The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  BANDITS HUT STANDS THIRTY KILOMETRES north of Davis Station. Another ten k’s, a mere hop and a skip, and they would be at Walkabout Rocks, the station’s northern boundary.

  Pockets of steam lift the lid from a pot of melted snow, mist upon the window waxes and wanes. Though Freya feels weary from a full day of training, she leaves her companions to the warmth of the field hut, its gas heater glowing, a clutter of Scrabble tiles spilled upon a board.

  Outside cold bites at her skin. Shadows stretch the length of the frozen fjord. Bergs on the horizon rest in evening light. Below, five quad bikes nestle between the shadow of stone and undulations of broken ice—the tide crack, which can be seen rammed against every outcrop of land. Freya breaks off a wedge of chocolate, her last bar, having demolished the rest of her monthly supply in her first two weeks at the station. She savours the bittersweet square as it thaws and melts inside her mouth. No matter that it’s Old Gold and five years out of date.

  Granite dykes meander the length and width of the Vestfold Hills, corridors of shiny black that crisscross the rocks like a cobbled road. On the southern horizon luminescence glows from the river of ice they call the Sørsdal; the large glacier with its fissured tongue slicks out across the ocean to mark the station’s southern boundary. Beyond the hills the icecap, always the icecap, beguiling in its blush of rose. She turns in circles, drawing in the wonder of the place, giddied with the reality of being here, immersed in its beauty and expanse. She will photograph it all, from Walkabout Rocks to the Sørsdal Glacier, the calm and wild of the place. This, she knows, reaching for her camera, is joy.

  The lookout above the hut is capped with boulders as crimson as the evening light. The air surrounding her is charged with life. Angel wings blur in Freya’s camera shutter: snow petrels darting and swooping, agile with every turn. The night is filled with the chatter of these birds no larger than doves, flashes of white fluttering into and out of rocky crevices.

  Freya hears a bird call. She kneels upon the rock and whistles a quavered note, then hears from beneath her feet a soft trill in reply. She releases her camera from its tripod and scrambles down to where she can lie flat and squint into a rocky cleft. She can see deep inside a pair of glassy beads peering out. The snow petrel, small and white, could fit in the cup of her hands. How does a bird so seemingly fragile exist in such a hostile place? Freya watches and absorbs, struck by a sense of the familiar, and remembers, Frank Hurley’s image of a snow petrel, identical to the scene before her. To shared discoveries; Freya whistles and the snow petrel tilts her head, she studies Freya for a time. Finally, the bird plumps her breast feathers, closes her eyes and tucks her head into a curve of downy white. She knows she is beyond reach, safe, protected by her hug of rock.

  Nesting snow petrel

  Composites

  March 1912

  THE CURIOUS NOISE PLAGUED DOUGLAS and Hurley all afternoon. Douglas thought of surf breaking incessantly on a distant beach; Hurley likened it to wind raking the tops of trees. To the west, flurries of snowdrift lifted from the cape while along the foreshore the bay remained still. Hurley had abandoned his tripod and lay sprawled on his belly among the rocky crevices, attempting to entice a nesting snow petrel to pose before his lens. He might score more than a photographic impression: the snow petrel’s defence against intruders was an oily red concoction that the dainty little creature could summon from its belly and eject a full six feet.

  Douglas rested on his haunches, framing with his eyes a panorama of the bay. The adélie rookery looked barely inhabited. The occasional weddell seal that still ventured ashore received a swift bullet to the head; scarlet snow lay in patches along the foreshore where Ninnis and Mertz butchered the meat while the dogs stood poised on their chains, fielding the scraps.

  Ninnis and Mertz; their names rolled off the tongue as a couplet, never one without the other.

  Hurley scrambled to his feet. ‘Somewhere up there, Doc,’ he gestured to the sky, ‘it’s blowing like the devil.’

  Douglas gave a wry smile. ‘If we could only find a way to make it stay up there.’

  Throughout these last weeks the wind had blown with increased velocity, leaving only a few hours’ reprieve before ratcheting up to blast the bay anew. This was their third month at winter quarters, the sum of their science work a boxful of specimens for the biological collection, and the daily meteorological and magnetic recordings. As for exploring further afield, blizzards had simply overwhelmed their attempts at preliminary sledging and trail-marking up on the plateau.

  Hurley returned his camera to its tripod, entering his other world beneath the black cloth. Douglas looked forward to these hours more than he could say, assisting Frank with his eighty pounds of photographic equipment. Indoors, Hurley would act the eternal practical joker, but out here, camera in hand, he approached his art with scientific resolve. A seventy-mile-an-hour wind that blasted others indoors brought Hurley scurrying outside. He filmed men blown from the weather screen, photographed them hurricane walking, their bodies pitched semi-prone into the wind. Photographing the blizzard, Frank declared with utter certainty, is our chance to show the world something it has never seen before.

  Not so long ago, Douglas had believed a photographer was worthwhile solely as a means of recouping funds after the expedition: lantern slides to accompany public lectures, photographs to illustrate a book, an adventure cinematograph to be shown in theatres to the paying public. Yet he could see, from the prints Frank created in the hut’s darkroom each evening, that his images stood alone. His photographs evoked two Antarctic worlds, one of serene, dazzling beauty, the other hostile and stark; each mood enkindled the senses. In his images of man against nature, one could come to believe in the presence of God. In the darkroom Hurley turned alchemist, pushing the limits of photographic science. For artistic effect he could take a scene of the bay photographed on an overcast day and merge it with a negative of a sky torn ragged with cloud. Composites, he called these compilations. No one but Hurley could detect the real from the embellished and even he, over time, might fail to distinguish between the two.

  Oregon timber for the wireless masts stayed stacked beside the hut where it had lain since January. Oh, for a spell of calm long enough to get them up. By now—the evenings dim before nine o’clock, the receding sun as pale as tinned butter—the relay station at Macquarie Island would be tuning in each night, listening unrewarded through an ether of static for a string of dots and dashes from a thousand miles south.

  Douglas ran his thumb over a quartz seam in the gneiss painted with splashes of copper, crystals glowing emerald green—minerals created deep within the earth’s crust. Phenomenal forces of pressure and heat transformed silica-rich fluids into a bejewelled seam of rock. While it was the order of science that shaped his thoughts, this astonishing beauty—the lustre of minerals, their exquisite crystal structures and kaleidoscope of colour—bewitched a deeper, intangible part of him.

  The sound of moving air grew shrill. Hurley looked out from beneath his black cloth and stretched his arm to the sky as if to comb his fingers through a river of wind.

  ‘See here.’ Douglas beckoned him, taking his handkerchief and polishing a film of sea salt from the quartz. ‘This glassy green could be emerald, at the very least beryl; under a microscope we’d see a pattern of hexagonal prisms.’

  Hurley kneeled down for a closer look. ‘Jewels for a king.’

  A willy-willy rose from the incline behind the hut, the funnel of snow wheeling across the slope like a child’s spinning top.

  ‘This is green apatite.’ Douglas brought their attention back to mineralogy. ‘And all of this,’ he pointed, ‘is copper sulphide oxidised to malachite.’ Douglas wanted Hurley to see the art in science as he saw the science in Hurley’s photographic art. ‘These minerals begin as separate elements—copper, beryllium, aluminium, phosphorous, calcium. The real magic happens when they crystallise and combine; then they transform into new minerals.’

&nb
sp; ‘Composites.’

  Douglas nodded. ‘Nature’s form of art.’

  He caught the edge of a sound and turned to see a zinc sheet sweep into the air. It flew north over Boat Harbour like a great silver-backed gull then lifted higher again, the razor-sharp edge agleam as it twisted and turned, the sheet warbling a cry as it sailed overhead.

  Hurricane walking

  SLUSHY

  BY ELEVEN AT NIGHT THE BUILDINGS of Davis Station gleam from the golden light of a sun that, now, barely sets. Even Freya’s accommodation block basks in the glow, the orange prefab box elevated by the lustre. Quiet hours; a reprieve, she thinks, pausing at the landing of her studio before stepping in.

  Freya has resigned herself to her bone-shaking surrounds; she dons ear phones and edges up the volume of her iPod to muffle the shriek of engines, the drum-beats of air, anything to disguise the quaking that rattles the engineer’s workshop below and reverberates upstairs. The two Squirrels, at rest now until morning, are lashed to the ground, rotor blades pulled taut so they bow like whale ribs.

  She feels a visceral shiver when she opens the image attached to Marcus’s email: Hurricane walking. Autumn 1912.

  >> The diaries make constant reference to the appalling weather at winter quarters. By autumn they experienced winds exceeding 120 km per hour. Mawson’s journal speaks of Frank Bickerton, the plane engineer, venturing out with Hurley and both being swept down a slope. Johnny Hunter, biologist, remarks of men being unable to walk upright, of the struggle to simply get underway against the wind resistance. Might this attached photo of Hurley’s illustrate those diary excerpts?

  Indeed it would. She draws back from the image of the two men and pictures the photographer clinging to his heavy wooden tripod, snow filling his camera as he battles wind and frostbite.

  Freya wants to honour Hurley and his work, pay tribute to a pioneer of Antarctic photography. She knows that there are those who disparage Hurley’s photographic vision, who claim his portraits reduced the men to members of a species battling nature’s forces, rather than the heroes the public of the day wanted to see. Freya clicks to her own portraits—her fellow trainees retrieving a quad bike from its simulated plunge through the sea ice during field training; scientists working in snowdrift at the tide gauge; Kittie changing the sunlight card, a parhelion filling the sky and tracing a circle around her. So far she has only a handful of images to place alongside Hurley’s, yet she can see that the Antarctic environment itself is as vibrant now as it was then, as real and as complex as any human figure. In Hurley’s Hurricane Walking, the identity of the two men was secondary to his desire to portray the challenge of working in such extremes. At winter quarters, the community of eighteen epitomised the hero, each man an integral part of a unified team. Descriptions from the diaries, Marcus has persuaded her, will add another layer to the photographic experience. Freya sits back further in her seat at the thought of all she owes her husband.

  In preparing her second application to the Arts Council, try as she might she could not transform her creative vision onto paper, not in terms that Marcus found convincing. She agreed to his offer to collect impressions from Antarctic pioneers; he rewrote her proposal as a narrative woven through the photographic work. Marcus found, in the diaries of the men from Douglas Mawson’s 1911–14 expedition, the link to Australia’s Antarctic history—and to Hurley—he said her photographs needed.

  Freya had whirled like a dervish from the letterbox to the house, delirious with joy at the Council’s offer.

  Come with me, she had said to Marcus (hadn’t she already anticipated his answer?)

  Whatever will I do in Antarctica for five months?

  Come as my assistant, she’d offered lamely. See the place. Experience it with me.

  Marcus had placed his arm around her shoulder. I’ll see ice aplenty through your and Hurley’s photos. I’m happy here, Freya, working on the text.

  FREYA RELISHES THESE QUIET AFTER-DINNER hours in her studio, a mug of hot chocolate warming her hands. If not for tomorrow’s early start—she is rostered on as slushy in the kitchen—she would stay here half the night, would look up from her desk through the pane of crazed glass to gauge the lowest dip of light.

  She pulls her studio door shut and registers a separate echo. Across the way she spies the figure of a man leaving the carpentry shop, hunched down: Chad McGonigal, head-chippie-turned-unwilling-photographic-assistant as of this morning’s meeting with the station leader. We’ve met, Chad muttered without expression when Malcolm Ball introduced them. Freya studies his gait as he saunters down the roadway, jacket and overalls adding to his bulk, hands wedged in pockets, drawn in on himself as he had been throughout Malcolm’s briefing.

  He slows in his tracks, perhaps to take in the ice-choked bay flooded with pink. Does the wonder of the place fade in the eyes of a jaded man who’s seen it countless times before? She watches him cross to the edge of the path and cartwheel through a bank of snow with a litheness that surprises her. When he stands and brushes snow from his hands, his long hair spills across his back.

  Who deserves the most commiseration—a wounded Adam Singer, visibly put out at being denied the chance to help her; Chad McGonigal, landed an assignment he clearly doesn’t want; or herself, the future of her project beholden to an unwilling man?

  ‘Joy,’ she bids the sky goodnight on her way down the steps.

  THE MORNING WEATHER BALLOON RISES from the meteorological building, scudding across the sky faster than Freya can run. Cold air cuts her lungs and her hair is a tangled mess. She waves at Kittie and makes it to the kitchen just in time for her rostered day on.

  Freya is not about to enquire of either chef why the second slushy hasn’t shown up. The tension between Sandy and Tommo bulges like a pressure cooker lid about to explode. Enough to know that the tradies have downed tools for their morning break and are on their way, marching down the road. Among them are the nicotine hounds who peel away to the smoking shed for a longed-for drag, but the mass of hungry workers cascades into the dining room for ten o’clock smoko, mounding onto their plates a volume of food that leaves Freya wide-eyed.

  More toast, slushy!

  Freya slides the tray into a bain-marie of steaming porridge, beans, scrambled eggs, Sandy’s maple syrup pancakes and his grab-’em-while-they-last cheese scones. No sooner has she topped up the coffee machine than there are empty jugs to refill. She scours the shelves in search of powdered milk, scans an out-of-reach ledge, afraid the chefs will snap at her if she asks, one more time, where things are kept. With a rising tide of despair she hears the clatter of pots being slung onto the bench, the sizzle of a pan plunged into water. Used baking tins hover in a teetering pile, tongs fall and clank, batter forms an ellipsis that stretches across the floor from the rim of the stove to a bowl bobbing in the sink.

  Freya remembers that the music on the MP3 player is slushy’s choice only when an opportunist takes advantage of her oversight and puts on Metallica. Loud.

  ‘On ya, Freya!’ Tommo, the big chef, springs into life, drumming his meat knife on the stainless steel counter.

  ‘Turn it down, please!’ Dr Ev calls from the furthest table.

  ‘Hear, hear.’ Malcolm theatrically pokes his fingers in his ears.

  Chad McGonigal slouches in the corner, swirling syrup across his high-rise of pancakes.

  Sandy pleads, ‘Freya, I know we’re one slushy down. I’m onto it, but for now, try and get those pots washed. Soon as you can.’

  ‘I told her already,’ Tommo growls, throwing his frisbee of a meat tray onto the bench. Blood splatters the wall tiles. ‘She’s slow.’

  The two chefs are as glum as a pair of sad clowns. Sandy, the new summer chef who travelled south with Freya, looks exhausted as he pours filling into fluted shells of pastry, his forearms powdered with flour. Tommo, who wintered over, rocks to the rhythm as he trims fat from a weeping shoulder of pork. He throws the discards none too carefully into a bin.

 
Charlie, Freya’s saviour, rounds the corner with a carton of milk powder balanced on his shoulder. ‘This should hold back the herd. You mix up a fresh lot. I’ll get a head start on the washing up and we’ll round them off at the pass.’

  ‘I’ll do it, Charlie. You’ve been working since six this morning. Sit down and have your break.’

  Charlie ignores her, pushing through the mess to the sink and rolling up his tartan sleeves. Two field assistants scuttle up from a table and run a stack of plates and cutlery through the glass washer, then launch into a tea-towel flicking match.

  ‘You galahs got nothing better to do with your time?’ Malcolm ushers them over to the drinks fridge. ‘Merv, you unpack the juice and Wattsie, let’s you and I get these boxes stacked away.’

  Dr Ev pulls an overflowing laundry basket from under the bench. ‘Freya, I’ll run the tea-towels upstairs, get them started for you.’

  Freya does battle with an overfilled garbage bag that splits as she pulls it free of the bin. She seizes the bag in her arms, her futile grip all that stops it rupturing further, while the innards of the bag leak onto her jeans and across the floor.

  Chad McGonigal appears before her and shakes out a new bag, easing it over the old.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  ‘When do you want to start?’ he asks by way of hello. ‘Malcolm’s given me the list of places you want to photograph.’

  ‘I can be ready as soon as you say.’

  Chad winds a length of colour-coded tape around the neck of the bag: green for wet burnables. ‘It’s not my project,’ he says. ‘I’m just along for the ride.’

  ‘Look,’ she says, frustrated at his surliness, ‘I’m sorry if you feel put out. I didn’t ask for your help. If I had my way—’ Freya stops herself. ‘I mean that I’m used to working on my own.’

  ‘The way it looked from the cab of the D8, you’re lucky to be working at all.’

  Freya flushes at the reference and Chad looks contrite.

  ‘Why don’t I talk to Malcolm?’ she says. ‘See if he can find someone else? I don’t want to waste your time—or my own. You have the option of coming down here whenever you choose. I only have one chance at this.’