The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  Chad sands thick and weary layers of history from oak floorboards while Barney and Lachlan extend the line of the roof, doubling the size of the two front rooms. They replace old sash windows and the patio door with new custom-built jobs. The Glass Ballroom, Barney names the living room, whistling at the fancy bi-fold doors.

  By the end of January, after two more runs to town, they have laid the foundations for a grand new Oregon pine deck. Even with nothing but the frame in place, Chad can stand on a ladder at the corner post and see beyond the point.

  Barney’s ute, with Lachlan at the wheel, chugs up the drive loaded with shack furniture tired when even he was a boy, destined for the Campbell Town tip—better known, Lachlan says, as Dad’s Shed. Chad waits on the road until the ute drives out of sight; until he hears the toot of the horn at the turnoff and knows they’re on their way.

  He returns to his house of oak and glass, a man with a beginning who can see far across the bay.

  ON HIS FINAL RUN TO town in March, he parks down near Constitution Dock. Thirty minutes is all the time it takes to swagger out of the optics store the owner of a flash new pair of binoculars. Not your everyday lenses: these are top of the range.

  He sits on a bench beside the river with his cheese and salad sandwich. He slides the binoculars from their felt-lined case and sets them on his knees, then picks them up and pans along the opposite shore, marvelling at the clarity of vision. His thoughts return to an image of the winter left behind.

  After the surgery at Mawson Station a drip hung beside his bed pumping fluid through his veins. A nasogastric tube drew sludge from his stomach, a catheter line curled over the edge of the bed, the drain from his wound ran as relentlessly as his pain. Hell was not a chasm of icy blue but the weeks that followed his accident, trapped in a world that began and finished at the edge of his bed. It took all his will and the extraordinary care of those around him—it chokes him still to think of it—to continue breathing in and out. When it seemed a miraculous feat to shuffle to the bathroom, half-carried by two bearded nurses in Carhartts, Chad was beyond caring that his reflection showed a man with sallow skin whose gaunt face he barely recognised. Winter’s darkness passed before he gained the psychological stamina to revisit the site of the crevasse—first in his mind, and then, when he was strong enough to leave the station, with Barney. Even still, so much remains a dream.

  He turns his new binoculars this way and that, holds them up one more time to feel their weight in his hands. He wipes the lenses with the silky cloth before replacing the caps and packing his treasure away. He declares such extravagance a blessing of life.

  THE EASTER THRONG HITS THE bay and with it comes a run of sun-kissed days. He listens to splashes and squeals from kids on the beach, takes in the aromatic smoke from a neighbouring barbecue, gives silent thanks at the close of the day when the whining of a chainsaw splutters into silence.

  He mulls over his father’s once-cherished transistor radio, doubtful it will be fixable; it has no material value—the ivory bakelite discoloured and cracked, the aerial hanging by a steel thread. When he arrived at the tip this morning, he set the wireless aside from the pile of junk, thinking a collector might see it there and take it home. He drove out through the exit and then did a U-turn and drove back through the entry again, peevishly hauling the wireless into the car. Someday your father might call and want it back, Ma’s voice still visits him. Someday pigs will fly.

  It’s six-thirty and almost dark when he watches the last shivering kid, wrapped in a beach towel, scamper up the track that leads from the beach. Chad stands on his new pine deck with a mug of tea warming his hands. The big room remains unfurnished except for a pair of easy chairs and a blackwood dining set crafted long ago by Pop. He’s grown used to the lack of clutter in the room. Lamplight spreads a honeyed glow across the boards and freshly painted walls. Beyond the point, Jim Buckle’s old Seagull outboard whirrs like an eggbeater wending him home. The time is nearing for Chad to return his attention to building boats. He looks to the northern sky and counts the seconds before the cape lighthouse winds its beam out across the ocean, its faraway glow a ghostly echo behind the hills.

  He unpacks milk, bread and the paper from the co-op and sorts through his mail. He lays aside bills and magazines and then pauses at the sight of the package wrapped in plain brown paper, postmarked Melbourne GPO.

  Chad guesses the contents before he has the wrapping peeled away. He moves to an easy chair and sits beneath the lamp to study the catalogue from Freya’s exhibition.

  THE NATURE OF ICE

  —Images of Antarctica—

  By Frank Hurley and Freya Jorgensen

  Edited by Marcus Fitch

  Chad rubs at the knotted scar on his throat.

  The front cover features a turreted iceberg tinted in blues, soft around the edges like a dream. He turns the book over to an image of the plateau on the back cover, a glorious thing with scurries of drift curling into sky, the ice alive with crystals of garnet light. Inside it is a full-page photograph of Hurley’s. He’s seen it before, but never as now—a man entombed in an ice cavern, wound in light, in the foreground a canopy of ice waiting to collapse. A glimpse, a memory, a flash of blue from the crevasse shudders down his spine. A post-it note falls from the pages and flutters to the floor. For a moment Chad ceases to breathe; his heart loose in his chest, he pins the note with his finger.

  Break a leg—Charlie.

  A wry smile to Charlie boy; the last glimmer of hope snuffed out.

  Freya’s colour images sit opposite Frank Hurley’s black and whites: a weddell seal basking in sun, the hurly-burly of the adélie rookery, Antarctic light streaming over sea ice; each of them delivering a wave of nostalgia.

  Chad pores over the section of her portraits that unfolds like a family album: Elisia welding, Malcolm in the laundry, a towel draped around his shoulders, directing proceedings while being given a crew cut. Charlie sits in the radio room frowning over the top of his specs as he does when deciphering the garble of an HF radio call from hundreds of kilometres away. A team of limnologists stand in a circle on Crooked Lake, the jiffy drill as tall as the woman who cores the ice. There’re two scientists down on the sea ice working at the tide gauge, Kittie at the met building sending up the weather balloon. Chad turns the page to see himself in the demisted cab of the bulldozer, crooning some song the day he met Freya and nearly wiped her out. The D8’s blade is so close he can practically count the crystals in the ice it holds.

  The series titled ‘Summer Auroras’ catches his eye. He distinguishes the blues of the bergs and the white of sea ice, but travelling across the frozen mass—even through it, it seems—are streamers of colour so vibrant they dazzle him. He is about to turn the page when he recognises a shade of green as that of the groundsheet that billowed behind his bike the day they drove to Zolatov Island. The impression the photo creates is truly that of a brilliant green aurora, alive as it dances through the sunlit ice. The groundsheet has turned into a luminescent cloak swirled across the ice, and through it runs the wheel of his bike—only here it appears as a corona, its steel hub a body of silver surrounded by an aureole of black. The green folds onto itself just as an aurora might drape across a darkened winter sky. Within the folds he deciphers other tinges of colour as the duco red of his bike, the yellow of the quad’s kitbag.

  He turns the page to reveal ridges of cerulean that dissolve into light, dips and rises of turquoise. He sees an orange sleeping roll unfurled in an arc.

  Freya had become gripped with the notion that the southern and northern lights occur concurrently. When the aurora borealis dances vivid in the dark of an Arctic winter sky, the aurora australis, at the identical moment, sways in rhythm unseen across Antarctica’s sunlit sky. A summer aurora; she held her arms to the sky, her polarised glasses mirroring the glare of the sun. Just imagine if we could see the colour of its light. Here she has created it, a summer aurora cavorting and swaying, waxing and waning.

>   Though he has always considered photographs still and quiet things, before Chad are images alive, pictures in motion, swirling shapes, liquid light. He will always picture Freya behind her camera, physically distanced from her subject yet an integral part of it, the same connection he feels to the ice no matter where he is. Through these images the essence of the artist shines, Chad feels it like the presence of a ghost, her aura luminescing through the glow.

  IT’S LONG PAST HIS BEDTIME when he puts up the fire screen and flicks off the lamp. From his closet shelf he takes down a storage box labelled Antarctica IX–X. Inside it are two journals and an envelope crammed with medical reports, as well as the rolled-up portrait of Freya he pilfered from her studio. For all his gall in claiming it, the photo was never his to display; now he unrolls it one more time to study her face.

  Afterwards, he takes from the box a letter delivered to him at Mawson Station by the ship that finally brought him home. He traces a finger across impressions in the paper. Words a winter old before they reached him, relinquished, surely, even before he read them. The letter has aged, the folded pages limp and fragile from touch. He knows the words by heart but still they overwhelm him, the closing lines reopening a wound of want. He slides the letter between two pages of the catalogue and packs it in the box.

  A mopoke owl hoots across the creek gully. Another mopokes back. From his bed he can look through the silhouette of branches and see Orion. Tonight the southern sky is a starry vault stretched to the edges of the hemisphere. So many things intervene. Truly, he thinks, for all our desire and ambition, lives mapped out, pledges made, in the end we live from day to day, as fragile as twigs, needing to be loved, urged on by hope and acts of kindness.

  Returning from the edge of the world

  February 1914

  AFTERNOON HEAT SHIMMERED OFF THE pavement. Douglas moved along Adelaide’s North Terrace, his senses full of the city air, an orchestra of passing conversations. His attention was seized by the spotless white of men’s shirt sleeves, by the wonder of lightweight skirts and dainty linen blouses. He was mesmerised by trills of laughter beneath coloured parasols and wide-brimmed hats. He was a man returning from the edge of the world, taking new steps upon a civilised land. All that kept him grounded in the surreal lightness of being here was his herringbone jacket, outmoded and too heavy for a summer’s day; inside his pockets were fifteen letters written to Paquita during his second year at winter quarters, and his sketches for a home.

  A store window decorated with millinery. The clatter of a tram.

  He turned into the South Australian Hotel where he found his luck had been too good to hold. Cries of Dr Mawson! escalated, footsteps sharp as tacks across the tiled foyer.

  He agreed with the first newspaper man that a second enforced year had been a trying time indeed, not for him alone but for all six of his fine comrades who had stayed at the hut and tended him—and not forgetting too the pain of the unexpected delay for the dear ones at home.

  Captain Davis’s actions had his full support, he told the second reporter. On top of which, Davis’s decision to relieve Frank Wild’s western party instead of his own had possibly saved Douglas’s life. In hindsight, he doubted he would have survived the voyage home a year ago.

  An undeniable success! The sledging parties had opened up large areas along the coast and obtained magnetic data inland to the vicinity of the south magnetic pole. During the second year a new wireless operator had added to Mr Hannam’s pioneering work of 1912 by conducting regular telegraphic communications between Antarctica and Australia.

  Yes, with great sadness he had relayed wireless messages from Commonwealth Bay to the people of Lieutenant Ninnis and Dr Mertz. He would be visiting the families in London and Basel later in the year. He feared the meaning of Scott’s non-return from the pole—he had come so close to death himself.

  It had been a blow to return to the hut and learn the news that his father had passed away. (He would tell no one but Paquita of the night, in a tent on the plateau, that his father had appeared before him in a dream.)

  Indeed it was grand to be home. Why, he planned to see Miss Delprat as soon as was humanly possible. He hoped, nodding at the wall clock, she might forgive him for arriving for their appointment twelve months late.

  He threw a pleading eye to the man in hotel uniform who obliged by crossing the tiles to shepherd the newsmen away.

  Douglas scaled the guest stairs two at a time, pausing at the landing to reply to a last opportunistic question pitched up to him. No fear! he cried back to the reporter. Dr Mawson would not be returning to the ice.

  THE PULSING IN HIS CHEST engulfed his body in the seconds between knocking and waiting for the door to open. It was not Paquita but her mother, Henrietta, who welcomed him with a hug, crying, Dear, dear boy and gesturing with a sniff and her handkerchief towards the sitting room doors.

  The image of the girl he’d left so long ago now blended with the woman edged in light at the window, taller than he remembered in her frock of ribbon and lace. He chose to ignore the flicker of shock that Paquita blinked away as she traced his haggard body with her eyes.

  Words momentarily failed him. He felt at risk of breaking down.

  ‘You have had a long time to wait,’ he whispered, not trusting his voice to deliver more words. Paquita slowly nodded.

  He reached inside his jacket; his fingers turned to butter, letters and his house plans slipping to the floor.

  Then Paquita stepped towards him with open arms, drawing him to her with the strength of her smile. He closed his eyes to the press of her body and the gentle folds of home.

  Frank Hurley

  A NEW WAY

  OF SEEING

  FREYA RISES WITH THE LIGHT. The trail, once a railway line linking the Darling Scarp to Perth, leads her through bushland chill with shadow; it’s too early in the day for June’s winter sun to warm the face of the escarpment. These morning walks through the bush, beyond earshot of the drone of commuters pouring westward to the city, away from the hisses and groans of road trains lumbering up Great Eastern Highway, clear Freya’s head and resurrect a world beyond the acrid turmoil at home.

  Freya leaves the trail and scrambles uphill through bush. She reaches her favourite outcrop of granite that looks across the tops of jarrah and marri, down through a sweeping valley to the Swan Coastal Plain. She turns an ear to the rush of a distant waterfall revived by winter rain. The first gleam of sunlight touches her back and silvers the brook snaking through grass trees and scrub. She sits for a time, drinking in the view. She will miss these things, will crave them, even.

  Freya doubles back to the opening of the abandoned railway tunnel, where a kookaburra peers down at her between the branches of a tree.

  The date carved into a limestone block reads 1895. She has entered this masoned archway only once before, Marcus gripping her hand in his, rallying her through the eight-hundred-metre-long enclosure. Now Freya walks once more through the blackness, the frigid tunnel closing around her in a press of lifeless air. Water drips and echoes. Her boot catches an aluminium can and sends it rattling over stone. For a moment she thinks to turn and run but when she looks back towards the entry, the daylight beyond is no longer defined by an arch of stone. She has come so far that the blackened lens of tunnel has reduced the light in the distance to a pinhole, to an aperture closed down.

  MUSIC FROM THE FAR END of the house belies the dissonance.

  Freya spends the morning reclaiming her shambles of a studio, filing remnants from the photographic exhibition, archiving the last of negatives and proof sheets. She is thankful, now, for her husband’s insistence (ultimatum, her sister called it): We will finish what we began, Freya. She owed him that and more. She, in turn, has behaved above reproach, has, for longer than the agreed-upon trial—if you still want to go after the exhibition I won’t stand in your way—dutifully played out the futile charade.

  She spreads an armful of proof sheets and prints across the wor
k bench—ocean and icebergs, shots around the station, a man’s black and white portrait she refused to destroy.

  When she studies her photographs of Davis Station, she can see that the spirit of community is as vibrant now as it was in Douglas Mawson’s day. The portrait she has of Frank Hurley, dressed in full sledging gear, reminds her that though aircraft and vehicles have replaced sledges and dogs, the terrain they cross is a layer of the same. She has learned from her summer on the ice, that for every hero of the past, another waited at home for their return. And for her own small part, through some gradual, curious process that has you absorb a place until it forms a part of you, Freya has been vested with a new way of seeing. Her concept of Antarctica began with Hurley’s black and white images from a century ago. Her vision now flourishes with colour, and will forever hold an image of two people upon a limitless expanse of ice. Truth and understanding, she sees, perhaps a glimpse of love, can be found in frozen places.

  Freya sorts through proofs of a broken red skidoo retrieved from a crevasse on the Amery Ice Shelf and flown back to Davis Station for repair. She hears the garage door, sees Marcus make his way towards her studio with a satchel of papers, his head down. She won’t let his heartache undo her. No, Marcus; without hesitation she turned down his offer that they start a family—begin again—a forlorn and desperate plea. Freya knows now that some things can’t be fixed, no matter how you try.

  WINTER

  SOLSTICE

  DAWN. THE JUNE SUN PALE and low. The water is a shimmer of glass, broken only by a pair of wooden blades that form coronas of bubbles as they dip and rise. The oars are evenly weighted in his hands. On this, the winter solstice, the sounds are of the bay, nothing more. Chad listens to the cry of gulls, glides over baubles of kelp, hears the gurgle of water beneath the newly varnished planks. He nods to the silver-haired lady in tartan pants who stands at the end of the new timber pontoon that has replaced the crumbling granite breakwater, for years the bay’s single eyesore. Each morning at this hour she does a sprightly walk to the rocks, on to the pontoon, then returns along the beach to her easel and paints to catch the light. What began a few days ago as an insipid wash and a few wavy lines, this morning, when he wandered over to say hello and take a look, captures refractions of winter light thrown across the bay.