Resupply (part 1 of 4)
Tuesday 28th March 2000

Running and maintaining an Antarctic station is not a trivial undertaking. Once a year all of the four Australian Antarctic stations are supplied with enough food, fuel and materials to enable them to be self sufficient for a whole year.

For Mawson, the resupply voyage for 2000 was V6 which was the last voyage of the 1999/2000 shipping season. The RSV (Research and Supply Vessel) Aurora Australis (AA) arrived on the 2nd of March, direct from Hobart to commence the Mawson resupply. As the AA arrived in Horseshoe harbour, two Inflatable Rubber Boats (IRB's) towed the mooring lines from the ship out to the 10 mooring points located around the harbour.

The RSV Aurora Australis moored in Horseshoe Harbour, with cargo on the foredeck ready for the Mawson resupply.

During resupply everybody on base, and most people on the Aurora Australis, become involved in the unloading and backloading of all the food, fuel and cargo. Resupply is a good time for everybody to come together and get involved in a fairly unique operation. A few days before the AA arrived, we had a station meeting where Michael Carr, the station leader, detailed all the jobs people would be allocated and the processes that we would have to get through to efficiently unload the cargo and make sure that the resupply process went smoothly.

Most of the plant equipment such as the Cat950 loaders, the crane and the JCB loaders were expected to be in near constant use, travelling to and from the wharf where the containers were being unloaded to the places where the containers needed to be unloaded or stored. For the people not driving the plant equipment, including me, we were assigned to the labour gangs that help unpack the food & warm store containers.

Trevor Williamson driving a Cat950 loader. We had two of these running almost constantly carrying the E-containers full of food and cargo from the wharf to the greenstore and other locations around Mawson.

Some of the food comes in refrigerated containers which we referred to as "reefer's". These containers needed to be unpacked quickly into the station's cool stores so that the fruit and vegetables do not get too warm or too cold. If a different types of food needs to be stored in different temperature ranges, so we have different stores to hold things like cabbage and lettuce while another store holds the potatoes and carrots. Another store is used for dairy products and another is for meat and fish products. The labour gang formed a human chain between the reefer container and the stations store. As the boxes of vegetables were unloaded from the reefer, they were either passed from person to person or slid along a conveyor and stacked on the shelves in the cool store. Some of the unloading had to be done outside so luckily the air temperature was not too cold and the wind not too high so the perishable food did not get frozen before it was put into the correct place.

Email continues in part 2