by Robyn Mundy
She sighs. ‘I’ll give it a shot.’
The sea ice runs in a corridor beside open sea. They stop to photograph an elephant seal heaving itself along the ice at a pace that belies its tonnage of rolling blubber. Chad sniffs on the wind the unmistakable trace of an elephant seal wallow.
‘We won’t see ele seals hauled out near the station until after the sea ice breaks out. Want to check’em out?’
‘Absolutely,’ she says, collecting her camera. ‘I have a little-known fact for you,’ she announces as they walk towards their bikes. She looks childlike, eager to share.
‘Hit me with it.’
‘Did you know that just one half of an elephant seal tongue is enough to feed eighteen men?’
He smiles at this unexpected gem. ‘Who told you that tale?’ The moment he utters the words they sound like a challenge. His lack of social grace is confirmed by a flash of her eyes.
‘My husband,’ she says quietly, the bubble surrounding them burst. ‘Douglas Mawson’s men shot an elephant seal at Commonwealth Bay, according to the journals Marcus is reading.’
Shyness returns to thread him in a knot. ‘Your husband got the raw part of the deal.’
She stacks her camera case and tripod on the bike rack. ‘How’s that, Chad?’
‘You’re down here having all the fun while he’s stuck at home reading about the place.’
He sees her bristle. ‘Marcus isn’t stuck at home. It’s what he chooses to do. And this,’ she ties down her bag with a mangled knot, ‘is what I do for a living. It might seem like nothing much, but it’s what I’ve spent years training for, in the same way you have with your trade.’
Chad registers her distress as she squeezes the bike helmet over her head. ‘I wasn’t saying—’
‘Onward!’ She points at the island in the distance, snapping her visor closed and roaring away in a clatter of gears.
WALLOW, FREYA DECIDES, IS A fitting word for a gathering of malodorous elephant seals. Amid a squeeze of girths and press of bellies, these gargantuan blubber bags literally wallow in a mire of urine and foul-smelling sludge. One stretches the end of its flipper like a hand and nimbly pares off casts of its russet-coloured skin. The surrounding rocks are littered with sun-leathered, freeze-dried sheaths. Another elephant seal gapes a colossal pink mouth in a yawn, its jowls wobbling as it sneezes a voluminous spray of mucus in Freya’s direction. That chore squared away, it slumps its bulk across a neighbouring back and returns to sonorous sleep. The wallow resounds with a cacophony of belches and farts. A bull’s outrageously oversized snout acts as a foghorn, reverberating off the cliffs. Is it a come hither, Freya wonders, to the new arrival they watched slop across the ice?
Freya skirts the perimeter of the wallow, springing across rocks and over spongy hillocks of dried, compacted sludge, surely representing decades of faecal waste. She takes a shortcut to where Chad sits watching, stopping herself short from jumping onto an apparent boulder that suddenly rises and blinks at her with soft brown eyes. The seal snorts, its quivering nostrils spluttering strings of snot across her boots. Quickly she retreats, noting the seal’s jowls are scarred with a crosshatching of wounds.
Chad defends their graceless ways. ‘Eles are highly social. During the summer moult they’ll use one another as rubbing boards. The urea in the urine soothes their itchy skin.’
Two bulls rise up to full height and chest-butt in a rippling of blubber. They growl as they biff one another, the larger pressing the smaller backward with each thrust. The big bull, sporting a mountainous proboscis, buries its canines into the flesh of the other, wrestling the smaller challenger and dragging it from side to side like a dog tearing at a bone. The smaller bull soon retreats.
‘Beachmaster versus wannabe,’ Chad says. ‘Not ready to surrender his fiefdom this season.’
AT ZOLATOV ISLAND, THEIR FINAL destination for the afternoon, a pair of skuas settle on a nearby rock, as bold as you please, sizing up Freya and Chad as they share sandwiches and thermos tea. The birds, feathers ruffling in the wind, appear perfectly at ease in human company. This pair seems less interested in the contents of a packed lunch than in observing two strangers. Freya wonders who is entertaining whom.
‘They’re not as feisty as people make out.’ She takes her camera from her pack and composes the bird’s face full-frame in her viewfinder. ‘I think they’re regal and proud.’
‘They’re sharp-looking birds.’ Chad nods. ‘Smart as a whip.’
The skuas shift their focus towards the glacier in the distance, tilting their heads at the deep rumbles and explosions that issue from the ice. By the time Freya looks up at the frozen precipice, the ice has calved; all she catches is a billow of spray rising from the base where the ice has plunged into the water, the swell washing against the white cliff before the ocean subsides.
She turns to Chad. ‘Marcus—my husband. I asked him. He didn’t want to come.’
‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘It’s not to everybody’s liking. How about you? Why Antarctica?’
She thinks for a while. ‘I guess it began when my father took me to see the Fram, Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic ship, before we came out to Australia. I would have been only seven, but it made a huge impression on me. And then I saw Frank Hurley’s photos. That was it. Hook, line and sinker. I had to find a way to come here for myself.’
‘So, here we are.’
‘Here we are.’
What if Marcus had decided to come? How would he have coped? Or she, if he were here with her? He’d balk at the menial chores, socialising with the throng of people at the station; even today, out here, he’d quickly tire of the place. Marcus avoids social gatherings, even the monthly market days Freya loves. It’s not that her husband isn’t giving. When they’re home alone, he smothers her with affection. When it’s just the two of them he can be funny and playful. And quick; ask any of his students. Marcus can outsmart any mystery novel you hand him; he will, during Freya’s favourite movies, spot gaps in plot and slips in continuity that are simply beyond her scope. But here? Forced to converse with people, some of whom he might otherwise scorn? She thinks of the times she had invited people to their home: it wasn’t worth the angst, her husband visibly bored and drawing on his wit to belittle her before her friends. One excruciating evening he selectively derided their guests—people from the magazine she worked for. The sting in his barbs. Furtive glances of disbelief.
Focus on the good things, Mama says. And isn’t every marriage a contract of concessions? She had freely given Marcus her pledge before they married, no children, never imagining the difference a decade would make. Perhaps she has Sophie to thank for changing her outlook: the unexpected joy in watching her niece grow from a tiny girl to a teenager, the flood of warmth she feels in being part of Sophie’s life, entrusted with her secrets, in loving and being loved in return.
I’m forty-seven years old, Marcus had silenced her. I don’t intend slaving for the next twenty-some years to support an iGeneration brat.
Marcus, she reminds herself, makes up for it in other ways. He dedicates hours to this project, encourages her career, not once has he objected to her wanderings. The man Freya married is rock-solid, never has he left one of his student’s despairing, or made them wonder, should they give it all away? Of course she returns. She owes it to him, to them both, to bring home the perfect picture.
THE BEST OF THE DAY has gone, a freshening wind and the sky thick with cloud. Freya zips up her Ventile jacket past her neck warmer, grateful for the extra layers she has brought along to shield out the chill. As they pick their way over rocks towards the bikes, the lunchtime skuas swoop into view and circle above. They hover, perfectly balanced, their wings daubed with flashes of white.
‘Farewell, skuas,’ Freya calls. The birds shriek. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘We must be near their nest.’ Chad looks around. ‘Watch where you step.’
Freya is jolted by a sudden knock to the back of her skul
l. The force of the blow pushes her against the rocks. She wonders, momentarily, if she’s been stoned. She rubs her wounded head and sees her fingers smeared with blood. A skua spirals above.
She scrambles up off the rocks and tries to make a run for it but the birds dive at her from opposite directions. Chad manoeuvres to the left to avoid them. The skuas shriek fearsomely, swooping again and again, a pair of maniacal demons in perfect formation. Freya cowers back against the rocks and drops to her knees. ‘Why do they keep coming for me?’ she cries.
She sees him stifle a smirk. ‘I guess they like you the best.’ If she were not so terrified she would very much like to thump him.
‘Walk in this direction.’ He beckons. ‘Hold your tripod above your head. They’ll aim for the tallest part of you. Don’t be scared.’
Freya edges towards him but can’t help cowering each time she senses a movement. The sharp beak comes straight at her again and she hears herself whimper. The clawed feet drop like the landing gear of a stealth bomber. She ducks and runs after Chad, wielding her tripod like a white flag. The titanium legs jar in her grip with each new strike.
‘There’s the nest down there.’ Chad points to a scrape of gravel, indistinguishable from the surrounding rock except for the two large speckled eggs resting there. One of the adult skuas lands at the nest and paces, clucking its distress.
‘A month away from hatching,’ he says. ‘You wait till you see the chicks. Little grey fluff balls.’
She takes up position behind Chad, thankful for a substantial shield, suddenly seized with the urge to laugh at how she must have looked. She is pulled up short by the sight of a penguin flipper and loops of fresh entrails that lie strewn around the nest.
‘The adélie would have been injured.’ Chad senses her disgust. ‘They wouldn’t take on an adult otherwise.’
Freya grimaces. ‘That doesn’t make it less revolting.’
‘A skua’s got to eat. This is a tough place to stay alive.’ He inspects the back of her poor head. ‘Man,’ he remarks, clearly shocked by what must be a large lump sprouting from her skull. ‘They copped you a beauty. Your induction to Antarctica; now you’ll have something to write home about.’
He scans the clouds scudding by and gestures at their bikes. ‘That’s enough fun for one day. Time to drive the huskies home.’
AS FREYA STEERS HER QUAD, the cold wind whistling through her helmet, she holds in her mind an image, not of Hurley but of Xavier Mertz kneeling in the snow with his camera as the dog team thundered toward him. Time to drive the huskies home.
Soft focus, atmospheric lighting, shadows from the dogs spilled across the snow—a Hurleyesque impression of nature.
Belgrave Ninnis and the dogs taking a load of stores to Aladdin’s Cave.
Photographer Xavier Mertz, 1912.
Aladdin’s Cave 1
August 1912
DOUGLAS, MADIGAN AND NINIS SPENT two days excavating an ice cave five and a half miles south of winter quarters, a sledging depot protected from weather, and a portal to the plateau. The crystalline walls glittered as though with a wealth of diamonds and within the magical cavern the three men discovered anew a world replete with silence. In the blizzard outside, the sledging dogs curled in on themselves, their matted hair frozen down, eight dark snouts barely visible above the snow.
Inside Aladdin’s Cave, as Madigan and Ninnis dubbed it, colours looked dreamlike to Douglas, the luminescence in the ice casting an eerie veil of blue. The three ate quietly, unaccustomed to such a small company after living for so long with a hutful of eighteen, absorbing the absence of wind; in its place, though, their ears reverberated with an endless peal of ringing.
Douglas abhorred waste, but not even he could finish the boil-up of hoosh, so rich was the sledging porridge of dehydrated beef and lard pemmican, ground plasmon biscuit and glaxo milk powder all mixed to a slurry with boiling water.
A REPORT BOOMED FROM DEEP within the surrounding ice. Douglas lay facing Cecil Madigan’s back in the three-man bag. The meteorologist’s body was folded to a crook, his limbs awkward and muscles taut from unwanted intimacy. The heat generated by three bodies swaddled and lulled, rhyming breath soon giving way to sleep. Madigan’s head sank back against Douglas’s forearm, his hair coarse and dank against the silken reindeer pelt which exuded a trace of the Arctic tundra’s earthy scent. Douglas wondered if the smell of a flesh-eating animal differed from that of a herbivore, if his own skin, like the others, oozed a disagreeable odour from a diet of penguin and seal.
A CANOPY OF MORNING CLOUD diffused the light and reduced the surface definition so at times he would step awkwardly into a trough, or catch his foot on a crest of sastrugi. Wind on the plateau had scoured the snow to concrete. He and Madigan took turns at running alongside the sledge, keeping on course dogs that loathed running into the bite of the wind. Before this trip the sum of dog sledging had been training circuits taken by Ninnis and Mertz. Now, on an uphill gradient and patches of slippery blue ice, the three men—badly out of condition after a winter cooped up indoors—struggled to keep pace with the dog team. Douglas called for a rest and Ninnis, riding on the back of the sledge, planted his foot to push the brake’s steel jaws into the snow. Dogs eased to a halt in snorts of steam.
Douglas had hoped to run three days to the south to explore but he read the southern sky well enough to know that its blanket of stratus would soon be upon them, that snowdrift, even blizzard, could force them to hole up for days.
Ninnis and Madigan gaped with disappointment at his decision to turn back. Madigan’s subversion of his leadership was artful enough to be mere inflection, a shift in tone too subtle to object to. Now his voice, tinged with disdain, reported the sledge meter’s meagre record of eight miles and two hundred yards from the hut—Douglas heard the unstated inference, that they were turning tail because of his lack of pluck. Confused, Ninnis looked from Douglas to his Hyde-Park-Corner compatriot, his allegiance wavering. Douglas thought of sea elephant bulls sparring along the shoreline at Macquarie Island, the master continually having to defend his realm against contenders.
‘Bear in mind, if we’re holed up in bad weather we’ve only brought three days’ rations of dog pemmican. After that the dogs will go without.’ He addressed himself to Ninnis, who fretted over the dogs’ welfare and imagined ailments. Ninnis and Mertz had formed a ‘secret’ Kennel Club, extending membership only to those who smuggled the dogs tidbits from the kitchen. Small chance Douglas would be invited to join. Bad enough to know it was going on behind his back.
His hope that they would make winter quarters by dark was dashed by a maze of small crevasses, and a sixty-mile-an-hour tail wind that blew the sledge into the dogs and sent them skittling in a tangle of traces. When they unharnessed the team, to take over hauling the load themselves, Pavlova was the one dog that stayed by their side. Grandmother, who was in fact a grandfather, shot away the moment he was loosened, and with the innate sense of direction unique to sledging dogs, the other miscreants ran hot on his heels back towards Aladdin’s Cave.
The following day the three men spent bored and fidgety inside Aladdin’s Cave while outside, in pea-soup drift, the dogs hunkered down, their bodies succumbing to occasional bouts of shivering. The drift was almost as thick the next day, and Ninnis joined Madigan in trying to persuade Douglas that they should attempt the five and a half miles to the hut.
‘Experience,’ Douglas said, ‘has proven that it is usually best to wait until the drift eases.’ But he finally acquiesced, reasoning that as they had a sound knowledge of the direction of the hut, they couldn’t stray too far off course. Just the same, he hoped the drift would clear before they reached the coast.
They had travelled half a mile when Ninnis cried out that the dogs weren’t following. ‘They’ll be back at the cave buried in snow.’
‘I’ll run back,’ Madigan said, unharnessing himself from the sledge.
‘No.’ Douglas motioned to the drift. ‘I don’t wa
nt anyone going off in this alone.’
‘We’ll all go,’ Ninnis suggested.
Before Douglas could respond, Madigan said in a patronising tone, ‘You’re being overcautious, Mawson. I’m faster than either of you. I’ll be back in no time,’ as if it were he, Madigan, who had the Antarctic know-how to decide what was best.
‘No!’ Douglas ordered, tired of having his authority challenged. ‘The damned dogs can catch up on their own. We’ve wasted enough time.’
Together Douglas and Ninnis hauled the sledge downhill towards the hut. Madigan stayed at the rear of the sledge holding a guy rope taut in case the load started to slip away down the slope.
‘You wait and see.’ Douglas nudged Ninnis. ‘As soon as the dogs get hungry they’ll bolt for the hut. Chances are they’ll be home before we are.’
DOUGLAS LAY ON HIS BUNK at winter quarters, the candle’s feeble light flickering over the pages of his journal. He read back over the last fortnight’s events, wincing as he recalled his certainty that the dogs would make their own way home.
15 August: Got to the Hut at lunchtime—heard that bergs had calved from the cliffs some 2 days previously. During our absence the top of the south mast had been put up. They had two calm spells for a few hours each … Arranged for Bage, Mertz and Hurley to start first thing in morning for dogs.
16 August: Drifting heavily and strong wind, so they cannot get away …
Nor had they left the following day. The wind howled at eighty-five miles an hour, and they spent another day confined to the hut, sewing harnesses, and weighing and packing provisions ready for sledging.
19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in a bad way.
20 August: Thick drift, heavy wind—poor dogs …
