18 January 2012
Last night – the eve of our departure from Antarctica– we had a commemorative re-enactment of a night in Mawson’s Hut. The ten men who arrived in McMurdo by DC-3 from remote Commonwealth Bay, fresh with memories of the boys’ bunkroom that was Mawson’s Hut, found themselves in a two-storey layer of bunks in a dormitory in the Hotel California on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The one woman in our return party – Karen Barlow, ABC reporter extraordinaire – was spirited away to lone comforts we could only dream of. It was our communal masculine task to take the commemorative commitment into the early hours and relive this dimension of the experience of Mawson and his men for just one night of their 400. But our dormitory, cramped as it was, was spacious compared to their hut. The original expeditioners were stacked up like sardines, and a man’s bunk was the only personal space most had – it was where you put your things during the day and then somehow tried to dig your way back into at night. They knew one another well, those men of the AAE. They literally inhabited one another’s dreams. The wireless operator, Walter Hannam, beloved for his cooking, was deeply resented for his snoring. One of his fellow expeditioners, a sane man during the working day, spent those early hours plotting to kill him.
Seeing McMurdo is a shock. It has the air of something between a mining camp and a military installation. It feels like an obscene violation of everything that Antarctica represents. How could such a barnacle have been allowed to grow over a site of such intensely valued and recorded history and where it overwhelms the site of Scott’s original 1902 Discovery Hut? Modern McMurdo desecrates this remarkable peninsula and turns its back on the stunning topography of the Sound. I just hope I am not glimpsing the future of Antarctica.
The dining hall and the three bars do not look out on the landscape, and the bars confect a fiction of ‘nightlife’ in the never-ending summer day. The ugliness of the station’s infrastructure makes the bare volcanic rock of the surrounding hills – all spewed from Mt Erebus – look like the interior sides of a quarry. We are informed that sustained photography of McMurdo is discouraged. Perhaps this is a hangover from the late 1980s when Greenpeace photos of McMurdo’s giant rubbish dump revealed its violation of the 1975 Code of Conduct for Antarctic Expeditions and Station Activities and added to the groundswell for the Madrid Environmental Protocol. On one hill above us is a large white space-age dome like a golf ball which makes you wonder if you’ve landed on Mars. The white ‘radome’ protects an antenna that is part of NASA’s space communications network. It’s just a little bit suspicious that entry to the area around the dome on Arrival Heights is prohibited on the grounds that it is an ‘Antarctic Specially Protected Area designated under the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty’. Ecologically sensitive, or just sensitive? Well, at least something at McMurdo is sensitive…
But McMurdo also has a gritty fascination. On a continent of annual generational change, of eternal changeover, it has tenaciously given root to an intriguing local culture. Here there is a weird kind of urban history. Known as MacTown, it is now over 50 years old and has a population that varies from 1200 in summer to 200 in winter. It has more than 100 buildings and they include laboratories, observatories, dormitories (named, like ours, Hotel California, or next door, the Mammoth Mountain Inn), canteens, a clinic, church, firehouse, bowling alley, barber shop, video store, gym, bars, a coffee house and an aquarium. A weekly newspaper, the Antarctic Sun, is published throughout the summer and Radio McMurdo is 104.5 FM. The base is serviced by a helipad, three airstrips and a harbour. There is even an automatic teller machine. McMurdo is a brilliantly organised transit centre, and we have been absorbed into it with impersonal ease.
From the moment of its foundation as a tent camp and then a cluster of eleven prefabricated buildings in 1955-56, this Antarctic ‘city’ looked ramshackle and untidy, with one or two makeshift streets defined by bulldozers. At McMurdo, vehicles drove vaguely on the right, and a mile away at New Zealand’s Scott base they drove vaguely on the left, until (so says an urban legend that seems to encapsulate the twentieth century) a road connected the two stations and a US Navy caterpillar tractor weighing 35 tons met a New Zealand jeep, and the ‘right’ of way was asserted. Antarctic bases are often compared to shabby mining towns: there is a brutal practicality about them and an abrupt disconnection with the landscape. MacTown tells us that, inAntarctica, no matter how substantial the installation, it always remains a camp – but a camp with its own culture.
In Antarctica I never thought that I would meet a human I might call a local. But today I met two of them. The first I encountered in the Crary Laboratory, the impressive centre of scientific work at McMurdo. Karen has lived here for five months of every year since 1990. She was delightfully full of quirky, perceptive and fond observations of the culture, art and psychology of MacTown. She accepted my description of her as a local and reflected on the peculiarities of that state. Once, when she had just returned fromAntarcticato the normal world, she observed an unusually small person whom she assumed was ill until she realised with a shock that it was a healthy child.
I met the other human local at the top of Observation Hill which rises 200 metres above MacTown and where in summer the dominating sound is the beep of reversing vehicles. As I sat there alone regarding the ring of mountains, a US Airforce pilot named Joe clambered up the steep side of the hill from the Sound and sat down beside me for a yarn. For sixteen summers in a row he has lived here, and together we looked out towards the ice runway that is his workplace. He clearly relishes the austere beauty of the setting and the challenge of landing billion-dollar aircraft safely on sea ice – and he also knew about Mawson, every Australian’s passport to respect in the south. We sat there and talked of the heroic era, the language of Antarctica.
At the top of the hill is a cross to the memory of the five men of Scott’s 1912 polar party. I noticed that Joe, who in his 16 years as a local has climbed this hill countless times, paused for a moment in front of the cross before descending. Made of hardy Australian Jarrah, the cross was erected in January 1913 by the comrades of the dead men. Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote: Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well. Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow … It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had lived: and the Barrier on the other, where they had died.
Under that shadow of the hill, beneath the cross, the hut of Scott’s 1902-04 Discovery expedition still stands. Although its ambience and setting have been overwhelmed by McMurdo, the hut itself remains defiantly resilient. Over the years it has been subject to raiding, sampling and souveniring – I wonder if any of Captain Scott’s biscuits are now left in those tins inside? Compared with Scott’s later hut at Cape Evans (1910-12), Shackleton’s at Cape Royds (1907-09) and Mawson’s Huts at Commonwealth Bay, the Discovery Hut was never loved. Even when first erected, this hut – an outback building bought in Australia – was famously makeshift; it was known to be cold and comfortless and a bit of a pigsty. In a thaw it stank. From the time it was unloaded from the Discovery in early 1902, it was used as an emergency shelter, a storehouse and a theatre, and the men preferred to live on the ship. Shackleton used it as a staging post and summer hostel during his Nimrod expedition, and Scott used it as a supplementary hut in 1911–12. In January 1915, it again came into emergency use by the Ross Sea party of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, and the men entered it by smashing a window and had a memorable meal there of fried bacon, frozen sardines, biscuits, strawberry jam and tea, ‘all from Scott’s stores’. Thus the Discovery hut was never anyone’s primary hut; it was never snug and homely; it was always a place where you were rearranging the packing cases, raiding someone else’s stores, and helping yourself to someone else’s biscuits.
I am struck by the curious parallels between the Discovery hut and modern McMurdo, which I had at first assumed to be so unsympathetic with one another. They have both been essentially transit stations, staging posts to the remote and beautiful Antarctica just beyond, each unloved but useful enough to endure. Perhaps they do belong together on this peninsula after all.
o0o
It is now 19 January and we stand in our full polar gear on McMurdo’s ice runway waiting for the US Airforce C17 Globemaster cargo-carrier to take us back to the temperate world. It is a further symmetry of our commemorative expedition that on this day a century ago the Aurora left Cape Denison. The men held a party on the ship and there was some speech-making. Archie McLean wrote that Mawson declared that they were making a new epoch in Antarctic exploration. Then the 18 men climbed into the whale boat to cheering and shouting and the hoot of the ship whistle. Percy Gray watched them with sadness and gravity as they rowed away: The whole thing impressed me very much, those 18 men on their little boat pulling away to their icy home.
Mawson’s Huts are so remote, so hard to get to, even today. This summer the ice had forestalled the visits of ships hoping to reach Commonwealth Bay. We had managed it only with helicopters, and even then we had no choice but to submit humbly toAntarctica’s own timetable. No-one visits Mawson’s Huts casually or incidentally; the experience is always sharpened by anticipation and uncertainty. And when you do finally arrive and see that pale, warm glow of wood in the snow, it really does feel like a home, a beloved refuge, lonely and self-contained, complete in itself, a concentrated residue of two remarkable years of Australian Antarctic endeavour.
I like to remember the sheer excitement of those young men at reaching this new frontier, their quiet pride that they were part of an Australian expedition, and their relish at the opportunity to flex their scientific muscles. They were determined to explore this unknown coast of a remote, icy continent at the bottom of the world, and to pay homage to it with daily, dutiful recording and thoughtful analysis. With their bodies and their minds they laboured towards understanding. And, with a sense of fun and adventure, they also tried to keep one another cheerful. A hundred years ago, on that portentous day that we have been commemorating – the 8th of January 1912, the day of the first landing of an Australian expedition on the great continent of Antarctica – what did our revered expeditioners do the moment they set foot on the ice? As Archie McLean recorded, Mawson and Wild explored and the others had a snowball fight.
Postscript (1 February 2012): One of the heroes of this story – Iceberg B9B – has now moved, with frightening speed for something so huge, to cover the place where we waited in the Aurora Australis on the edge of the sea ice for the chance to visit Cape Denison. Thus our treasured temporary home in Commonwealth Bay, our berth among the penguins, is already obliterated by the powerful majesty ofAntarctica.