Discovering the unknown continent - Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent - page 27

Erebus Voices The Mountain

-

I am here beside my brother, Terror.
I am the place of human error.

I am beauty and cloud, and I am sorrow;
I am tears which you will weep tomorrow.

I am the sky and the exhausting gale.
I am the place of ice. I am the debris trail.

And I am still a hand, a fingertip, a ring.

I am what there is no forgetting.

I am the one with truly broken heart.
I watched them fall, and freeze, and break apart.

bill manhire

More modern poets have also used Antarctic themes, such as the Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda whose two poems were truly

written from the imagination as he never visited the continent. Others, such as
the New Zealand poet Bill Manhire, have spent time there and used poetry to
remember both historical events from a century ago and more recent events,
like the DC-10 crash on Mt Erebus.
The early explorers needed to record their discoveries, both geographical
and scienti

- Antarctic Stones and Antarctic -

c. Carrying artists and draughtsmen on board was normal and it is
the artists on board the Endeavour , Captain James Cook

'

s ship, that provide our
earliest images of the Antarctic. Yet many expeditions did not have professional
artists and it is the paintings of amateurs, many self-taught and painting simply for
their own pleasure, that present very personal views of the continent. Some, of
course, painted the Antarctic of their imagination, especially in attempting to
visualise the heroic exploits of Scott and Shackleton, but by the Heroic Age
photography had developed with its startling new images,

firstly still and then

later moving. For us in the twenty- rst century the black and white or sepia

images of a century ago have an immediate historical feel but even then there
were attempts to bring colour to the landscape by hand-tinting monochrome
photos. The arrival of colour photography changed yet again the visualisation of
the continent, abolishing the widely held belief that there was no colour in the
landscape.