travel / Antarctica

Mawson’s Antarctica

On the eve of the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s expedition to East Antarctica, we voyage from New Zealand to “the ice” — and back in time. By Louise Southerden

“Ice on the starboard bow!” At 4pm on 29 December, 1911, the steamship Aurora passed its first iceberg since leaving Hobart a few weeks earlier. On board were Douglas Mawson and the men of his Australasian Antarctic Expedition, en route to explore a previously uncharted part of Antarctica due south of Australia. They soon found themselves within a puzzle of pack ice, which settled the “mountainous seas” they’d had on the journey south and transfixed the men on deck.

“The tranquillity of the water heightened the superb effects of this glacial world,” wrote Mawson in his 1915 account of the expedition, The Home of the Blizzard. “Majestic tabular bergs whose crevices exhaled a vaporous azure; lofty spires, radiant turrets and splendid castles; honeycombed masses illumined by pale green light within whose fairy labyrinths the water washed and gurgled.

“Seals and penguins on magic gondolas were the silent denizens of this dreamy Venice. In the soft glamour of the midsummer midnight sun, we were possessed by a rapturous wonder — the rare thrill of unreality.”

A hundred years later, this ice world inspires the same sense of wonder and is just as irresistible. The rest of the planet may be known, mapped and settled but Antarctica remains a land apart: pure and unblemished, wild and intimidating, a place where nothing is guaranteed and anything can happen.

It’s a misty December afternoon when we leave Dunedin, in New Zealand’s South Island, aboard the Orion, a ship twice as long and infinitely more comfortable than the Aurora, which was a 50-metre steam-yacht built in Scotland for whaling expeditions to Newfoundland.

But our destination is the same as Mawson’s: Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay.

There are three distinct regions in Antarctica. The mountainous Antarctic Peninsula is the most accessible, only two days by sea from the tip of South America. It’s also the most visited, receiving more than 36,000 tourists* every summer. Then there’s the Ross Sea, where you’ll find the largest Antarctic base, McMurdo Station (home to more than 1200 people in summer), Scott’s and Shackleton’s historic huts, the world’s most southerly active volcano (Mount Erebus) and the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating “ice barrier” as large as France that periodically calves to create mega-icebergs up to 300km long.

The largest and most remote region is East Antarctica. This “far side” of Antarctica makes up two-thirds of the continent, is separated from the other regions by the Transantarctic Mountains and includes the geographic and magnetic South Poles. It’s also at least five sea days (about 2700km) south of Australia and New Zealand.

Last summer, only 242 people* visited Commonwealth Bay, one of its most popular spots. Why so few? Because it’s so far, and so defended by pack ice that you might go all that way and still not reach the continent or be able to get ashore. But that’s part of the adventure.

South across the Southern Ocean

Before this trip, spending five consecutive days on the open ocean seemed a daunting prospect. However, crossing the Southern Ocean turns out to be a highlight of the trip. It helps that my seasickness medication works and the sea plays nice: even in the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties, latitudes notorious for rough weather, the swell is a moderate three- to four-metres — perhaps because 56 of us “Antarctic virgins” had placated King Neptune on the way by letting our expedition leader, Don McIntyre, hose us down with near-freezing sea water.

We’re also travelling aboard the Orion, surely the most luxurious ice-strengthened expedition vessel in these waters. Its beautifully appointed 53 “staterooms” (some with balconies) can accommodate up to 141 passengers though there are only 96 on our trip, attended to by a crew of 82. There’s 24-hour room service, a gym and health spa, a sauna, a lecture theatre (lectures, movies and documentaries are screened on each stateroom’s TV, too) and silver service dining in the restaurant, where stemless wine glasses, rubber anti-slide mats on the linen tablecloths and chairs that can be chained to the floor remind us where we are.

Lovely as life is indoors, it’s impossible to resist the pull of all that ocean. Before breakfast, between lectures, after dinner, every chance we get, we get out on deck to watch dolphins leaping out of blue waves while prion and cape petrels and lightly mantled sooty and wandering albatrosses skim the crests of the waves with their wingtips. Eventually, we’re so far from land even the seabirds disappear and I become acutely aware of our isolation. We are an island of comfort in this vast, watery wilderness, as physically alone as Mawson was.

Antarktos

As we make our way south, the days become longer and colder. By our fourth sea day, the air temperature is zero and there’s snow on the deck when we step outside to watch humpback whales come up for breaths between ice floes. Snow petrels circle the ship, a sign that we’re close.

The next morning, soon after crossing the Antarctic Circle, we see the northern edge of the Antarctic continent: an ice cliff with a sloping brow filling the southern horizon. It seems impossibly vast. The geographic South Pole is still, incredibly, 2630 kilometres further south, across all that ice — some of it four kilometres thick.

For all I’ve read and heard about Antarctica, it’s unlike any other place on Earth, even the Arctic. In fact, when the Greeks imagined a southern pole star to match the northern one they called Arktos (the Bear), they named it Antarktos, the opposite of the Arctic. It makes sense: the Arctic is a sea surrounded by land; the Antarctic (as the unknown southern land came to be known) is a land mass surrounded by sea.

Not that you can see any land; 99 per cent of Antarctica is permanently covered by snow and ice. Cape Denison, a rocky point in the middle of Commonwealth Bay, is an anomaly, one that, by fate or good fortune, Mawson found only after cruising the ice cliffs for weeks. Unlike Mawson, we know where to go but, even with our 21st-century navigational gadgetry, satellite imaging and an “ice master” on the bridge, Orion is at the mercy of the pack ice as much as Aurora was.

Fortune smiles upon us too, though. The ice magically parts and we anchor safely off Cape Denison, just as Mawson did in January 1912.

“The sun shone gloriously in a blue sky as we stepped ashore on a charming ice-quay — the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent between Cape Adare and Gaussberg, a distance of about two thousand miles. Close to the Boat Harbour, as we called it, was suitable ground for the erection of a hut ... For supplies of fresh meat, in the emergency of being marooned for a number of years, there were many Weddell seals at hand, and on almost all the neighbouring ridges colonies of penguins were busy rearing their young ...

“So it came about that the Main Base was finally settled at Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay.”

Home of the Blizzard

The two days we’re there, Commonwealth Bay is eerily calm, belying the fact that this is the windiest place on Earth. For the features that made Cape Denison ideal for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (its ice-free harbour and exposed rock) owe their existence to fierce katabatic winds that blow down off the polar plateau, at speeds of up to 320km/h — as Mawson soon discovered.

“The climate proved to be little more than one continuous blizzard the year round; a hurricane of wind roaring for weeks together, pausing for breath only at odd hours ... Stepping out of the shelter of the Hut, one was apt to be immediately hurled at full length downwind.”

Even without a blizzard, stepping onto “the ice” for the first time is exhilarating. This is Australia’s Antarctic territory, but Cape Denison really belongs to the Adélie penguins that still nest here in their thousands every summer. They’re everywhere: on every rocky promontory, sliding on their bellies down snowy slopes, porpoising through the water, even walking with us as we wander.

Climbing a rocky ridge on one side of Cape Denison’s small snowy valley, we sidestep nesting Adélies (named by French explorer Dumont d’Urville after his wife) to reach the memorial cross erected in 1913 for Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, killed on a sledging journey with Mawson in early 1913. Back at sea level, we walk around Weddell seals lying like slugs on the ice to look at three small huts, in various states of disrepair, used by Mawson’s team to take magnetic readings. But the main event, and the most significant site in Australia’s Antarctic history, is what’s now called Mawson’s Hut.

Mawson’s museum

Mawson’s men had little or no building experience, but Australia’s first scientific base, made of pre-cut planks of oregon, clad in Baltic pine, is in remarkably good condition 100 years on thanks to its sturdy and simple design, the snow packed around it, the cold, dry air that has preserved its timbers and the efforts of Mawson’s Huts Foundation, set up in 1996 to conserve the hut and its surrounds.

With chain crampons over our gumboots to stop us slipping on the icy floor, we step inside — and back to 1912–13. This is one of the purest museums you will ever see: many of the things Mawson and his men used are still here, in situ, literally frozen in time, making pictures in your head about how they lived. There are books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, To Pleasure Madame and Nautical Almanac 1913, sparkly with hoar frost. There are cans of cocoa, tins of Bovril, Eiffel matches, the old stove where the men would have warmed themselves after venturing outside, photographer Frank Hurley’s darkroom where he scrawled on the wall, “Near enough is not good enough.” (Hurley came to Antarctica with Mawson before joining Shackleton’s legendary 1914-1916 expedition.)

Stepping outside again, I find a quiet rock with a view to sit and take in this place: the constant burring of Adélies, a Wilson’s storm petrel flitting over the rocks, softly falling snow. Just offshore lie the snow-caked Mackellar islands, dozens of rock islets named by Mawson after a patron of the expedition. Either side are John O’Groats and Land’s End, the eastern and western limits of Mawson’s home away from home — treacherous ice cliffs where one slip would mean “instant death”, as Don McIntyre puts it.

It’s all exactly as it would have been when Mawson was here: the penguins and seals still come every summer; my fellow passengers in their red jackets could be Mawson’s men preparing for sledging trips; our black Zodiacs could be whale boats ferrying supplies in from the Aurora, anchored offshore where the Orion is today.

Macquarie: then and now

Too soon, we’re heading north again, but one of the advantages of visiting this part of Antarctica is the chance to stop at Macquarie Island, which Mawson famously called “one of the wonder spots of the world”.

“Leaping out of the water in scores around us were penguins of several varieties,” he wrote in The Home of the Blizzard. “Penguins were in thousands on the uprising cliffs, and from rookeries near and far came an incessant din. At intervals along the shore sea-elephants [elephant seals] disported their ungainly masses in the sunlight. Circling above us in anxious haste, sea-birds ... gave warning of our near approach to their nests. It was the invasion by man of an exquisite scene of primitive nature.”

In fact, man had invaded Macquarie long before Mawson arrived. Within 10 years of Captain Frederick Hasselborough, a sealer, discovering the island in 1810 and naming it for Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales, its 200,000 fur seals had been hunted to extinction and its 100,000 southern elephant seals almost wiped out, too. Then New Zealander Joseph Hatch established a penguin-oil industry: up to 2000 royal penguins at a time were steamed in purpose-built “digesters”, yielding about half a litre of oil per animal.

Mawson was instrumental, in 1919, in stopping the exploitation of animals on Macquarie. The island was proclaimed a wildlife sanctuary in 1933 and a nature reserve in 1971 and was World Heritage listed in 1997. All of which means that this long, ruggedly handsome island — actually an uplifted undersea mountain range — has recovered considerably in the 100 years since Mawson was here.

Landing at the island’s northern end, we’re greeted by Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service rangers, our guides for the day. Everywhere we walk, we see thousands of king and royal penguins (which Mawson called “picturesque little fellows, with a crest and eyebrows of long golden-yellow feathers”) promenading along the black-sand beaches like well-dressed gentlemen. (There are as many as four million penguins on the island now: kings, royals, gentoos and rockhoppers.)

Skuas and giant petrels soar overhead. Great boulders of flesh dot the landscape: elephant seals, weighing up to four tonnes, which now number about 90,000. The grassy hills are alive with penguin cities — one royal rookery we visit has about 13,000 nesting pairs — and rabbits, introduced by sealers for food and responsible for extensive environmental damage. (Their days are numbered, however, as a five-year, $25 million rabbit-eradication program began in April this year.)

A swell return

Leaving Macquarie feels like the end of the trip, but we’re still three sea days from Dunedin and the Southern Ocean isn’t about to let us go lightly. The swell builds all day until, that night, it peaks at 10 metres.

At dinner, we hold on to our plates and glasses as the ship rolls and watch the windows of the dining room submerge like the doors of front-loading washing machines on the rinse cycle. After dessert, a few of us put on our wet weather gear and stand at the stern railing watching a procession of monster waves chasing us, the 50-knot winds blowing rain squalls and salt spray in our faces until two waves catch up to the ship, a wall of water descends and washes over the deck and we retreat inside. Safely in our beds later, it feels as if the sea is breathing deeply under us.

Our last stop is another World Heritage-listed subantarctic island, Campbell. Although gale-force winds prevent us from going ashore, our Zodiac cruise along the protected eastern cliffs, in the company of mermaiding New Zealand fur seals, is spectacular, not least for the mercurial weather conditions. Cue the rain squalls! Now some sunshine! Thirty-knot gusts tear the whitecaps off the dancing water and hurl them at us — until we’re rewarded with a rainbow as the sun momentarily spotlights thousands of nesting albatross on the high cliffs above.

After another sea day, and smooth seas again, we cruise back into Dunedin’s long harbour. When Mawson returned to Adelaide, and the known world, in February 1914, after two long years on the ice, he marvelled at “the tree-clad shores and the smoke of many steamers” and said, “The welcome home — the voice of the innumerable strangers — the hand-grips of many friends — it chokes one — it cannot be uttered.”

How strange it must have felt. To me, even tiny Dunedin seems busy after less than three weeks at sea. But following in Mawson’s wake, landing where he did, stepping inside the hut he and his men shared through blizzardly conditions, seeing the icy environment that took the lives of some of them and almost killed Mawson himself — it’s history in motion, the past in the present, and our journey to Antarctica has been all the richer for it.

Louise Southerden is an award-winning travel writer based in Sydney; she travelled to Antarctica as a guest of Orion Expedition Cruises.

* Tourism figures from the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators.

Facts to go

Getting there: Orion Expedition Cruises has two Mawson’s Antarctica trips to Commonwealth Bay next summer departing from Hobart and ending in Bluff, near Invercargill, on New Zealand’s South Island. The trips leave on December 1, 2011 (19 nights) and January 3, 2012 (18 nights). Fares start at $23,735 per person twin share and include an experienced expedition team led by Australian adventurers Don and Margie McIntyre, 24-hour room service, entertainment, talks and lectures, Zodiac excursions, use of the ship’s gym, port and handling charges, government fees and taxes. The first voyage includes an invitation to the Mawson’s Huts Foundation Centenary fund-raising dinner in Hobart on 1 December. Call 1300 361 012 or see www.orionexpeditions.com.

More information: Antarctic Tasmania is hosting Antarctic Centennial Year until June 2012; see www.antarcticcentennial.tas.gov.au. The Australian Antarctic Division website also lists Mawson centenary activities; see www.centenary.antarctica.gov.au. For more information on the Mawson’s Huts Foundation, see mawsons-huts.org.au.