The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  He steps onto the landing, the blades of the chopper a blur. He takes a last look back, ‘Call it self-preservation,’ and shuts the door.

  FREYA STANDS AT HER STUDIO window, the drone of the helicopter reduced to an echo, the speck on the horizon disappearing into sky. She returns to the desk, noticing the parcel wrapped in cloth, and her photo frame that no longer sits as she left it. For a moment she considers ignoring the parcel, leaving it unopened, refusing to take part in this final act of severance.

  She unties the lashing and the cloth falls away. Freya turns the snow petrel in her hands, studying the curve of wings tucked close, absorbing every feathered line, running her hand over the glassy finish of the pine. His hands inhabit every ridge and line. She holds the bird to her cheek, remembering the first snow petrel she saw nestled beneath rocks at Bandits Hut, how she’d imagined then cupping the fragile creature in her hands.

  She sets the carving down, presses her fingers across the ridges of her breastbone and listens to her heart. Thud. Thud. Thud. Only the feel of his presence lingers in the room. She drags her fingers across her blemished cheek and throat. Her mark of birth never was a blessing; it never was a charm. She has spent her life trapped beneath a glacier, searching for a way out, led and misled by refractions in the ice. The darkroom and camera, the college where she first met Marcus—an admiration she once mistook for love: all paths in search of light.

  After that single, sorry night of marital separation, she dutifully returned home from the refuge of her parents’ to a man wretched with despair; his manic talk, his threats of doing harm to himself, have haunted her since. Everything can be exactly as it was, he begged, when all the while it was she who had turned unannounced and changed direction, she who craved for more. Flowers, cards of eloquent devotion: she had reduced her husband—through her guilt and pity—to a man with a suffocating need to please. An untenable storm of turmoil and uncertainty that abated with a please don’t leave me, the simplest and saddest of words that finally wound her in. Alright, Marcus. She didn’t give her promise lightly.

  She passes the snow petrel between her hands, raises it to breathe in the perfume of wood, to feel its loveliness sensuous against her cheek. She winds the cotton wrap around sorrow and regret and all that she can never have and places the carving deep inside the drawer.

  >> Freya, I’ve been thinking things through these last weeks. I am so very sorry for the way I spoke to you on the phone on Christmas Day. You have every right to still be upset, but please, don’t cut me out. You reply to my emails, but it seems a long time since I felt something from you. I don’t know what else to say to make things right again.

  If nothing else, work on the exhibition moves forward at a good pace. Hurley’s Fury-lashed waters of Commonwealth Bay gives a glimpse of the conditions that Aurora encountered on her return in January 1913. Captain Davis spent weeks battling the weather, searching up and down the coastline. He not only had Mawson’s missing party to worry about, but the safety of Frank Wild and his men, who were 1500 miles west along the coast, their hut built upon a floating ice shelf. Joe Laseron, the biological collector, conveys the mood at winter quarters in his journal.

  This is 2.30 a.m., and perhaps the last night I shall spend in Adélie Land. For the last week every night was to have been the last, but we are still here. The same old stove in front, the same old corner where the nightwatchman sits and reads—or thinks maybe—be it for the last time. I feel unutterably homesick—home and the green trees and sunshine and the little water. The same old bunks are occupied by the same old chaps, that is nearly all—but there are three vacant. The poor old chief—we loved him with all his faults, Ninnis, cherub as we called him, and X whose Swiss heart was one of gold, are up on the plateau somewhere. Oh that awful plateau, blizzard ridden, treacherous, the most desolate, cruellest region in the world. January has entirely gone, and winter is practically on the land again …

  Fury-lashed waters of Commonwealth Bay

  Aladdin’s Cave II

  8 February 1913

  WOULD THE SHIP WAIT? DOUGLAS had taken to sitting outside Aladdin’s Cave huddled like a child with his back to the wind, waiting for a lull. He weighed up the likelihood he was strong enough to stop the sledge from hurtling downhill and toppling over in a sixty-mile-an-hour wind against the unthinkable gamble of severing his lifeline to shelter and going down alone, leaving the sledge behind. With good crampons he might make the five miles to the hut in a single march, but he had only a miserable pair fashioned from a packing box with nails that cut into his feet; they, and he, would give out in the first five hundred yards.

  He’d spent a week eating and sleeping in a cave whose walls no longer sparkled with magic but had blackened with smoke and soot from boil-ups of ground plasmon biscuit and glaxo milk powder. He had eaten chunks of pemmican straight from the tin. Two oranges and a pineapple whose verdant scent had filled the cave on his arrival, and spoke of Aurora’s return, did more to upset than bolster his constitution. Diarrhoea, blood spouting from his nostril and a watery concoction bursting from his fingertips set him questioning whether he had scurvy, or if stale supplies were doing him lasting harm.

  Could Captain Davis afford to wait?

  To sit on the sledge and be blown downhill, whatever the result, would be infinitely better than another wasted day.

  True to the unpredictable nature of Commonwealth Bay, no sooner had he made the decision to take the risk and go, strapped gear to the sledge and begun the downhill march, than the drift subsided and the wind dropped.

  After he’d walked a mile the weather cleared and he could see enough of the ocean to know that no ship lay in the offing.

  For another hour he held onto the thought that Aurora had headed east along the coast to search. Better still, she had swung inshore to anchor and now was obscured from his sight in the lee of the ice cliffs. But a harsher voice that grew more convincing with each laboured step, told him Captain Davis would do right to abandon the Far Eastern Sledging Party. Douglas’s instructions, left in the box in his cabin, would have confirmed he was now four weeks overdue. In the same box were personal letters, one for Paquita and the other for his brother Will, to be delivered in the event of my non-return.

  Davis had already done as any good leader would and sent out a search party to scour the plateau. McLean, Hodgeman and Hurley would have returned to the hut a week ago with nothing to report.

  It would be beyond cruel if Providence had let him come this far only to be given up for dead.

  BOAT HARBOUR EASED INTO VIEW below, a cloudburst of light shimmering across the water and onto the ice. He could see the apex of the hut and beside it two newly erected wireless masts. Along the ice edge clusters of adélies conferred at the foreshore. When three of them straightened into human figures he felt himself swim to the surface of a dream and heave a cry of air.

  It felt like an eternity before the figures finally turned and answered his wave. He watched the commotion as they bolted from sight in the direction of the hut as if running away to hide.

  He continued slowly downward, even now not daring to relinquish his sledge. On the horizon, he caught sight of a dark smudge far out to sea. A head rose above the brow of the hill and as the man closed in he recognised Frank Bickerton, red in the face beneath his dark beard and puffing like a locomotive from the climb. Bickerton slowed and tilted his head in puzzlement, waiting, no doubt, for Ninnis and Mertz to appear.

  He sprang once more into motion and bounded through the snow like a man across hot coals. ‘My God! My God! Cherub!’

  Douglas felt his knees buckle in the warmth of human embrace. ‘It’s Douglas,’ he cried but Bick didn’t let him go, a circle of arms threatening to crush Douglas’s bones that felt loose inside his skin.

  He felt himself unravel with the shuddering of sobs. ‘The ship?’ he asked.

  ‘Waited as long as she could,’ Bick blurted. ‘They went to go then waited some more. She left just a few h
ours ago. Captain Davis had six of us stay on, on the off-chance …’ He drew back. ‘Ninnis and Mertz? They’re at Aladdin’s Cave?’

  Douglas shook his head, letting Bickerton absorb through his silence the confirmation of their death. He would have wept with Bick if his train wreck of a body had any more to give.

  He looked beyond Bick, hearing the welcoming cries of Bob Bage and Cecil Madigan, Archie McLean and Alfie Hodgeman, and a sixth man, a newcomer, who joined the soft sea of faces as they crowded in.

  Feb 1, 1913

  Dr. Douglas Mawson, Commander

  Australasian Antarctic Expedition

  Winter Quarters

  Commonwealth Bay

  Adelie Land

  My dear Mawson

  I sincerely hope that you will read these lines which are to tell you that we are leaving for Wild’s base today. What these last days have been I cannot tell you. I have followed out what I consider to be the best plan of operation under the circumstances and hope same will meet with your approval. On our return to Australia if we get back all right I will get things going as well as I can …

  We spent the last few days searching the coast for you and seeing flags on every point which always turned out to be mirage. Everything has been remarkably successful since we left this base last year that your detention is a heavy blow as it is totally unexpected. I only hope however that you will get in safely or that the search party may tumble across you in time. It has been blowing a gale 2/3 of the 19 days we have been here, what it has been on the plateau God knows. I am keeping your box of private papers here as I think I had better have it than to leave it at the hut. When we get back it will be placed in safety and nothing disturbed …

  Trusting you will get this all right. We shall not be able to return here in March as I had hoped, our coal will not allow it so you will have to try and get through until I shall be down D.V. by Dec 1.

  Yours JK Davis

  ANOTHER

  WOMA N’S PAST

  MID-FEBRUARY AND SUMMER IN ANTARCTICA is winding down. Adélie penguins are leaving for the winter and all but those chicks hatched too late to survive have moulted and followed out to sea to take their chances. Nothing, Freya thinks, when she takes her camera from its bag, not even the icecap continually in motion, is here to stay. From the front seat of the helicopter the Vestfold Hills stretch before her, splayed with pattern and light. The cobbled pathways of mafic dykes—intrusions of darker rock—trundle along as if to guide their course northward, rolling over hilltops, spilling down slopes, dipping beneath the water to cross submarine floors. Even the fjords—arms of glistering white when she first arrived—have thawed and appear from this height as shallow as shoals. By March, she is told, a new season’s ice will form.

  They fly along the edge of the plateau, over the site of the Casa skiway. Freya might have missed seeing it altogether had Elisia, seated behind her with Adam Singer, not touched her shoulder and pointed down at the single line of fuel drums—all that remains to mark the skiway’s presence—waiting to be slung beneath a helicopter and ferried back to station.

  Freya has been witness to one cycle of change—an Antarctic spring unfolding to summer, summer closing down. She came here to understand the nature of ice, to record the texture of a place. She now has to remind herself she can have no lasting presence here; she will leave no trace behind. She feels weighed down by the prospect of going home, sickened by the thought of never coming back. The Aurora Australis is somewhere out there now.

  The sea ice at the northern tip of the Vestfolds remains intact. Ahead of them a blackened nub of mainland protrudes from the plateau. Walkabout Rocks, Freya’s final Antarctic destination and the site that has eluded her all season, lies within reach, rising from a pillow of white.

  ELISIA CARRIES FREYA’S TRIPOD WHILE Adam, the last in the entourage, brings her waterproof case. Freya lays down her pack and races Elisia to be first to Walkabout Rocks’ stone cairn, the pair clambering over boulders.

  They stand together on the rocks, Freya’s eyes fixed upon the plateau, Elisia looking out to sea as she hums.

  ‘What things have you missed the most?’ Freya asks her.

  ‘My husband. Followed by, let’s see …’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Insects, actually.’

  ‘Insects?’ Freya laughs.

  ‘The music of a Queensland night. Dragonflies, cicadas, even the drone of a good old blowfly. Up at the skiway there’s wind hammering off the plateau or there’s silence. Take your pick. They both get to you after a while.’

  ‘Heard anything from Chad?’ Freya asks nonchalantly.

  ‘Had an email a few weeks back. He’s all settled, says it’s a nice group at Mawson, sounds like there’s plenty to do. He’s already put his hand up for next year’s winter. Not me, babe. One more week and I’m on that ship and outta here, homeward bound.’

  Adam beckons Freya and Elisia down from the cairn to the rocks below. Freya watches him drag an aluminium case out of a crevice.

  ‘What’s the story on all this?’ Elisia asks him. ‘Charlie says you’ve been swotting up.’

  ‘Do you genuinely want to know?’

  Freya settles on a rock and wraps her arms around her knees. ‘Of course we do, Adam. Go ahead.’

  He postures before them, his knee on the case. Adam clears his throat. ‘Hubert Wilkins was an Australian polar aviator and explorer—and a photographer—who joined a private US expedition back in the late thirties. When the ship left Cape Town, the Americans informed Wilkins that they were going to claim any land they visited in Antarctica for the US, even though they’d signed a pre-departure statement saying they wouldn’t make any claims. Douglas Mawson had already claimed this whole coastline in 1930, 31, during his British and New Zealand expedition. Even back then,’ Adam says, ‘the Yanks thought they could commandeer the world.’

  ‘Unlike our own imperialist forebears,’ Elisia says.

  ‘Douglas Mawson came here?’ Freya exclaims before the two of them can begin to bicker.

  ‘He sailed right along the coast, took a number of flights in a biplane they brought along. It was a different place by 1930, the Antarctic water teeming with whaling ships. This was almost twenty years after Mawson’s expedition to Commonwealth Bay, when he and six men were forced to spend a second winter there.’ Adam winks at her. ‘You’d know the story of Mawson’s fiancée waiting for him all that time? This Everlasting Silence.’

  So Adam was her Secret Santa. Did he steal the book of letters from the station library? She can’t help the shameful thought.

  ‘Mawson and JK Davis,’ he continues, ‘were middle-aged men by then. They sailed to Proclamation Island, west of where Mawson Station is built, then motored all the way back east to Commonwealth Bay. They claimed that whole section, except for the bit the Frogs got to first.’ Adam nods at Freya. ‘Now you know why Australia lays claim to forty per cent of the Antarctic pie.’

  ‘Good old Douglas.’

  ‘Don’t forget JK,’ Elisia says. ‘They say Davis was the unsung—’

  Adam talks over her: ‘Hubert Wilkins, the Australian pilot, wasn’t having a bar of the Yanks’ bullshit. Once they got down here he took off in his plane and landed at several places along the Vestfolds, including Walkabout Rocks.’

  ‘He couldn’t have been on his own in the plane,’ Elisia says. ‘Where did he land?’

  Adam sighs at the interruption. ‘He would have landed up there on the plateau or down on the sea ice. Either way,’ he says, ‘Wilkins climbed to where we’re sitting right now and raised the Aussie flag.’

  ‘You know something else, Freya?’ Adam stands and puts his arm around her shoulder. He points to a black dot rising from the sea ice. ‘See Tryne Island way out there? That’s the site of the first landing by a woman in Antarctica. Karoline Mikkelsen, the wife of the Norwegian captain who named the Vestfolds. She hailed from your corner of the world.’

  ‘Adam,’ Elisia t
humps him on the back with a force that shunts Freya off balance, ‘you’re full of surprises, boy.’

  ELISIA AND ADAM CLIMB DOWN to the sea ice and head off in separate directions. Freya savours her time alone at the cairn. She breathes in the chill air, slowly looks around. She cannot remember a sky so flushed with colour, its reflection bringing the plateau so alive.

  Freya is jolted by the scene before her into remembering that Hurley’s Antarctica was as flooded with colour as her own is now. In 1912, colour photography had been available in Australia for less than five years. The muted, pastel hues of Lumière autochromes—the first commercial colour plates—would have touched the core of an artist like Hurley. One precious box was all he had to trial at Commonwealth Bay; less than a handful of plates have survived to this day, not one of them published.

  Hurley’s vast collection of black and white photographs define their time and place in photographic history. It dawns on Freya how influential his images have become in shaping a collective understanding of the past: they do not simply preserve the memory of Antarctica and the first Australian expedition, they compel the mind into imagining the past in black and white.

  Freya did not envisage, when she conceived of this project, that her photographic collection would be a celebration of colour. When Hurley photographed the blizzard, he offered people at home a vision they had never seen before; similarly, of the thousands of Antarctic images she has captured in these last months, she singles out her summer auroras as her own, unique expression. For Freya, they embody Antarctica’s kaleidoscope of colour.

  The sky presses down on her, saturating her in jewelled light as if she were part of the garnet-studded rock she holds in her hand. It was never hers to keep, though for weeks she has carried the stone as an amulet, waiting for the right moment to restore it to the ground.

  She returns to her tripod and searches through her viewfinder, photographing scurries of snow, drift rising from the crest and spiralling into sky. She widens her lens, craving more, but no eye can take in the expanse. She abandons her camera and faces the sea. She turns in circles, muddled with colour, drunken with light; she tilts her head to swallow the sky. She lets the light wash through her, absorbs the giddying, weightless heliotrope hue until she feels herself afloat. She rises above her grounding of rock, relinquishing land in search of more. She hovers, feathered with luminescence, wings agleam. She glides, diving and wheeling, expansive as she dips and curls, the ice around her spangled with lustrous light until she is spread so far she belongs to the plateau’s nacreous glow.