Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  It may be the case that I had misgivings about Antarctica. A few days before I left – flights operate from Christchurch, on fat, rumbling Hercules aircraft – I’d said to a friend, ‘I’m worried that I might fall into a deep–’

  ‘Crevasse?’

  ‘No, depression.’

  It was the thought of all that wide white waste. It was worse than I thought. Antarctica obliterated signs of life, annihilated it; the whole stupid, merciless place was a vacant lot. The very best description of the sullen planet was recorded in December 1773. Cook’s second voyage took him south in search of the Unknown Southern Continent; his passengers included Hitihiti, a young aristocratic islander from Ra’iatea who hitched a ride on the Resolution. He toured New Zealand. He didn’t like it much. He was in for worse as Cook left Queen Charlotte Sound and crossed the Antarctic Circle.

  Historian Anne Salmond provides a wonderful account of Hitihiti’s polar exploration in her book Aphrodite’s Island. ‘On December 12 at 62 degrees south,’ she writes, ‘Hitihiti saw his first iceberg. During his visit to New Zealand he had gathered a bundle of little sticks, one for each island they had visited since leaving Ra’iatea. … Now he added another stick for this “bright star”, which he described as “white, evil, useless”.’

  Among the happiest sights I saw in my fortnight was morning tea at Scott Base. About a dozen men steamed up a small room with their mugs of tea and coffee, and crowded around a magnificent plate of freshly made sausage rolls. You can take New Zealanders out of New Zealand, but we had arrived at the ends of the Earth and immediately colonised it. We were domestic, suburban, worshippers of tea leaf and pastry, happy to while away the hours at indoor pastimes – all that fortnight, person or persons unknown worked in silence in the library, patiently piecing together a thousand-piece jigsaw of hot-air balloons floating in summer skies.

  There was a social divide between the university scientists and the ground staff of carpenters and electricians. In summer the population at Scott Base hovers around 85 when academics arrive to measure, monitor, sift, sample, prod and poke the continent. I rarely saw them have anything to do with the working guys. They spoke a different language and kept their hair on. As well as Alan Williamson, the mohawked engineer from Dundee who now lives in Dunedin, four other ground staff had taken a razor to their heads. Chris Knight, a mechanic from Palmerston North, had chosen to scalp the back of his.

  A core of ten ground staff would stay on after the last flight of the season left at the end of February. Their tour of duty would last for thirteen months. ‘Wintering over is the reward for summer,’ Alan said. The working week goes down from six days to five; when the last plane leaves, the roller doors on the bar go up and stay up. Sixteen more staff would soon be arriving to winter over, and Alan wondered whether it would create a split camp of two tribes – the core who all knew each other, and the fresh faces. ‘It could be a bit like Survivor.’

  Chris Knight would notch up one thousand nights on the ice. ‘It’s my third winter and my last,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get institutionalised.’ He talked about the drag of routines. ‘Breakfast served at the same time, lunch at the same time. The trick is to keep your own pace, otherwise it can be a long winter. I’ve seen people walking around the base at two a.m. looking like zombies. They just couldn’t cope with it.’

  In summer, the Antarctic observes an exaggerated version of daylight saving. The sun sets in February. After it creaks below the horizon in April, the continent experiences weeks of midnight black. Chris Knight was auditioning for the great New Zealand understatement when he said, ‘June is definitely pretty dark.’

  Damian Thorn, who would winter over as base cook, was looking forward to that. ‘I can’t wait until it gets dark. I hate the sun. This constant sunlight is doing my head in, to say the least.’

  It also did his head in to work a 17.5 hour shift to prepare a dinner at Scott Base in honour of Prince Albert of Monaco. The principality had signed up to the Antarctic Treaty and the monarch had decided to tour all 27 bases on the continent. I saw him after his meal – a short, tired man who spoke with an American accent. Thorn could be found on the smoking deck, biting down on a cigarette at midnight, in the full glare of that cursed sun. The next day he was given the wrong numbers for lunch and had to face diners holding empty plates, and that morning there was a mad rush to supply packed meals for a departing flight – no one had notified the kitchen. He was not pleased. Outside, there was the terrible poetry of the mystical, ancient Antarctic; inside, there was the actual stuff of life.

  It was a happy ship, run with generosity, kindness and humour. Scott Base operates as a government agency, set up to provide scientific access with minimal environmental impact. It runs on a tight annual budget of eleven million dollars. Ground staff suffer the usual joyless dictates of OSH – Occupational Safety and Health – and put in long hours. After work, they get outside, skiing, climbing, opening themselves to the amazingness of the elements. They sometimes received unexpected gifts – a hike up Mount Aurora led to the discovery of a discarded 35-kilogram jet rocket. It was nabbed, put in a backpack, and taken back to base to send home for conversion into a potbelly stove.

  Country music pitched its high, warm, lonesome sound throughout the base, courtesy of Steve Locke, a Telecom technician from Christchurch who operated the radio station, among his various duties. He first came to Scott Base in 1999 ‘to upgrade for Y2K. We all knew it was cobblers but who’d turn down a trip like that?’ He had prior experience of living in obscure corners of the Earth: in 1984 he had gone to the Chathams for six months and stayed thirteen years. This was his third summer at Scott Base and his eighth visit but he wasn’t game to winter over. ‘There’s a saying here. The first time you do winter is for the experience. The second is for money. The third is because you don’t fit in anywhere else.’

  And then he quoted another saying. ‘Americans come here for booze and we go there for sex.’ He meant the Americans over the hill at McMurdo Station. He added, ‘There’s probably more action when people come in for events.’ He meant the scientists who arrived for field trips. You had to watch your step on Scott Base; according to legend, the shared dormitory bedrooms meant private assignations were held in the library, the drying room, the first aid room. For most, though, sex conformed to the governing ethic of Antarctica: absence. No night, no trees, no humidity, no scent, no TV or cellphone reception, no hunting, no fishing, and – most artificial of all – no children, anywhere.

  All else was the presence of nature, the weather and, possibly, God. At the terribly pretty Chapel of the Snows at McMurdo, I found Wellington priest Father Phil Cody. ‘A lot of people get involved in a spirituality down here,’ he said. ‘They are struck by the awesomeness of the place, and also its isolation – they need something to sustain them.’ I asked how many people attended Sunday service. ‘Fifteen,’ he said. McMurdo has a population of about a thousand.

  God was in Hell. Death had dominion. You saw it every morning from Scott Base, looking upon Erebus, knowing what happened there. As Mike White wrote in North & South magazine, ‘We don’t even say “Mount”, we leave out “plane” and “crash” and just say “Erebus” and everyone knows what we mean.’ It didn’t look much from Scott Base, just a small white lump. From the air in a helicopter it looked vast and awful. Even that close you couldn’t comprehend the impact and the horror of what happened there at 12.49 p.m. on November 28, 1979. In his Royal Commission report into the annihilation of all 257 people on board Air New Zealand flight TE901, Justice Peter Mahon was moved to describe Antarctica as a ‘white silence’.

  I have a copy of the report I bought second-hand. The previous owner had left in it a clipping from the Listener – a column by Tom Scott, published on May 16, 1981 in response to Mahon’s shocking report, which blamed Air New Zealand for the tragedy. ‘The frailty of human judgement is a persistent, if unwitting, theme to the Royal Commission findings,’ Scott wrote. And then, w
ith some prescience: ‘Mahon’s central conclusion just might be subject to the same frailty.’

  Air New Zealand has always refused to accept any blame. It also refused to apologise to families of the victims until Mike White’s North & South cover story appeared in November 2009, headlined: ‘Erebus: No peace, no apologies, no end to grief. Will the 30th anniversary be any different?’ A week after the magazine went on sale, Air New Zealand got around to answering the question: it apologised to the families.

  Swedish vessel Oden, regarded as the world’s best icebreaker, docked at McMurdo. It was a big brutal thing that coughed black smoke and added to the impression that this corner of America in a foreign field looked like a dark satanic mill. It took about an hour to walk there, up and over the hill from Scott Base. There was something intensely satisfying about being able to walk from New Zealand to America. It would have felt even more intensely satisfying were it not for the sheer agony of walking for an hour in the cold air, which made you feel ten years older with every step.

  McMurdo turned out to be a lively dump of a place, roaring with heavy machinery and boasting three bars, a Wells Fargo ATM, and an excellent library. Scott Base’s library was desultory – old rubbish like Death is Late to Lunch by someone called Theodore DuBois, new rubbish such as the biography of a newsreader, Angela D’Audney. McMurdo’s library was generously stocked with titles by Haruki Murakami and Robert Fisk; it had a complete set of Granta. It also had a librarian, a beautiful girl with dark hair and glasses, who looked like Lisa Loeb. The quietness in the library had a softer, lovelier quality than Antarctica’s white silence. The rooms were dark. There was a couch. Outside, friendly and enormous Americans waddled the dusty streets. The first guy I met was smoking a cigarette as he crossed the road. I told him that smoking was permissible at Scott Base only on a narrow smoking deck. He smiled and said, ‘Welcome to the land of the free.’

  I spent a lot of time at McMurdo. It had a smoking room. It had a very big cafeteria that did chicken pie, chicken and lentil stew, and barbecued chicken, but the South Polar skuas tore down on anyone foolish enough to attempt a takeaway chicken. Other main food groups such as popcorn marshmallows were on offer. But protein was in short supply: no one had solved the audacious Christmas theft of 250 kilograms of steak.

  There was so much of everything else. McMurdo had more people than Scott Base, and there was more of them, with their big American necks and their big American bottoms, taking up room with their big American confidence. Returning home to Scott Base was a reminder of modest and droll New Zealandness. The buffet trays in the dining room at lunch one day were marked SAUSAGES, SAUSAGE PIE, SAUSAGE PASTA and CHICKEN CURRY WITH SAUSAGES. The salad selection was marked NO SAUSAGES.

  Craig Cary, an American professor of biological science at Waikato University, greeted his overnight guests at his camp in the Dry Valleys on the mainland of Antarctica and immediately asked, ‘Where are the frozens?’ He meant the box of frozen meat, bread and cheese. The helicopter had left without delivering it.

  ‘This is third time it’s happened,’ Cary said. He recounted the history of the two previous failures, then said, ‘I mean, shoot! We had three chillibins of beer came in from McMurdo. One of the guys asked and in it dropped. No problem. But what do we have to do to get frozens out of Scott Base? They keep promising and nothing happens. Nothing. It’s bad for morale. It ain’t right.’ And so on, a litany of complaint about another Antarctic absence – no frozen food in a frozen continent.

  Cary talked a lot, about everything. As well as giving detailed impromptu lectures on his project in the Dry Valleys, he delivered a dissertation on Germany’s military advance on Russia in the Second World War. I can’t remember whether this subject occupied his thoughts during the trek past a frozen lake to locate a mummified seal, or whether it was on the five-hour round journey to the top of a steep ridge to inspect the fabulous and grotesque shapes caused by the wind in rocks known as ventifacts.

  ‘I think you’ve got a pretty good handle on what it is we’re doing here,’ he said to me. I didn’t. I’d lost the plot of his ‘important study’. Meaning had got buried beneath his load of words. All I knew was that it was international, led by Waikato, and had something to do with a great many cross-discipline Earth scientists studying microscopic life in the arid desert of the Dry Valleys.

  Cary took samples of earth beneath the seal. There were another 500 sites where his team scratched around in the soil. Walking inside a large blue tent, I found scientists from universities in South Africa, England, Australia and New Zealand quietly sorting through ten-centimetre bottles of collected soil samples while listening to The Dark Side of the Moon. As well as lichens, algae and various assorted bacteria, the organisms under inspection were springtails, the largest terrestrial animals in Antarctica. They are two millimetres in length and lie dormant 300 days of the year.

  I couldn’t wait to leave the Dry Valleys but it was heartbreaking to leave Cape Bird. I went there with Kerry Barton of Landcare Research, who was monitoring a colony of Adélie penguins. A helicopter flew around Erebus and touched down on a rocky beach. A lot of steps led up a cliff to a two-bedroom hut.

  I came to look on the hut as a luxury resort. It was built in 1966 by carpenters Ray Greeks of Lower Hutt and Roger Bartlett of Warrington, Otago, who survived an Antarctic storm there and wrote in the logbook, ‘The roar of the wind and rattle of stones on the walls…’ Later, back in New Zealand, I got an email from Greeks, who now lives in the Far North; he wrote as though the Antarctic storm were still howling around his ears.

  ‘We flew all the gear up in three loads and as the chopper departed for the final time we could see bad weather brewing to the south. We worked furiously for many hours, levelling the site, erecting the walls in order to get the tie-downs in place before the storm hit.

  ‘We had a pile of plywood sheets for interior lining, all nicely pre-cut and painted; we stood two full 44-gallon drums of kerosene on top of these to stop them blowing away. By the time we had the tie-downs drilled into the rock it was nearly impossible to stand up outside, so we grabbed a box of tucker and hunkered down inside.

  ‘We were looking out the window as one shrieking gust came through to see our full fuel drums picked up like they were empty and just disappear. Plywood sheets filled the air like confetti. We never ever found a trace of either them or the drums again.’

  When Greeks returned to New Zealand, he went hunting with Bartlett in Te Anau. ‘I met his sister, married her in 1967, and am still happily married today. We have just had a great three weeks at Rakaia fishing, with Roger joining us, so the friendship forged in that stormy environment has lasted as well as the hut obviously has.’

  The hut was snug and warm and solid. Kerry Barton, as an old Antarctic hand, supervised the laying down of provisions, established radio contact, and got the stove working. We were a party of five. We drank tea at the dining table in front of the hut windows with a view of the beach, icebergs and grey sea. Penguins fished in the water and hitched rides on ice floes. Skuas performed dazzling swoops high in the air.

  ‘I have a surprise for you,’ Kerry said. She led our party out of the hut and along a walkway to the top of a mound. The scene below was outrageous: a colony of fifty thousand pairs of squawking, gargling, hooting, barking penguins sitting in their pink-hued excrement of krill in a valley formed by a glacier that stood in the sea. A colony of fifty thousand penguins makes a lot of noise. The constant din, the unbelievable numbers of birds – they were everywhere. The colony went for miles, along the beach and up the valleys, stuck there, flightless.

  Soft, furry, gormless, the chicks had nearly fledged, and stood – or slept together face-down – in protective crèches. The protection was from the only bird of flight. The penguins had strength in numbers, but it was their only strength. South Polar skuas were their worst nightmare and they lived that nightmare every second. Closely related to gulls, skuas are monogamous, have a life expectancy o
f 35 years (one banded skua at another cape on the island has reached 40), and can fly vast distances: Scott saw a skua on his doomed expedition to the South Pole, making it the most southern bird in the world. In winter it migrates as far away as the North Atlantic, to feed and sleep entirely at sea. It’s large, with a lightly tan body, a sharp hooked black bill, and webbed feet that it uses to scoop up krill. In summer its other main source of food are penguins.

  To walk through the valley of Adélie penguins was to walk through a valley of death. The ground was a boneyard: every step revealed another headless skeleton of an annihilated penguin, only its three-toed feet and flippers uneaten. This, surely, was Hell, preserved through the ages. For an updated version, I watched the final seven minutes of a penguin’s life. Two skua had succeeded in isolating it from the crèche and the adults. One skua planted a foot on the chick’s head and plucked out its feathers. The other bird ate it from behind. The chick beat at its assassins with its flippers, but it may have felt like just a gentle caress. On and on they ate it alive, and continued eating it when it finally, mercifully, stopped moving.

  ‘Cape Bird is about the best place anywhere in Antarctica to study penguins versus skuas,’ Euan Young said. Like Ray Greeks, Euan wrote to me after I returned from Antarctica; like Greeks he was familiar with the huts and the cape, where he worked as one of the world’s leading researchers of Adélie penguins. ‘As you saw, it is possible to sit above them and record their lives so perfectly with minimal disturbance.’

  Yes. From one of his scientific papers: ‘Twenty-five hours’ observation of foraging skuas was carried out, in which 42 attacks on penguin chicks were recorded, and over 40 feedings observed. … Feeding was a desperately frantic business with the head and neck buried within the carcass to gobble up the soft internal flesh. … In some cases, skuas were drenched with blood over the forehead, neck and breast…’