The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  Freya is tempted to explain more but thinks better of it. Not everyone shares your passion for Hurley’s art, Marcus would caution.

  In her first, unsuccessful application to the Arts Council she had worded her proposal Themes from Hurley’s photos linking to my own. When the Council recommended further development, Marcus had comforted her: It’s certainly not a failure. What you have is the kernel of a very good idea.

  ‘Is he a photographer?’

  ‘Frank Hurley?’

  ‘Your husband, you schmuck!’

  Freya laughs. ‘Marcus is an academic. Communications. Though in some ways he knows more about photography than I do: he taught visual theory in the early days.’

  ‘Dr Marcus didn’t try to stow away as your field assistant?’

  ‘He has teaching commitments,’ she offers, ‘and he’s busy with some research.’ Freya hesitates. ‘To be honest,’ she confides, ‘my husband tends to be a bit of a homebody.’

  ‘Ah.’ Kittie gives her a knowing nod. ‘My partner’s a would-be homebody. Has visions of being a stay-at-home parent with a brood of kids.’

  Encumbrances, Marcus had dismissed children the one time she broached the topic. ‘You have children, Kittie?’

  ‘Not yet. Diana and I are hoping to adopt.’ Kittie registers Freya’s blink of surprise. ‘Believe it or not,’ she says, ‘I do tend to be closeted when I’m at the station. Doesn’t pay to stir up the homophobes.’ She taps a finger in the direction of Adam Singer at the opposite railing. ‘Case in point,’ she whispers.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Freya leans closer, curious in spite of herself.

  ‘I get the weirdest vibe from that dude. I’m here to tell you, I can pick out the egomaniacs and misogynists from a hundred paces.’

  Adam? She can’t be serious. Freya is unsure whether to laugh. ‘That’s a bit harsh. You make the place sound like a hornets’ nest.’

  ‘Nah, there’s always one or two that come crawling out of the woodwork. The difference from home is there’s no ready means of escape. As for the rest of us, it’s a mandatory requirement to be off-centre. You would have had the unspeakable joy of the psych assessment?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Freya shudders, remembering the written test, the hour-long interview, the evaluation. You appear to be fiercely independent and professionally self-assured, yet the written tests indicate a tendency to be submissive—at times you operate out of a sense of duty.

  ‘It went on forever,’ she recalls. ‘How would I integrate into a tight-knit community after working so long on my own? Did I have my husband’s full support?’ Who wouldn’t feel on edge with some of the intimations?—an underlying vulnerability, a lack of self-esteem—the psychologist’s focus all the while honed in on her birthmark. He had quizzed her at length over Marcus, interjecting: But outside of the house, what do you do together—for fun? Freya had found herself back-pedalling, defending her husband and her marriage. ‘I half-expected to be told I wasn’t suitable.’

  ‘At mine,’ Kittie says, ‘the security guy escorted me up in the lift. When the interview was over I said to the psych, Shall I let myself out? She gives me this go-crawl-back-under-your-rock look and says, Unless you’d rather jump out the window.’ Kittie twirls her fingers. ‘And a good day to you too, DrH appy!’

  Freya drums her fists on the deck with a peal of laughter. She opens her eyes to catch Adam’s smile.

  ‘So there you have it,’ Kittie says. ‘We’re both certifiably insane enough to go to Antarctica.’

  FREYA ARRIVES AT THE DINER table in time to hear Charlie, the Davis Station radio officer, expound on the pros and cons of modern-day communications compared to earlier technology. ‘Telegraphy, it was back then at the Melbourne GPO. Twenty years before I started coming south.’ His weathered face bears a kind smile.

  ‘Phone calls, emails, faxes—and now bloody sat phones and SMSs,’ Charlie emphasises each word, ‘the ruin of many a relationship, in my opinion. These days you get wives and partners calling up all hours of the day and night, checking up. Coming to Antarctica won’t solve any problems you’ve left at home.’

  ‘A somewhat cynical view, Charlie,’ says the woman at the end of the table whose name eludes Freya.

  Charlie shrugs. ‘Three decades south.T hree marriage bust-ups.’ ‘Why do you keep coming down?’

  ‘The buggers won’t let me retire! Each time I tell the Division this is my last year—yes, yes, they say, then call me up four weeks before the start of a new season, knickers in a knot because someone’s pulled out. Gave the winters away a few years back,’ he says. ‘A lowly summerer nowadays.’

  Freya laughs. ‘Plenty of us would kill to have your kind of summer every year.’

  ‘What about the female perspective?’ Travis says. ‘You’re married, Freya. Your other half mind you running away to Antarctica?’

  ‘Hardly running away,’ she tries not to sound defensive. ‘I’ve been freelancing for ten years. Marcus is used to me going away for work. Though, admittedly, not for five months straight.’

  ‘You’re on a humanities grant?’ says the woman, a PI as she introduced herself yesterday—Principal Investigator— distracting Freya from remembering her name with yet another Antarctic acronym.

  ‘A Commonwealth arts grant. I’m working on a photographic collection for an exhibition.’

  ‘Courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.’ The woman sniffs. ‘What a lark.’

  Charlie winks at Freya sympathetically. ‘As I understand it, that privilege extends to us all, sciences and trades.’ He leans conspiratorially towards Travis. ‘They’ve got a cubby hole set up for Freya above the helipad at Davis Station.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Travis grins agreeably, though, like Freya, he seems mildly perplexed.

  Freya addresses herself to everyone at the table, ignoring whatever bait is being dangled. ‘They’ve lined-up a studio that an artist-in-residence used a few years back. The station leader says it has views across Prydz Bay. Is he right, Charlie?’

  ‘Million-dollar views.’ Charlie nods, gathering the plates. ‘A million decibels of racket thrown in at no additional charge.’

  FOR EIGHTEEN BONE-SHAKING HOURS AURORA Australis bashes through ice that seals Prydz Bay, her progress best measured in hours per kilometre. Forward the ship rumbles, struggling to gain momentum, engines screaming with an insatiable thirst for fuel. Aurora charges at the fast ice like an orca seizing prey from the shore.

  In her cabin, Freya scrolls through the bank of Frank Hurley photos she keeps on her laptop, opening a folder of images of the original Aurora’s journey. Steam Yacht Aurora breaking through pack-ice on her voyage south.

  She wonders at her desire to peer in through the sphere of Hurley’s lens, to focus on the man looking out. She can easily picture the larrikin Hurley defying danger and cold as he precariously balanced on the slippery bowsprit with his big box camera to photograph the ship, those watching from the bridge shaking their heads at his showman antics.

  What a lark. What a lark.

  Frank Hurley wrote that every photograph, like an autograph, bears the stamp of the photographer’s personality. Freya flags this image for her exhibition; it is as striking a reflection of a tour-de-force photographer as of a voyage of discovery. As she considers the photos she took today—technically sound but not one of them involving risk—she suddenly questions if she can meet the challenge Frank Hurley has set her.

  Through the porthole, Freya spies two crosses marking an outlying island—a grim welcome to Davis Station. She hears a commotion in the hallway and follows others up the stairwell onto the deck. Beyond the island, the ice of the Antarctic plateau shimmers like a mirage. On the ship’s bow, a group dressed in yellow freezer suits link arms and sway back and forth. And there, directly ahead, nestled among rock, sits a cluster of green, blue, red and yellow buildings, a bright and shining station at the edge of the world. Why the anticipation of arrival should flood her with apprehension she doesn’t fully
understand. She feels eight years old again, shuffling on a crowded deck towards a gangway and clasping her father’s lifeline of a hand, overwhelmed by baking heat and the salty air of Fremantle port, by booming voices and indecipherable words. Now, just as she did then, she wishes she could turn back time and sail on, remain in no-man’s land for just a while longer. Her trepidation strikes her as absurd, yet she can’t shake off the foreboding: before her is a threshold beyond which there can be no return.

  Steam Yacht Aurora breaking through pack-ice on her voyage south

  The seventh continent

  19 January 1912

  DOUGLAS MAWSON GLANCED THROUGH AURORA’S porthole at a foreshore strewn with provisions, a line of tents, timber stacked beside the foundations of the hut already referred to as winter quarters. Beyond their base, the great domed icecap could be mistaken for a blanket of cloud pressing down upon the horizon, so mighty was it in breadth and depth.

  From his cabin he could hear Frank Hurley crowing about photographs of Aurora he’d printed to send home to the newspapers, The old girl ploughing through a glorious band of pack-ice. Inglorious ice, Captain Davis would argue. Douglas dared not think how close Antarctica’s gauntlet of ice had come to undoing the expedition. Days wasted circling the pack, a sickening volume of coal consumed in searching for an open lead. And then the bittersweet sight of a stretch of ice so vast they had at first mistaken it for the continent. The quickening of the pulse, the realisation that within a gunshot was the greatest glacier tongue known to man, their eyes the first to witness it. Less magical was the ensuing backtracking, hours spent on Aurora’s open bridge or frigid in the crow’s nest, scouring the coastline for a tract of ice-free land on which to establish this base. He’d had no option but to amalgamate the smallest subsidiary party into his own, reducing them to two continental bases instead of the planned three.

  Some from the Geographical Society had scoffed at the magnitude of his plans—he, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian geologist mounting an expedition with science its sole objective. During 1911 he had given his fundraising presentation ad nauseam throughout Britain and Australia: Bound up with the general mystery of the seventh continent are volumes of facts of vital importance to science and economic problems. The object of the expedition is to investigate the Antarctic Continent to the southward of Australia. Our intention is to land several self-contained wintering parties at widely separated points, each to make continuous scientific records at the base station, and to investigate the surrounding region by sledge journeys.

  He should thank Providence that they were here at all, the relay party successfully landed at Macquarie Island on the way down, the newly erected wireless mast now crowning the island’s North Head. Wireless telegraphy will be used for the first time in polar exploration, our Macquarie Island station transmitting Antarctic news to Hobart.

  Douglas wound the sheet out of the typewriter and read over his instructions to Captain Davis: Motor at least five hundred miles west, there to establish Frank Wild’s continental base. He could hear Davis above decks, bellowing orders to heave up the anchor and make ready to depart. Westward ho, lads! Douglas scrabbled for a new sheet of paper and took up his pen.

  Adelie Land

  19 January 1912

  My Paquita,

  Just a hurried line to say goodbye for a year—we are just about to go ashore at winter quarters, having landed all the needful.

  What has happened in the last fortnight you will hear from the press. Suffice it to say that everything has gone off well enough though we had hoped to find a more rocky coastline.

  You will not get this letter until the end of April or May and by then we expect to have the wireless in operation so you may hear earlier.

  We have made a successful landing and I don’t anticipate anything in the nature of disaster. Your wandering Dougelly will return with the Olive Branch to his haven of rest in a little over a year’s time. Of course that is if he is still wanted—from what you have said anyway, he is coming back to enquire. You will be quite a woman of the world then—perhaps quite too fine for me? Eh. Well don’t let that be, for in this stern country of biting facts ones love gets frozen in deeper and there is plenty of time here to think over all the happiness that may be ours. The very fact of your loving me seems all that I want, and I could live always in that beatitude.

  Know O’Darling that in this frozen South I can always wring happiness from my heart by thinking of your splendid self.

  There is an ocean of love between us dear.

  Your loving Douglas

  IT WAS AS THOUGH HE had folded and sealed all his personal emotions inside the letter to Paquita, tenderness put away in readiness for the task ahead. Indeed, the parting at Commonwealth Bay may have seemed a matter-of-fact one to those watching from the ship. Hurried handshakes on the poop deck, a round of cheers from the ship’s crew, their smaller boat pushing off from large. As his eighteen men pulled away, each on an oar picking up the rhythm of the stroke, he heard Aurora’s boatswain mutter, Poor beggars. Captain Davis’s remark skimmed across the mirror-calm water for all to hear, She’s a godforsaken country to spend a year in.

  Douglas watched the arc Aurora made as she slid her nose around a half-moon, his men gauging the broadening distance between whaleboat and ship with a growing sense of realisation. In the time it took to angle their course towards shore, a wave of melancholy subdued the men of main base left on their own at Commonwealth Bay. The whaleboat rocked in Aurora’s wake.

  DAVIS

  STATION

  AURORA AUSTRALIS GIVES THREE DEAFENING blasts as she swings away, nudging back along the channel of broken sea ice and out between the islands of Prydz Bay. Davis summerers congregate along a snow-encrusted road that winds from the station down to the sea ice. Freya stands at the foreshore adjusting her tripod. She focuses on a line of bodies crowning the hill, each with a maritime flare held high, a line of statues posed in farewell. Shouts and laughter are punctuated by a report of cracks and whizzes as their makeshift fireworks cascade in a blaze of orange smoke. Freya leans into her camera, her motor drive burring, trying to summon, through the pall, a feeling for this place—and a sense of her own place within it. In the space of a week, people around her have eased into a pattern, returning tradies reminiscing with old workmates, a comradely chatter among those Freya has worked alongside during resupply— dozens forming a human chain to transport provisions from shipping containers, sort old food stocks from new.

  The ship slides from view and the crowd of well-wishers slowly disbands, lured indoors by the promise of warmth. Freya folds her tripod and turns to see Adam Singer waiting for her.

  ‘At last she’s gone,’ he says of the ship. ‘Our summer can finally begin.’ Adam walks beside her up the road; ten o’clock at night and the station gleams, buildings edged in sunlight.

  ‘How are you settling in?’ he asks.

  ‘This reminds me of my first week of school in Australia. Everything new and different and my head still spinning.’

  ‘Found your way around the buildings yet?’

  ‘Mostly. I now know where to muster if the fire alarm goes off, and not to mix burnable rubbish with non-burnable.’

  ‘You’re doing better than some. I’m impressed. What would your hero make of the place, a century on?’

  ‘Hero?’

  ‘The famous Hurley. He’s your inspiration, I hear.’

  ‘I imagine Frank Hurley would be right at home in the twenty-first century. He’d own the latest digital camera and image software, and would be out there scaling one of those icebergs to get the most dramatic viewpoint.’

  ‘He’s the one who stood on railway tracks snapping photos of oncoming trains.’

  ‘That’s Hurley,’ Freya says, surprised at Adam’s knowledge. ‘Master of photography and daring pursuits.’

  ‘Can we expect the same of you?’

  Freya blinks. ‘I’m not much of a daredevil. I’ve also been told there
’ll be no exploring off station until I’m field trained. First time and all.’

  Adam scoffs. ‘Anyone’s guess how long that will take with the boffins all raring to start their science projects. You’ll be way down the list.’ He slows and turns towards the sea ice. ‘Down here, Freya, there are times when what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Make the most of every moment. Summer comes and goes in a heartbeat.’ He strides away to the living quarters and calls back to her, ‘If you and your camera want some company, I’d love the chance to help.’

  ‘I’d like that too,’ she says, flattered by his attention, a bounce in her step as she climbs the hill toward her studio.

  EVENING SUNLIGHT CATCHES THE CORNER of the window above her desk. Freya’s upstairs studio perches on the brow of the hill, flanked by helicopter landing pads. She scrolls through the backlog of daily emails from her husband, registering his impatience at having to wait days for a reply. ‘Dear Marcus,’ she writes.

  >> I’m sorry! The ship left tonight and this is the first chance I’ve had to write. The week has been a blur with vehicles trundling back and forth across the sea ice, helicopters slinging in loads from the ship. Everyone on station worked around the clock while an astronomical amount of fuel was pumped from ship to shore.

  A crate with my gear and belongings finally turned up today and I’ve begun setting up my studio—make that my sea container, 1990s-vintage, heated, with a freezer door, windows and—joy of joys!—internet connection. It’s wee, and a little bit decrepit in a way that reminds me of the first studio I had in Melbourne, but warm and cosy with bench space and beautiful natural lighting. I love it! I share my little parcel of real estate with the helicopter crew downstairs and with Romeo and Juliet—yes, those are the call signs of our two noisy helicopters. Hopefully things will quieten down now the ship has left.

  There are eighty people here for summer and we’ve already been assigned our weekly duties. Think of me tomorrow sweeping and mopping cold porches! The LQ (Living Quarters) is the main building where we squeeze into the dining room, with some overflow to the lounge and bar. The ‘deluxe’ bedrooms upstairs have been assigned to those who will stay on for winter, while we summerers are scattered far and wide. Tonight I was relocated from a bunk room to my own tiny room in the temporary accommodation module.