Going Home (part 4 of 4)
July 2001

Heard Island

The next stop after Davis was the Australian Antarctic Territory of Heard Island.

Four days later we arrived at Heard Island which is located in the middle of the Southern Ocean almost directly north of Mawson. As we approached, we were welcomed by hundreds of thousands of sea birds flying behind and along side the ship just millimetres from the waves. I counted about 6 different types of Albatrosses, 1000's of small Pryons and even more of other varieties of birds. I don't think I had ever seen so many sea birds at any one time!

We had come to Heard Island to retrieve an Australian scientific expedition, which had been on Heard Island for the last 6 months studying it’s native fauna and flora. On Heard Island is Australia's only active volcano, called Big Ben, and is also the highest peak in Australian Territory. The island is dominated by Big Ben which has a 2745m high summit named "Mawson Peak" - higher than Mt Koscuiosko!. The island is only about 10km wide so it rises very quickly out of the sea and up into the clouds. The slopes of Big Ben are covered in snow and ice and there are 18 glaciers stretching down from the peak to the ocean.

The peak of Big Ben on Heard Island covered in clouds

Heard Island is one of the windiest, wettest, and wildest places on earth. It also seems to have a weather system of its own. Thus it was no surprise that when we arrived the peak was shrouded in clouds and all we could see were the steep cliffs of basalt and huge glaciers dropping into the ocean. Heard Island has been home to some Australian expeditions before. In 1947 the first Australian Antarctic station was established here. It didn't last for long, only about 5 years after it was established.

Because of the notorious weather 6 days were set aside to retrieve all the people and equipment. Luckily this time had been allowed because for all of the third day the wind increased up to 150kph and the sea swell was up to 15m! The Polar Bird had to move out to sea to avoid being blown into the island and it had to face into the wind and wait out until the weather improved. During the storm the ship pitched and rolled at very uncomfortable angles making it hard to walk around without being thrown against the wall.

Eating dinner was a challenge as any loose plates or knives tended to fly sideways at the wall and carrying a plate of food to the table was tedious. Sleeping was even more difficult because of the back and forth rolling causing my head and feed to alternately hit the wall and the end of the bed. We struggled to keep our cabin in order with bags and clothes sliding all over the floor.	15m swell and 150kph winds makes an angry sea near Heard Island.
Standing out on the rear of the ship during the storm I witnessed the awesome power of the wind and the sea. I had never seen a sea so angry as this and with difficulty I took a number of photos trying to capture the power of the moment.
After the all the expeditioners and equipment had been retrieved we set course east for the 10 day trip to Hobart. For the trip to Hobart the Polar Bird lived up to one of its nicknames ‘The Polar Roller’ as it pitched and rolled through the Southern Ocean. After 4 weeks on the ship I eventually became used to the movement and managed to get some sleep but I was still eagerly looking forward to terra firma.	The ‘Polar Roller’ rolling through the southern ocean.

Arriving in Hobart

In the evening of March 28, 2001 I saw the lighthouse on Maatsuyker Island on the southern most end of Tasmania with the South West Wilderness in the distance. That night I had a lot of things running through my head about what it would be like the docking at the wharf in Hobart the next day and if it would be like my expectations.

The next morning after breakfast I went outside to be greeted with land on either side of the ship as we sailed up the Derwent River to Hobart. Out on the bow of the ship I could smell the damp air laden with the scent of forest bark and leaves even though we were still about 1km from the shore. In the distance I could see Mt Wellington and for those last few hours I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness because I had completed my adventure and I felt that I had made the most of the privilege that I had been given. Since I was a child I had often dreamt that I would be able to go to Antarctica but I had never really thought it would become a reality and the realisation that the dream had just come true was an intensely happy feeling.

Friends and relatives waiting at the wharf to welcome us back.

Looking Back at the experience

Over my year at Mawson I had spent a long time reflecting on my experiences and what they all really meant.

The urge to leave station and explore had been very strong. I always had a feeling that I was missing out on something and that I had to see and experience as much as I could. I also experienced some amount of envy mixed with frustration in not being able to go out on every trip. In the process of learning about myself I had concluded that my conscience ruled most of my thinking. So to offset the envy I knew that I gained satisfaction from achieving milestones in my work and if I was happy with getting work done I would be more satisfied and able to appreciate the experiences of travelling off station.

There were often opportunities to visit the same place a number of times, but with different people and a different purpose. I had a number of ideas about getting out and about. My rational side was telling me that I had already been there and I didn’t need to go again, but on the other hand my conscience had learnt from experience that every chance to get out is different and every visit, no matter how recent, was worth the effort.

On the surface Antarctica lacks the endless variety that I had come to accept back home. For the most part colours are reduced to the bare minimum. The landscape is white, rocks are dark brown and the sky is blue in the day and deep black at night. The number of different species of animals that can be easily seen can be counted on one hand and the variation within them is subtle. The art of appreciating Antarctica is a choice between the feeling of insignificance, endless repetition of a common theme and a study of subtlety.

Climbing mountains and gazing over rivers and seas of ice made me feel very small and insignificant because of the difficulty in judging their scale. Standing at the base of the sheer cliff faces that rose abruptly to heights of 400m or more out of the 1000m thick plateau ice sheet I tried to imagine what they would be like if there was no ice. Viewed from a distance large boulders appeared as pebbles. By itself and isolated from it’s surroundings an iceberg is an object of beauty and grandeur unlike no other, but in it’s element it is like a tree in a forest. When travelling in a forest you inevitably come across a tree larger and more grandeur than the others. The same applies to travelling over the sea ice.

Living in Antarctica I have learnt a great deal about myself. Being away from the pressures of urban life, the ability to cut myself off from external influences came the realisation that I was capable of working and living in an isolated community. This is one of the reasons why my time at Mawson has been the most enriching and rewarding experience of my life so far.

In hindsight I have also realised that there is an element of romance with Antarctica in society and the way it is portrayed in the media bares little resemblance to reality. I cannot speak for the early explorers, but now, the fundamentals of living in Antarctica are not very different to living at home. It also occurred to me that my perceptions have changed because I was there so long and I adapted just as one would if you shifted from a large urban city to a quiet country town, but judging from some of the questions received from school groups there is still a fair bit of mis-understanding about such simple things like what we eat and the way we live.

The romance I am talking about has many elements. At one end is that living in Antarctica means you have to be an explorer like Sir Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackelton ; that day to day existence is a trial consisting of living in small wind blown huts eating rations; the days and nights are continuously dark and the wind and snow continuously howls outside. The truth is much closer to urban life than that. Most of the infrastructure is there to support a lifestyle like back at home, like living in a Hotel that you run yourself and surrounding the hotel are all the scaled down services that are required to run it – water supply, waste disposal, food storage and power generation.

Sometimes life here is just too comfortable. Many people have fallen into the trap of wearing a path between the comfort of their homes and their workplaces, not remaining aware of where they are and why they are here. They become ‘Red Shed Rats’ spending more time inside the living quarters rather than out. They remain too pre-occupied with their work or allow it to dominate their lives. The ability to remain self aware and see yourself becoming trapped in these daily routines and then doing something about it is one of the most important parts of living here. On the other hand I appreciated that different people had different motivations, goals and reasons for being here, but in the end I could not fully understand why opportunities to get out and explore were not taken and experienced to their maximum.

I guess I could write for pages trying to describe the adventure but I doubt I would really be able to convey what it was like. The experience of living in Antarctica is something that can never be fully described, it really is one of those ‘being there’ things. At one end of the spectrum some people can find it a struggle while at the other end people like me can find it to be one of the most rewarding, soul enriching and mind expanding times of their life. It all depends on what you put into it and what you expect to get out of it.

My time at Mawson has been the most dramatic and life enriching experience that I could have ever imagined and the problem that I faced was that there seems as if nothing will be able to equal or exceed it. In the back of my mind is the niggling question "What can I do to ever come close to living at Mawson?" What else is there that could expand and change my perceptions and feelings so much?

On with life's big adventure !

Cheers,

Kym

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