by Robyn Mundy
Today is her first summer solstice in Antarctica—the longest day of the year, she’d reminded Chad, who, throughout the morning, has been pensive and quiet. I don’t need reminding of dates, he had snapped at her.
She tumbles the rock she has found, twists it so it glints like a semaphore mirroring the sun. Her hands carry in their shape the hands of her father—narrow fingers curved in an outward sway, speckled fingernails above rising keratin moons. Snap! Freya likes to imagine her father walking the Vestfolds beside her, well pleased by the name an early Norwegian captain chose in honour of his home province.
She has a memory, the Indian Ocean, glittering with the colours of a new vocabulary as their ship approached port. Her father had pointed to a sign: Welcome to Western Australia. Vestfold, he’d squeezed Freya’s hand, the west side.
The duplex they moved to, long since knocked down, perched on a hill a stone’s throw from the beach, within sight of a city skyline punctuated with building cranes. If they were to cross the escarpment and keep driving east, Papa said, they would watch earth turn red and bush grow sparse, see where scrub gave way to an endless expanse.
Her father brimmed with talent, yet his photographs of everything he found majestic about this vast western state met rejections from dealers in Norway and Europe where his work was shipped. A man not easily deterred, he produced new, larger landscapes for galleries in the city, and sent them to the eastern states as well. Each prospective buyer shook his head doubtfully at a Norwegian wedding photographer turned artist; even the best-known photographers failed to sell their work as art. Who but a foreigner, the string of nos and sorries implied, would put creative passion and their life savings into the back of beyond?
Freya remembers her parents arguing over money, her mother’s distress that her father poured the last of our savings into film and paper, chemicals for the darkroom, photographic trips away.
Three more months, Solgunn. Just three more months.
Her mother pleaded, Think of your girls.
Once, when her father was away, Mr Madsen, his agent in the city, called in to their home at Floreat Park to return the unsold photos. Girls, say hello to Lars, their mother said. Lars, she called him, all aflutter. Mr Madsen greeted Freya and Astrid with a little bow, How do you do, little lady? How do you do? Her mother’s laugh, strange and girlish at things he said: real coffee!, and my word to a second slice of kromkake.
When Freya found the boxes in her parents’ attic filled with her father’s early landscape prints—beautiful compositions alive and lustrous with light—she asked her mother, How could Papa give up something he loved this much?
Mama wound her cardigan around her waist. Your father chose to put his family first. We were new to this country. You can’t begin to understand.
She didn’t want to understand Mama’s sobs behind closed doors, her father’s voice as sharp as steel. Enough to watch as joy and laughter leached from her father. Papa no longer stretched on the grass beside her to help count the stars. He stopped his morning swims and runs along the beach. He never sang his old college songs, and spoke to her in English all of the time, even at home. He talked of leaving the coast, moving away from the stinking city, up into Perth’s foothills; as if an escarpment, a rise of several metres, would somehow change their lives.
Freya stops mid step, removes her tinted sun glass to register the colour. Close to shore, adélies torpedo out through the lead, some landing squarely on their feet, others skidding on their belly and easing to a stop. Their feathers glisten as they march towards the rookery, pausing only to pass the time of day with those outbound. Freya sees Chad in the distance down by the rocks, staring at a sea that even the midsummer sun seems unable to penetrate, a band of indigo ink abutting the impossible blue of the Antarctic sky. A world of colour, Douglas Mawson wrote, brilliant and intensely pure. She pictures her father marvelling at the layers of colour through the ice, the hues of the evening sky. She thinks of him finding the same peace that she feels in this timeless expanse.
Papa hardly used his new Leica, but packed it away in its leather case and shoved it to the back of a high cupboard that would be opened once or twice a year. In two years he had outgrown his home darkroom business and purchased a building and adjacent land in a rundown part of town, four blocks east of Perth’s only other commercial darkroom. At the end of the third year he hired a girl to keep the books and a technician to run the printing and processing. He removed himself to the opposite side of the darkroom door, his focus honed on making profits grow.
He left this world as he’d lived in it; a life arrested, a career that culminated in a toast of wine with his accountant and darkroom manager, celebrating a successful bid to take over the business of his biggest competitor. And yet there would have been enough work for both of them—her father had said as much himself. As if refusing to be party to soulless gains, her father’s heart attacked this last betrayal of his spirit.
FREYA SEES CHAD STRETCHED OUT on the rocks near the bikes, his head resting on his pack. She scrambles down to sit beside him, breathless, certain he will love the treasure she has brought him.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says. ‘Hold out your hand.’
Reluctantly he plays along. She lays the rock plain side up and presses his hand closed around it. She watches as he unfolds his fingers to reveal an unremarkable stone striated with rust and a few lines of grey.
‘Turn it over,’ she prompts. ‘Turn it to the light.’
She sees his surprise at the swathe of miniature garnets studded across its face. He smiles for the first time all day, bedazzled by the band of glittering gems.
‘You like it?’
‘Very, very much.’
He turns the cluster so it glisters in the light. ‘Lovely.’ he smiles, flashing it at her eyes. He tries to pass it back.
‘No.’ She beams. ‘It’s yours to keep.’
Chad examines the stone in his hand. ‘Freya,’ he says quietly, ‘it isn’t yours to give. It belongs here in Antarctica, where you found it.’
She feels her face flush. ‘It’s just a rock. You like rocks.’
He returns the stone to the palm of her hand and just as she did to him, wraps her fingers around it.
‘I’ll keep it myself, then.’ Even to her own ears she sounds like a pouting child. She wishes she’d never picked it up at all.
He glowers at her. ‘Does anything I say or care about mean anything to you?’ He runs his hands through his hair and turns away. ‘Why would it? Do whatever the fuck you want with it.’
‘Of course it does. Of course I care. What’s wrong with you today? You’re like a bear with a sore head.’
He rests back against his pack. ‘I’ve had a gutful of trying to work things out.’
‘What things? What are you talking about?’
Freya waits until finally he speaks. ‘Malcolm wants a carpenter to go to Mawson Station to work the second half of summer.’
‘You can’t go!’ She surprises herself with her outburst.
‘No one else wants to. The others say they’ve done the lion’s share of work since they got here, that I should be the one to raise my hand. It’s fair enough.’
‘It’s certainly not fair. Speak to Adam. I know he’d listen—’ She halts at Chad’s odd look.
‘Trust me, Freya, you don’t know. Anyway, it’s no big deal.’
She’s almost afraid to ask. ‘You don’t mind going?’
He glances from the stone up to her face. ‘Is there a reason to stay?’
‘There’s a trillion reasons.’ Freya plows on, not daring to acknowledge the undercurrent: ‘Anyway, you should have first say. The Division asked you to stay on an extra summer because they needed you here at Davis Station. Not at Mawson.’
He offers her a crooked smile. ‘You needn’t be concerned about your project. There’s a score of people who’d be itching to help you out. Adam Singer, for one. You can finally choose who you want.’
> She rolls the stone in her hands. ‘I have exactly who I want.’
The words hang in the air between them.
‘My best mate Barney Foot is over at Mawson. Our Antarctic days go back to the eighties.’
Freya struggles not to sound aggrieved. ‘What sort of person, other than maybe a Flintstone, has Barney Foot for a name?’
Chad smiles. ‘The Feet, they’re known as back in Tassie. He and his two boys live just an hour’s drive from my place. You’d like Barney. You would have loved his wife. Maggie was a wonderful woman. An artist.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Killed in a car accident a few years back.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ she says quietly. ‘Chad, you have heaps of good friends here, too. We don’t want you to go.’
‘Are you representing the entire station now?’
‘I’m speaking for myself. I like being out here with you. Sharing all this with someone—with you.’
He pats her shoulder paternally. ‘Nothing’s decided. The Casas won’t leave for Mawson until after New Year. There’s time to figure something out.’
Freya slumps on her pack, eyes fixed on the rift that angles out across the sea ice towards the line of ocean. She ought to get up off the ground, fetch her other camera from the bike. She ought to photograph this vastness, this day, sea ice yielding to the ocean. She remains motionless, detached from the surrounds.
Chad points to the horizon. ‘Sea ice will soon be gone.’
She can see that for herself.
‘We’ve had a good run with the bikes,’ he adds, to which she musters a yes.
He says he is pleased, for her sake, the ice has held so long.
He turns to her. ‘You think I should stay then? See out the project together.’
She answers carefully. ‘You have to do what’s right for you, Chad, nobody else.’
‘What’s the right thing for you, Freya? What do you want?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I want,’ she says, suddenly frightened. ‘This is about you, not me.’
‘Have it your way.’ He gestures at the garnet stone. ‘What will you do with it?’
She turns the rock again in her hand, summoning a round of courage. ‘Is it so very wrong to want something, knowing it’s wrong, wanting it anyway? What if it were just for a while?’
Chad hesitates. He meets her gaze. ‘You’re the one holding the stone,’ he says quietly. ‘I think that’s for you to decide.’
Furthest East
December 1912
THE SNOW PETREL CIRCLED HIGH above Ninnis’s sledge, tracing the parhelion that circled the sun and seared through cloud. Too soon their tiny visitor flew northward, its wings a flutter of farewell. How was it that the lingering impression of such a beautiful thing—the first living creature they’d seen outside their own circle in weeks— could gladden the heart, quieten the soul, turn Douglas’s thoughts homeward?
Packed on Ninnis’s sledge were two of the dilly bags Paquita and her mother had stitched by hand. Before leaving Hobart he had opened her parting gift to find one dozen calico bags in the boldest shades imaginable—vibrant colours, she had written, to remind you and your little hutful of men of the goodness and warmth of home.
A quarter-mile ahead, breaking trail for the little pilgrimage, Mertz glided on skis. He belted out one of his student songs with such patriotic fervour that any moment now Ninnis would launch into a yodel to set the dogs howling too.
Mertz had made it his mission to bear out the worthiness of skis in Antarctica. Every so often he made a show of halting and gazing back, hand on hip—an exaggerated yawn, do you mind—while Douglas, Ninnis and the dog teams clambered in his wake through patches of knee-deep snow.
Ninnis had woken this morning his old jolly self, prattling this time last year … , this time next year …, rough-housing with Mertz and playing the giddy goat as they harnessed the dogs. Cherub had done himself a disservice by remaining stoic for so long; when Douglas finally lanced his whitlows, his fingertips were purple and bulbous with pus.
Douglas reached a stretch of névé—old, compacted snow indicative of a snow bridge—and stepped onto the sledge to spread his weight. Back on fresh snow, he flicked the whip and shouted, ‘Look out behind you, X. I’m hot on your tail!’
Thirty feet behind Douglas, Ninnis called to his team of dogs. Douglas turned to see him jump off the back of his sledge and run alongside the dogs to give old Franklin a hasten-along.
They were a jolly team trundling east in only a whisper of breeze, a balmy fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, the dogs pulling eagerly with their brushes flicked towards the sky.
Until yesterday a third sledge had carried the heaviest load to save the runners of the other two. Discarding it represented more than their imminent approach of the halfway mark. Men and dogs had slogged unyieldingly, traversing two crevassed rivers of ice so large that Douglas pictured their tongues slicking out across the ocean for fifty miles. Yesterday’s ritual of redistributing the load equally between his sledge and Ninnis’s was affirmation that they were fairly humming along; for once the expedition was all harmony and order.
Forgotten was the calamity of Tuesday’s broken bottle of primus spirit, though for two pins Douglas could have throttled Mertz for his wild, clumsy ways. Fading too was the tedious zigzagging at the glacier’s headwaters to detour around filled-in crevasses one hundred feet across. They had skirted pie crusts of ice whose frozen depths boomed as ominously as cannon fire. He’d lost count of the detours to avoid yawning mouths of ice with jaws hinged open.
The dogs slowed to a languid pace and today he didn’t mind. Sledging was rarely the relaxing pastime some imagined—most hours were spent heaving the load across waves of sastrugi, or untangling brawling beasts, or loping alongside to keep their bearing true. Tracts of glorious smooth terrain that allowed one to actually ride the sledge and relax for a time—well, moments like these were pure gold.
‘I still have my eye on you, George,’ he growled. George might be solid ivory between the ears but he was cunning enough to put just enough weight on the trace to feign the effort of pulling. Ninnis’s rear team comprised the pick of the dogs, while his front team—at greater risk of encountering a crevasse—boasted a motley collection of loafers, wasters and mischief-makers. If Haldane—named by Ninnis after the bigwig in Whitehall who had objected to his secondment from the army—ranked as the ugliest dog, then Johnson wore the medal for foulest odour. Mary and Pavlova worked only for as long as their ladyships were of the predilection, while Ginger, having recently dropped a litter of pups, pulled her little heart out but simply lacked the power of the larger dogs.
Douglas took the almanac from his kitbag to calculate the noon observations. He saw X raise his ski stock in caution then glide on. When his dogs reached the same place Douglas saw no sign of hazard and eased back on the sledge. The dogs trotted over a patch of névé marked with a hint of a depression, similar to many they’d crossed before. Still, Douglas turned back and called a warning to Ninnis who paced alongside his team. Ninnis’s reaction—swinging the dogs to face the névé straight on—was practice honed to instinct. The Far Eastern Sledging Party was a cracking A-One team.
Douglas returned to his sums, savouring air gentle with the slick of wooden runners over ice, crunches of snow beneath dogs’ paws, a faint whimper from one of the team at the rear who was likely feeling the lick of Ninnis’s whip.
‘Hear that, Georgey boy?’ Douglas called. ‘You’ll be in for some of that if you don’t pull your socks up.’
Latitude 68°, 53’, 53” south; longitude 151°, 39’, 46”: three hundred miles east of winter quarters. The hour was nigh to depot the bulk of food and gear from Ninnis’s sledge, make one final dash and stake the Union Jack at the furthest east. In the name of King George the Fifth.
Douglas glanced up and saw Mertz had halted, his head canted in puzzlement as he peered back along their tracks.
Douglas tur
ned, stung to see nothing behind him but a single set of tracks. He rolled off the still-moving sledge and raced back, thinking a rise in the terrain had hampered his view of Ninnis and his team. Even then, part of him knew. Too late, he knew.
A CHILL BELCH FROM THE crevasse.
The contorted mouth of the smashed ice lid exposing an abyss too wide to bridge. His frantic wave to Mertz to bring the sledge and rope. The echo of their calls bouncing shrill and alien off walls as sheer as glass and a piercing iris blue. The stygian gloom below.
A pathetic cry and struggle of a dying dog, its back broken, caught on a ledge so impossibly far down the animal looked as small as a mite. The futile farce of spooling out one hundred and fifty feet of fishing line to estimate the distance to the shelf below. They might as well splice all their lengths of alpine rope and try climbing to the moon.
Only with field glasses could he make out broken pieces of the sledge littered over the shelf: the remains of the tent, and a canvas food tank—the fortnight’s rations representing a fraction of man and dog food swallowed by the crevasse.
No sign of human life.
The hoarseness of their voices ragged from three hours of calling; another onset of neuralgia that skewed Douglas’s face into a grimace and seized him by the throat when Mertz began to weep—what should he do? What could he do but take action, however inane, and walk X away, Come, Xavier; support his arm and steer him to the rise; go through the mechanics of recording a bearing with trembling fingers and the tic of an eye.
One last pitiful hour sounding with a weight and bawling into the crevasse, Ninnis! Ninnis! Cherub!, as if refusal to relinquish hope might resurrect an angel.
Fallen comrade … Supreme sacrifice.
Words of his own to ease Mertz away, for no bible’s prayer would save the two of them.
Frank Hurley’s Southern
Sledging Party and the
Southern Support Party
camped on the plateau,
December 1912
CHRISTMAS
DAY
>> Merry Christmas, sweetheart. The wee hours here in Perth, the night too hot and sultry to contemplate bed. The temperature still hasn’t dropped below 30. Ghastly. I’m trying to conjure images of ice and picturing you sound asleep …