Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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Unlike the United States, New Zealand claims sovereignty over a slice of Antarctica. The Antarctic
Treaty neither endorses nor refutes this claim, or indeed the claims of six other nations (Chile,
Argentina, Australia, Britain, Norway and France). The Treaty evolved to preserve the fragile bal-
ance of ownership and non-ownership and to protect
Terra Incognita
from the depredations of ex-
ploitation and warfare. It states that 'Antarctica shall be used for peaceful measures only . . . in the
interests of all humanity', and gives all parties free access to the whole of the continent, fostering
science as the legitimate expression of national interest. Initiated during International Geophysical
Year and applicable to all territory south of sixty degrees south, the Treaty was signed by twelve
nations in 1959 and came into force in 1961. Since then the number of signatories has more than
tripled. The accession of India and Brazil in 1983, and China two years later, meant that the Treaty
was no longer the exclusive territory of rich, developed nations. The document subsequently ex-
panded. The Protocol on Environmental Protection, signed in Madrid in 1991, imposed a fifty-year
moratorium on extracting oil and mining minerals. It has been called Pax Antarctica.
In the early days, everyone wanted some of this unknown land - or at least, they didn't want
to be left out. Doris Lessing wrote that to non-Europeans thinking about the Antarctic in the dec-
ades before the First World War, 'there was little Europe, strutting and bossing up there in its little
corner, like a pack of schoolboys fighting over a cake.' Just before the Second World War, Hitler
decided that Antarctica too was to be part of the great Nazi empire. He ordered several thousand
steel-barbed swastikas, loaded them on to planes, put the planes on a ship and sent the whole lot
south, telling the pilots to drop their cargo over a vast tract of the icefields. After the war, people
were still optimistic that the continent could be made to earn its keep. In 1949 a journalist called
Douglas Liversidge went south to visit British bases and witness the relief of Fuchs and his ex-
pedition from Stonington Island. In his book
The Last Continent
, published in 1958, Liversidge
suggests that Antarctica might provide 'cheap, large-scale refrigeration of grain, meat and other
supplies' - that it might function as a global freezer, in other words. By the late eighties, a coalition
of Third World nations led by Malaysia accused Treaty members of 'modern day colonialism'.
The political situation often belied reality. I observed on my first visit south that the Antarctic
can erase national boundaries. An Argentinian arrived for a minor operation at a Chilean base
which included a relatively sophisticated medical facility. The man was greeted with slaps on the
back and urgent petitions about a forthcoming radio chess tournament. I had never heard that kind
of talk in Chile, only spiteful jokes about loud-mouthed neighbours who rolled their 'r's. The geo-
politics of Antarctica - complex, potentially explosive, deadly serious and ice cold - were played
out not on the snowfields but in the ring of the international circus of conferences they engendered
and the carpeted corridors of capital cities.
