire to see ‘the great span of Antarctic coast lying near Australia’, who then resisted further British inducements to explore more familiar regions of Antarctica and decided instead to rally ‘the young men of a young country’ to explore the unknown coast to the south of their own home, and who made it his life’s ambition to secure that ‘Australian quadrant’ of ice for his nation. Mawson’s expedition was a contribution to the British Empire’s embrace of Antarctica, but it was also a distinctively Australian endeavour, a proud initiative of the recently federated nation, driven by this newfound nationalism and by a southern hemisphere sensibility about the need to know one’s backyard, to understand the shared world of stormy sea and swirling, icy air that emanated from the neighbouring Antarctic region. Exploring Antarctica was Australia’s duty, Australia’s ‘preserve’, Australia’s destiny.