Journal
Articles
Inside, and outside
On the ship it’s a mix of hurry up and wait – cabins cleaned, bags packed and stacked in the halls, people standing in cabin doorways chatting – the uncertainty of farewells. Especially the twenty-odd Mawson-bound expeditioners – not knowing who to farewell and when.
Silence is the song
DURING THE LONG winter of 2020, and due to fortunate happenstance, I found myself locked down in a somewhat...
Buried treasure
Over the entire 800,000-year record, atmospheric carbon dioxide has never peaked over 300 ppm. For all of human history, it sat around 275 ppm until about 200 years ago, when we began to dig up and burn coal to fuel the Industrial Age. In 1950, it punched through the 300-ppm historic ceiling. In mid-May, as the forests of the Northern Hemisphere dropped their leaves, the planet exhaled atmospheric carbon dioxide at a new daily record of 421 ppm.
Warnings in the water
The environmental significance of krill extends beyond their role as food. They also play a vital part in the processes that regulate the Earth’s climate.
A subantarctic sentinel
It didn’t take long for this knowledge to spread wider – and for Macquarie Island to become an open-air slaughterhouse. By December 1810, another three Sydney-based sealing gangs were operating there and, within the first eighteen months of operation, roughly 120,000 fur seals had been killed for their fine pelts.
Last of the rational actors at the end of the unnatural world
Was it Douglas Mawson who compared Antarctica to Mars?... 'Outside, one might be a lone soul standing on Mars', or something very much like that. 'All is desolation and hard.'
Convergence
The holiday brochures talk about ‘the sound of silence’ in Antarctica. That it is an experience, elliptical and expansive. This has become a long-running joke at the base. Everyone knows that life here relies on making noise.
Hope sends a message
I am here to get the feel of the place; to understand why they are here, at the edge of the world, keeping hope alive. I need that hope and I think I am not alone in that sentiment. That is why I was sent, why I agreed to come, why this piece is being published – unless it has been suppressed. I am displaced as much as the people here; my family have not been to our homelands for generations.
Snowman
the hardest part about going to antarctica is coming back after two years to a six-year-old daughter who screams when you...
A Lullaby Made From Ice
The closest I’ve ever come to an iceberg is at the bottom of a dime bag. Me, a climate...
A badly researched history of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition
The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, headed by Douglas Mawson, explored the Antarctic coast between 1911 and 1914. After losing a sled...
Expedition to Blood Falls, Victoria Land
I used to catch fish in jam jars and hide in hedges. I slept in trees like a lemur and dreamt of...
