Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was dark by nine o'clock now. Field assistants returned from two months on the ice with their
beakers, and they clattered around the base sorting out their equipment. Ground sheets, hoisted
up to dry, bestowed upon their storerooms the alluring air of a Bedouin encampment. One of the
field assistants was a rangy geography teacher called Neil with a Liverpudlian accent and hair that
flopped into his eyes. He used the analogy of a rollercoaster to describe his Antarctic experience.
'It can be great here,' he said. 'But it's not really living.'
I had just finished reading Thomas Keneally's Antarctic murder mystery
Victim of the Aurora
,
published in 1977. It was narrated by an old man who was once the artist of a five-man team of
explorers closely resembling Scott's group. A journalist is murdered on the ice. 'To me', says the
narrator, 'the world was simple and the lying hadn't begun when I joined the expedition . . . Ever
since [the murder and its aftermath] the world has been fuelled and governed by lies. That is my
concise history of the twentieth century.' In addition, a refugee found hiding in an ice cave be-
comes a symbol of the human condition. 'But you can live, weeping and cursing,' says this charac-
ter. 'Oh yeah, it's possible,' and commenting on the fact that he can't quite stand up in his shelter,
he adds, 'I suppose that I'm characteristic of mankind.' The narrator returns to the Antarctic as an
old man, and is flown back to the Pole, which makes him feel sick. 'I suppose I may have been
suffering the shock of reaching the Pole, that trigonometrical siren of the Edwardian age, to find
it an ice plain without character, staffed by disconsolate young soldiers who would rather be in
Vietnam. In other words, the Pole was no longer a mythical place.'
Like me, Keneally visited the Antarctic as a guest of the American programme. 'The basic fu-
tility of Antarctic exploration', he wrote after he had returned, 'was . . . brought home to me as I
saw the nullity of the place, the meaninglessness of most of the geographic data for which men
like Scott gave their lives. The Pole itself was a prodigious nothingness, a geographic void. But
the wealth of impressions and memories that arose from my Antarctic odyssey will always enrich
my writing.'
George reappeared, the loquacious chief builder who had accompanied me south from Brize
Norton. He came storming in to our building one day and invited me to his birthday dinner on
Saturday evening. I was touched. He was going to be sixty-nine.
'Are they looking after you all right here?' he asked, adding conspiratorially, 'if not, come on
over, I'll see what I can do.' Quite what he would have been able to do was a baffling question.
Later, he showed me round the builders' quarters. 'I think it's all right for intellectuals to share
four to a room,' he said, flinging open the door of a pitroom and speaking as if he had spent years
acquiring this knowledge, 'but for my laddies, two is preferable.'
A blizzard descended on George's birthday, and the outside of the windows appeared to be hung
with sheets of muslin. In the evening I fought my way over to the party. They had put tablecloths
and candles on the tables, George and his sidekick were wearing ties, and a notice on the black-
board said
'Guest Star - 9.30: Stripper. 10.30: Haircuts
'. George dispensed sweet sherry, and if
anyone swore, he made them apologise to me. John the plumber, who was a vegetarian, told me
that on his first day he had been presented with a box of sixty-four microwaveable veggiburgers.
Later, I heard rousing choruses of 'Alouette' in the lounge area behind me, and people began ap-
