by Robyn Mundy
They were climbing the hill when Freya registered a breeze and stopped to zip up her jacket. Soon she was battling to keep pace, or to even make headway in the stronger gusts, the wind savage on her face. Chad had beckoned her on—It’s worth it—taking out his point-and-shoot. She had reached the top, breathless from the cold but transfixed by the scene laid out upon the ice. They stood side by side photographing streamers of snowdrift that could have been a thousand rivers tumbling out across the white. She couldn’t help herself. Have you ever seen anything so wild and beautiful?
Of course he had, countless times, she reminds herself now. She had held her glove in her teeth to change batteries, then had to scrabble for a cloth to clear the eyepiece of her camera which was iced over with her breath. At home she could operate any of her cameras blindfolded; out there in the cold, wearing gloves, she struggled to locate the shutter button, fumbling with buttons and dials. But within minutes of taking off her thick gloves and switching them for liners, her hands refused to function, her fingers wooden and throbbing with cold.
Tough on hands, your line of work. You want to head back?
She had hesitated. If she couldn’t handle an afternoon of poor conditions, how could she expect to carry out her project? I just need a minute to warm up.
They’d sheltered in the lee of boulders where she’d slid her bare hands into her armpits to gain some body warmth. As the feeling returned her fingers ached as though they had been slammed in a door.
This is about as rugged as it gets this time of year. Chad had poured hot drinks from the thermos in his pack. It gets easier, dealing with the cold.
Freya sipped a mug of sweet black tea, and then a second, feeling a glimmer of warmth radiate through her. I lived in Norway until I was eight. My sister and I would walk to school during winter in temperatures colder than this; we’d play outside all the time. I don’t remember feeling this cold.
Chad had nodded. Down here, the wind’s the killer.
Is there a trick to staying warm? She’d almost been afraid to ask.
He shrugged. You get better at knowing what clothes work for you, at understanding your limits. He’d offered her some chocolate and with it half a smile. There’s no formula. Somehow you figure it out for yourself.
An unmistakable whiff of penguin now wafts about Freya’s studio. She sniffs at her hands, her clothing, matted tendrils of her hair. Distracted by the acrid odour, she follows the scent across the room to her new waterproof camera pack, the base and tail straps caked in guano. Wonderful.
Freya opens her laptop and clicks on her inbox. She scrolls through an email from Marcus with the subject: Progress on the diaries!
>> Translated from the journal of Xavier Mertz, 18 May 1912:
At 6 pm we returned to the hut in pitch black. Such a walk has to be experienced once in a lifetime. The distance is only 300 metres, yet it took us half an hour, with great effort. The wind stole away our breath, and the severe cold bit at the uncovered part of our faces … First we tried our luck upright, locking arms with one another, but the wind knocked us down. For fifteen minutes we rolled about, our bodies writhing in all directions. Then the wind swept Azi away so I followed him. As we sat against a rock to catch our breath, I had to rub my hands because my fingertips were nearly frostbitten. Around the edge of my burberry cap was a bright light, ‘St Elmo’s fire’, produced by electricity driven through snowflakes.
Battling against the wind and darkness, the distance to the hut, and our sense of time, seemed distorted. Finally, we bumped into the hut wall with our heads.
Freya should reply to Marcus, acknowledge his email, tell him the details of her day. I want to hear about everything. She studies Hurley’s photo, Collecting ice from the glacier, focusing on the two figures, crawling on hands and knees through the blizzard. She feels herself transported by needles of snow, by wretched, aching cold. How did they find their way, let alone work, in such conditions? In a less alien environment the task of collecting ice might seem mundane, but at winter quarters, these two men battling nature elevates domestic duties to the realm of the extraordinary. If her own images are even half as evocative, a fraction as strong, she will rate them a success.
Wind buffets the window. Freya sits at her desk thinking through each aspect of her project: first, a series of portraits of station life, in counterpart to those Hurley took at winter quarters. Then, a collection of polaroid transfers—muted images—to echo the dreamlike colours of his Lumière autochromes. On her laptop she has blended several digital images, the beginning of a series reminiscent of those photos Hurley combined in the darkroom, composite images from multiple negatives.
Freya is still unsure how to photograph the ice. Ideas wake her in the night, parade in the shadows as if waiting for her to recognise them. Each day, vivid images glance before her eyes, tempting her to slow down time so that bikes, clothing— motion and colour—are illuminated from the ice. A summer aurora; she pictures it, a series of icescapes printed onto bolts of silk, dancing and billowing the length and breadth of a gallery wall. If Marcus were here she would talk it through with him—their project, she reminds herself. She knows she would be swayed by him—by his ability to tease out ideas, to shape and structure them with meanings she might never consider on her own. Her husband would offer his rendition as a gift, neatly packaged, near to, though not quite the delicate thing she first imagined, shades of her vision evanescing with the precision of his words.
Freya returns her focus to the screen, to Frank Hurley, withstanding such brutal conditions to garner remarkable images of time. Yet, for all the power in this image of the blizzard, already enhanced from the original, it failed to satisfy the photographer’s vision. Hurley embellished each published version with increasingly voluminous swathes of snowdrift, until the two figures, and even winter quarters, were all but obliterated by blizzard. Perhaps the cold addled his brain, Marcus suggested the day she catalogued Hurley’s images ready for her Antarctic trip, her husband suddenly out of sorts with her excitement. What kind of photographer, he said, would risk their credibility with such gross manipulation, such blatant untruth? Though Freya had remained silent, she knew instinctively, in a way she’d have floundered to articulate, that Hurley didn’t falter from the truth. Only now, defrosting her fingers and toes in this wind-battered container of a studio, can she explain what she feels: Hurley’s vision was not to imitate nature, but to offer an impression built layer upon layer, an accumulation of experiences that embodied the struggle with the blizzard.
A summer aurora? A fabrication, when she has access to so much that is real and tangible? She could so easily dissuade herself. How does it link to Hurley’s photos? Marcus would quite rightly ask her. She doesn’t know. At least, not yet. Other than her digitals, she’ll have no sure way of knowing, until she gets home, if a single frame is working. What kind of photographer would devote a finite supply of large format film to a whimsical idea, would risk the outcome of their project on such uncertain odds?
Freya shuts down her computer, a notch more resilient, in body and mind, than when the day began. This kind.
The nightwatchman’s terror
July 1912
THE NIGHT SKY SWAYED WITH streamers of emerald green. At every turn daubs of light smudged the sky, the aurora masking the stars so only planets shone through.
The group huddled against the sixty-miler. Those who had raced from the hut without burberry outers now inched to the front to gain what protection could be had.
‘Look!’ cried Ninnis, pointing to the north where luminescence above the horizon waxed to a ruby arch and threw up gold and emerald streamers. No one knew what caused these arches, mostly appearing in the north. Douglas believed they represented a concentration of ions in the upper atmosphere—a bombardment of magnetic rays from the sun. Webb and Bage, the two magneticians, had established a connection between the aurora and the earth’s magnetic field: with each strong display the magnetic needle oscillated wi
ldly.
Again the sky mutated, this time into curtains—two, three, four velvet drapes laid one upon the other, suspended from the heavens as if from an invisible clasp. For seconds they hung motionless, as though before a silent stage, flounces and folds unperturbed by wind that blasted the men’s backs as they huffed vapoured breath and stamped throbbing feet.
The curtains lifted through the sky, each drape swaying to a soundless rhythm, shimmering lilac, rose pink, heliotrope—floral light winding through each fold. Along the edges of the upper curtain, filaments charged towards the zenith, their hue accelerating from green to crimson, their brightness continually fading then revivifying.
Douglas scribbled furiously in the notebook as Cecil Madigan sang the time displayed on the half-chronometer watch. ‘Twenty-one twenty.’
21-20 Four brilliant curtains with very rapid streamer movement to the E. Display becoming much more brilliant and rising toward the zenith. One curtain almost to the zenith.
21-21-1/2 Very rapid streamer travel in the zenith curtain.
Douglas took responsibility for the recording during the day, and would assiduously check the nightwatchman’s log. The men had deemed the aurora the nightwatchman’s terror for the hours the recording swallowed up, robbing the nightwatchman of the job’s favourite perk: a hot bath followed by a hurried load of laundry before the bath water froze. Each did their best but some of the non-scientific party failed to understand the importance of correct terminology and systematic notations. Many trembling and glittering pencils of rays moved in all directions, Mertz would write. The eyes could hardly find the time to admire them all. X refused to believe that even in one hundred years’ time an aurora could be explained by science.
The travel of excitation along the streamers grew so rapid—Bage and Webb later calculated sixty-six miles per second—that light rippled and flickered like sparkling waves. Objects on the surrounding landscape lit up a mile away and when Douglas looked across at the reflection from the eastern ice barrier he saw a lyrebird’s tail. If he could only package the moment, send it to Paquita across the sky.
21-23 Now a great mass of nebulous bands and curtains from the N. horizon to the zenith.
The sky turned into an ocean of breaking waves with crests tipped rhodamine red. Directly above the hut filaments raced past the zenith, constellating into the most astonishing corona he had ever seen.
21-26 A vortex of colour and motion crossed the zenith from the W.N.W. to S.E. This corona was quite obviously due to the perspective affect of looking at a convolution of the curtain from directly below.
‘My eyes are full,’ said X, turning in circles, his arms open to the sky.
Ninnis giggled like a girl. ‘I used to think stories of auroras were exaggerated.’
Douglas turned to them. ‘I doubt something this grand has been seen anywhere else in the world.’
‘Not even at the famous Cape Royds?’ Madigan said mockingly. Someone alongside stifled a laugh.
Douglas’s intention had not been to brag. He’d been asked about the 1907–09 expedition with Shackleton time and again, quizzed by the men on the volume of science achieved, the tireless hours put in every day without complaint; he’d been asked to speak about the vast tracts of ice they had sledged. If Madigan chose to ridicule those accomplishments to make light of their own lack of progress that was entirely up to him.
The aurora had waned and several men raced towards the hut, teeth chattering, the sky’s hypnotic lure broken by a fresh blanket of stars and the overwhelming cold.
Douglas, X and Ninnis climbed up the snow bank leading to the roof. How quickly it had become the norm to enter one’s home via trapdoor and ladder. Hurley was balanced precariously on the roof’s apex, one leg stretched to match his tripod, his camera tilted skyward.
‘This time last year,’ Ninnis panted, ‘X and I were still in London, as busy as fleas and preparing to venture out onto the high seas in the dear old Aurora. Our thoughts were full of what we would be doing in a year’s time. This time next year we shall look back and remember that on this July night of nineteen hundred and twelve, in this little-known corner of the globe, we polar men of the AAE stood witness to a spectacle of nature the likes of which have never before been seen by man and might never again in the history of the world—’
Frank Hurley broke into a comic howl, and who could blame his display of agony? Ninnis was inclined to prattle when given free rein. Hurley devoted hours to photographing the auroras, experimenting with different exposures and using up a frightful quantity of glass plates and photographic material. So far his efforts had resulted in nothing more distinct than a nebulous haze, though it didn’t stop him scoffing at X who believed the supernatural could never be captured by a photograph.
Douglas, as much as Hurley, wanted to bring home an aurora and show it to the world. Privately, though, he savoured the notion that the aurora could render powerless a photographic wizard armed with the latest gadgetry. Aurora—the Goddess of Dawn—refused to be tamed.
ZOLATOV
ISLAND
CHAD BARRELS OVER THE SEA ice, the quad’s engine spitting as he sweeps around a melt pool. With each pass before the camera he stretches out to one side and curls the bike, wheels skating across the glassy slick. He rights his course and glances back. The groundsheet trails from his bike like a purse seine flung from a trawler, waves of green rippling over ice.
He loops a figure of eight to bring the bike alongside her. ‘How was I that time?’
Freya slowly shakes her head and looks around. ‘I’m trying to capture the movement of colour going by.’ She unwinds the camera from her tripod and paces. ‘It still isn’t right,’ she says. She kneels, she stands, she angles the lens to one side. Whatever result she’s after, she seems reluctant to share. ‘It’s just an experiment,’ she offers, an experiment to which she devotes a morning’s work and a fearful amount of oversized film. It puzzles Chad, this coyness; a guard against what? Not that he’s complaining. He would happily spend the rest of the day hooning over this traction-less playground of ice with a coloured tarp billowing in his wake. It’s the closest he’ll ever come to starring in the movies.
He readies the bike, but still she wanders back and forth. She stops to stand beside him, dappled by filaments of cirrus that skate across the sun and play tricks with the light. She turns to look away, she glances back, this woman of mismatched halves. The loveliness of her left profile accentuates her other, blemished side. What hardships linger in the birthmark that gathers at her throat and spills across her cheek? The contrasts in her face draw Chad to wonder if her childhood, like his, was divided into happiness and want. A fleeting memory escapes his hold: not a wave of a hand, not even a glance in the rear-view mirror as the ute pulled away. For all anyone knew the old man could have fallen off the perch years ago, abandoned life as quietly as he had fatherhood. The whole show fell apart after Ma.
The drone of propellers has him scanning the sky to see one of the Casa planes forming a silhouette against the sun. Ginger and Gadget are the future, the bigwigs claim. ‘No namesake will outclass the sledging dogs,’ he says, realising too late he’s spoken aloud.
Freya gives him a confused look. ‘Pardon?’
‘Talking to myself.’
The Casa passes overhead, its span of wings merging into cloud. He has to admit, it’s a neat-looking plane.
‘It must have been a different era, the dog days,’ Freya says.
‘That’s for sure.’ These days you can’t fart until you’ve filed a report.
‘You miss it?’
‘Seems a lifetime ago now. Like they say, nothing stays the same.’
‘It can’t be all bad. You keep coming down here.’
‘It’s not bad at all,’ he corrects her. ‘I’d go so far as to say that on days like this, out here on the ice, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.’
‘Well, that’s nice to hear, and something of a relief.’ She beams at him
then kneels on the ice, immediately intent on the view through her camera. ‘Could we try making the groundsheet billow more?’ she says with a rippling of her hand. ‘Perhaps slow down on the turn.’
She lies flat on the ice and rests her camera on its case. Her iceberg-blue eyes twinkle. ‘Ready when you are, McGonigal, Queen of the Ice.’
SHE SEEMS HAPPY ENOUGH BY the time they move on. There are no shortage of landmarks as they drive down the seaward side of Hawker Island; still she grips her personal GPS, inspecting it like a hawk.
‘Hey.’ He waves her to a stop. ‘Put that thing in your pocket.’
‘Why?’
‘You have a map, don’t you?’
Her face drops. ‘Please don’t try to make me use a compass. We could end up anywhere. Macquarie Island, ahoy.’
He grins at the thought. ‘Freya, on a clear day like this, out here on the sea ice, the only compass you need alongside your map are your eyes. You want to see what’s around you, not spend the whole time driving with one arm held out like you’re holding a lance while you study a screen.’
‘I’m not that good with directions,’ she protests.
‘You’re just out of practice, been driving down freeways too long.’ He pulls out his map and indicates features along the coastline, then gets her to locate the nearest islands. ‘Two things you need to know: where you are now and where you’re going. You’ve already figured out a few milestones to help you along your way; now trust what’s in front of you.’
