FitzSimons Peter - Mawson: And the Ice Men of the Heroic Age: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen

Sir Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, remains Australias greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, his Australasian Antarctic Expedition left Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below Australia, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. He was on his way to fulfil a national dream he had first conceived three years earlier, while on his first trip to the frozen continent on the Nimrod expedition under the leadership of the charismatic Anglo-Irishman Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Even as Mawson and his men were approaching Antarctica, two other famous Antarctic explorers were already engaged in nothing less than a race to become the first men to reach the South Pole. While Roald Amundsen of Norway, with his small team, was racing with dogs along one route, Englands legendary Scott of the Antarctic, with his far larger team, was relying primarily on ponies and man-hauling to get there along another.

As Mawson and his men make their home on the windiest place on earth and prepare for their own record-breaking treks, with devastating drama to be their constant companion, the stories of Amundsen and Scott similarly play out.

With his trademark in-depth research, FitzSimons provides a compelling portrait of these great Antarctic explorers. For the first time, he weaves together their legendary feats into one thrilling account, bringing the jaw-dropping events of this bygone era dazzlingly back to life.

I bet I know what youre doing, my wife said to me many years ago, when she saw me gazing intently at an Australian one-hundred-dollar note in my study.

What? I said.

Youre looking for your next biographical subject.

Got me! Over the years, through writing stories and books about such Australian legends as Nancy Wake, Keith Miller, Phar Lap, Murray Rose, Les Darcy and Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the battles of Kokoda and Tobruk, and the shipwreck of Batavia , I have made a practice of looking at beloved but long-gone Australian stories and trying to make them live and breathe again.

And Sir Douglas Mawson, whose image was on that note in my hand, really was a definite possibility. True, apart from his name and apparently well-deserved iconic status, I knew just about nothing about Sir Douglas, but in some ways that was the point. My generation had all but forgotten about him, and maybe it was time to look at him again, get to the bottom of why his story had been so beloved. But then, as ever I was wont to do, I forgot about it and went to other books, until

Until in mid-2009, when my eldest brother, David, happened to tell me over a cup of tea something of the grandeur of the Mawson story and my publishers then took me out to lunch and suggested him again. But when I soon established that three books had come out on him in just that year alone, I turned away from it once more.

Just a few months later, however, I received an email from out of the blue, from David Jensen, the Chair of the Mawsons Huts Foundation, wondering if I had considered:

a biography on this great man, the most famous of Australias Antarctic explorers and equal to Scott and Shackleton? No one has done it before in the make-it-live-and-breathe manner you do your books, and he seems to fit into that very criteria you outlined last night on TV. Such a book would also help our cause. We have a team of volunteer conservation specialists departing Hobart early December to spend eight weeks on the ice working to conserve the historic site and were planning a major documentary for screening next year. If youre interested in considering a book on him Id be happy to help with family contacts etc

And so it began.

For me, kindly helped by David Jensen all the way, the next two years were a fascinating journey physically, intellectually and spiritually to Antarctica, a place that I had never particularly contemplated before but now became, as my wife and family will attest, pretty much obsessed with. Beyond journeying to Antarctica itself, where I was thrilled to actually get inside Mawsons Huts, I also travelled, as a part of further research of the whole Antarctic story, to Hobart, Adelaide, Melbourne, Macquarie Island, Christchurch, Dunedin, London, Cambridge and Oslo, among other cities.

For, as it turned out, the more I got into writing this book, the more I found not only the story of Mawson to be absorbing but also the whole history of exploration in those parts. I was staggered that only a little over a hundred years ago, the continent had barely been set foot on, let alone explored. I adored the story of Shackletons exploration there, and the fact that even as Mawson and his men were setting off to the south the famed Scott of the Antarctic and Norways Roald Amundsen were in a race to the South Pole. I loved those latter stories so much that in short order, just as my previous book on Sir Charles Kingsford Smith had widened into a book on Smithy and those magnificent men , in this case I widened it from just Mawson to include the ice men of the Heroic Age . It was fascinating to me that these titans of their time should have been so active, so close together in such a tight timeframe, and I decided to construct this book to encompass that frame.