Academic puts summer on ice

Tom Griffiths.

An ANU historian is swapping the sweltering Australian summer for the icy sheets of Antarctica as part of a historic journey commemorating the nation’s first expedition to the great southern continent.

Professor Tom Griffiths, an Antarctic and environmental historian in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, has joined the Australian Antarctic Division’s centennial voyage to Mawson’s Huts at Commonwealth Bay. The journey marks 100 years since Douglas Mawson’s epic expedition of 1911 to 1914.

Mawson led the first Australian expedition to Antarctica, during which time he and his team carried out scientific observations and detailed mapping of the icy continent, providing the basis for Australia’s territorial claims and the nation’s ongoing presence on the ice.

Professor Griffiths and the other members of the expedition set out this morning from Hobart on the icebreaker Aurora Australis. The ship, which was meant to set out on 31 December 2011, was delayed in the Antarctic by bad weather. Professor Griffiths said it was entirely appropriate that the frozen continent should dictate the timing of the centennial visit to Mawson’s Huts.

"Aurora Australis had its return from Antarctica delayed by blizzards and high winds during its re-supply of Casey station," he said.  "This is the influence of what is called ’the A-factor’, which is the de-stabilising ingredient in all Antarctic planning.

"Uncertainty and waiting are the warp and weft of Antarctic history.  The men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition spent a lot of time waiting... waiting for the wind to stop so they could work outside or hear themselves think, waiting agonisingly for the Far Eastern sledging party of Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz to return, waiting for the black speck of the Aurora to appear on the horizon to take them home.  In Antarctica, it can feel like time has not only skipped a beat, but has lost the beat altogether."

Professor Griffiths added that Mawson’s original expedition was a decisive moment in the history of Australia.

"It has often been claimed that the Australian nation was born in 1915 on a war-torn beach far away in Turkey on the other side of the world.  But the heroic landing a few years earlier at Cape Denison, Antarctica - a landing also ’hampered by adverse conditions’ and in Australia’s own region of the globe - deserves our attention and was imbued with similar symbolism and sentiment."

Follow Professor Griffiths’ journey online at http://ceh.environmentalhistory-au-nz.org/research/aae/