David Day - Flaws in the Ice: In Search of Douglas Mawson

Scribe Publications
FLAWS IN THE ICE

David Day has been a research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Tokyo, and an ARC senior research fellow at La Trobe University. He is currently an honorary associate at La Trobe University in Melbourne and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. His many books include bestselling histories of World War Two, biographies of Australian prime ministers, and a study of Winston Churchill and Robert Menzies that has been made into a television documentary. His books have won or been shortlisted for several literary prizes, with Claiming a Continent winning the non-fiction prize at the Adelaide Festival. Conquest: how societies overwhelm others has appeared to acclaim in Australia, Britain, and the United States, and has been translated into several languages. His most recent book is the widely acclaimed Antarctica: a biography .

To the members of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition,
who went in search of a continent and found themselves .

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First published by Scribe 2013
Copyright David Day 2013

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Maps drawn by Kelly Day

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Day, David, 1949-, author.

Flaws in the Ice: in search of Douglas Mawson / David Day.

9781922072771 (e-book.)

1. Mawson, Douglas, Sir, 1882-1958. 2. Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914). 3. ExplorersAustralia. 4. AntarcticaDiscovery and explorationAustralian.

919.8904092

scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

This is a map of the Antarctic coastline, as it was imagined to be at the time of Mawsons expedition in 1911.

A map of the Ross Sea coastline, showing the sledge journey of Edgeworth David, Mawson, and Mackay across sea ice and land towards the presumed position of the South Magnetic Pole.

The cramped expedition quarters are starkly revealed by this plan of the hut and its attached workroom.

A map showing the position of the expedition huts and the surrounding features.

A map of the competing journeys by Mawson, Madigan, and Bage, as they raced to outdo each other.

List of expedition members

Main Base

Western Base

Glossary of terms

Imperial-to-metric conversions

Length

Weight

Temperature

A flaw in ones character will nowhere become so glaringly apparent as here.

Diary of Frank Bickerton, in Stephen Haddelsey, Born Adventurer: the life of Frank Bickerton , Antarctic pioneer, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2005, p. 61.

Preface

This book was meant to be part travelogue and part history. I was going to travel in the wake of Mawsons 1911 expedition to Antarctica, so that I could visit the hut in which he and other members of the expedition had sheltered for nearly two years, and look out at the windswept vista of ice and snow that had beckoned them into the unknown. However, it was not to be. As explorers have discovered over the centuries, the Antarctic has ways of disrupting carefully laid plans. In my case, a huge glacier the size of Luxembourg had floated westward to become stuck across the entrance to Commonwealth Bay, where Mawsons hut is located. The position of the glacier caused pack ice to build up and become so thick that it was impossible for our ship to force its way through to the continent. Even had the ship been able to penetrate the ice, its access to Commonwealth Bay would have been blocked by the glacier, which was stopping sea ice in the bay from being broken up by wind and wave and swept into the ocean. Two successive voyages ended in the same disappointing result. Although the continent was tantalisingly close, we had to be content with exploring the offshore pack ice.