Blackadder Blogs

Hello! Funny, but I haven’t written since the day I stepped off the Aurora Australis in Hobart last November at the end of voyage one. Well, I haven’t written on this blog. I’ve been pretty busy elsewhere, finishing the novel that I was researching about the first woman to reach Antarctica, writing an essay about my research and sketching out the first part of a kid’s novel about the last dog in Antarctica. It’s been a busy time and there’s a bit to report.

‘Chasing the light: a novel of Antarctica’ is being published by the Fourth Estate imprint of HarperCollins Australia in February 2013. If you’d like to stay up to date with the news and hear about any launches or readings in your area, please follow this link and sign up to the email list. I promise it will only be used sparingly for news of the book coming out! http://www.harpercollins.live.imobius.net.au/survey/Antarctica_Update/Jesse_Blackadder_Antarctica_Signup

My essay ‘The first woman and the last dog in Antarctica’ won the Guy Morrison Prize for Literary Journalism last week. It’s not published yet – I’m holding on to it till my novel comes out next year. For more details check out my website http://www.jesseblackadder.com/Jesse_Blackadder1/Guy_Morrison_Prize.html.

My first novel The Raven’s Heart is coming out in the US, Canada and the UK this September and part of the duties of an author these days is to blog! So I’ll be writing back here again, but not necessarily about Antarctica. If you’d like to keep following me that would be great, but I won’t be offended if you move on. The blog will look a little different too.

All the best

Jesse

My aurora email address presumably expires once I’m off the ship today, so any emails from now on please send to jesse@blackadder.net.au

Well don’t say you didn’t get up to the moment reports. We’re just entering the Derwent River, cruising past Bruny Island, which looks wild and rugged.

Nature has turned it on for the final stage of the trip. Cookie banged on the door last night and said there was an aurora Australis happening (the southern lights, not the ship) so I dragged my warm weather gear back out of the bag and scrambled up on deck. Darkness! Stars! And a thick sea fog low down. The top of the fog was glowing with the edges of an aurora. You’d think the winterers would have seen enough auroras for a lifetime, but a bunch of them came out on deck with glow sticks and capered around making their own auroras. The air felt deliciously moist and the darkness was like a blanket. It may not have been a spectacular aurora, but even to glimpse the edge of one was a treat.

Woke early this morning and jumped up to look out the porthole. Land ahoy! When I got up on the helideck I found it’s true – you really can smell the eucalyptus and it’s the most wonderful scent, makes you think of crushing a gum leaf in your hand. Cookie said the scent of rain and the feeling of moisture in his nostrils was incredible.

After breakfast I went back up to watch albatross circling around the ship and lots of brown birds – shearwaters I suppose. Managed a couple of photos of the albatross and Tui identified it as a shy one. That’s a species name, not a personality trait – apparently shy albatross nest near here.

And then – turned around to see a pod of whales giving us a tail-slapping, pectoral slapping welcome back home.

The mobile phones are coughing into life (or at least the Telstra ones – mine is still dead as a doornail), all our bags are packed, this incredible voyage is coming to an end. I feel very emotional standing up on the deck and seeing land again – and I’ve only been gone five weeks. It must be extraordinary for the winterers.

I’m not quite done with writing yet – you’ll be getting more updates over the next week or so – but next time I write I’ll be on land.

Thanks for coming along on the journey with me.

Love Jesse xxx

One of the V1 expeditioners has lived through a hard-to-imagine disappointment on the trip. After getting through the competitive selection process, passing the polar medical and participating in the training program, Chris boarded V1 all ready to start his summer season as a tradie at Davis. But fate had other plans – a medical issue arose on the voyage that meant the medical clearance was withdrawn – and Chris had to watch his new mates settle in to Davis and start their summer without him. Instead Chris has made a round trip and has to get back to Hobart and face new tests before knowing if he’ll get another chance to go to Antarctica.

It did mean Chris was with me on the field trip as a kind of consolation and a chance to experience something of Antarctica.

Chris, I really admire your spirit in handling this – and I’m not the only one. Fingers crossed you’ll get an all clear and be able to head south soon again. And a big hello to your family if you’re reading this – at least you’ll have Chris home for Christmas.

I was just meandering through the library and picked up a book I’d missed on my previous browsing forays – Tim Bowden’s book “Antarctica and back in sixty days”. Tim went to Antarctica in 1989 aboard the ship Icebird as a journalist on an AAD program not unlike the one I’ve enjoyed. I’m so tempted to steal this copy so I can read it right NOW, but I will restrain myself and find one back in Australia (or stay up all night).

Tim Bowden, well known ABC journo, is now also well known Antarctic veteran and has authored at least one other book on Antarctica apart from this one. I very much hope he won’t mind me reproducing his beautiful poem from the front of the book, under the dedication:

For Ros

COMING HOME

Fat droplets of warm rain
Slither slowly down my porthole winder
Where frozen fragments of ice
Whirled past wildly only days ago.
I am coming home.
To you.

Perhaps palm trees grew all the time
In Antarctica once.
Now patches of green algae stain
The underside of fragments of quartz rock.
A smear of lichen, patches of moss
Struggling for survival
Are an Antarctic forest.

I wondered if you would like it here,
But I could not think of you without pain -
Until the last iceberg ghosted past my porthole
And the first raindrops signalled I was coming home.
To you.

Icebird, Southern Ocean, 23 February 1989.

I’d like to dedicate that reproduction of Tim’s poem not only to my sweet Andi, who I can’t wait to see again, but to all the partners and families and friends of Antarctic expeditioners, (summerers, winterers and round trippers) who so generously allow us to follow our wild dreams and wait for us to come home.

Today’s our last full day on the ship – we have to be out of our cabins in the morning and I expect just about everyone will be up on deck for the first sight of land before we dock after lunch. Some of the people on this ship haven’t seen a tree for 18 months. This morning we had a big scrub of the mess and the galley, getting into those nasty little joins in the stainless steel with steel wool. In an hour I have to hand back the returnable items of my Antarctic clothing issue – most things you’ve worn close to your skin are yours to keep, such as thermals.

But! I haven’t finished the story of the first woman to reach Antarctica yet, and there might be no chance to blog tomorrow, so now’s my chance.

I’d got up to telling you about Alan Parker’s theory that Caroline Mikkelsen really did land on the mainland, but the site hasn’t been found yet. If you need a revision, go back to the blog post called ‘The plot thickens’. Alan had some ideas about where the real landing site might be, based on drawings made by Caroline’s husband at the time, and just about every year for the past, well maybe 20 years, Alan has asked people living at Davis Station to go searching for it, supplying coordinates and maps and suggestions.

And search they have. Several of the people who have been out there to look around are on the ship now and it seems like there’s been a huge effort to search those areas that Alan Parker has suggested, with multiple trips over many years to try and find evidence of Caroline on the mainland. So far they’ve come up with nothing.

Cookie sat me down to compare the original 1935 photo showing Caroline raising the flag, and contemporary images of the site taken specifically for the purpose of comparison. ‘The secret to finding the cairn is in the rocks’, as Alan Parker scribbled on one of his maps. Cookie reckons that a careful comparison of the two photos shows quite clearly that they are the same place – that Caroline is indeed standing on Tryne Island. On board the ship we only have a photocopy of the 1935 photo, so it’s hard for me to be sure, but Cookie’s not the only one who’s certain the photo is on Tryne Island – others who’ve gone there agree.

“That doesn’t mean she never landed on the mainland,” Cookie says, “but I haven’t seen any evidence yet that she did – no photos that are clearly taken on the mainland and no cairn.”

I’d like to put the photos up to show you, but it’s not possible from the ship – however I’ll do my best to organise it once I get back (if you’re still reading).

I had no idea that there was such interest in Caroline’s landing down here and it was very heartening. Most of the time I’ve been researching the earliest women to reach Antarctica I’ve felt like I was out in the wilderness and no one cared much. But down here on the ground, where history can be seen and touched, it’s much more alive. Climbing up to the Wilkins Cairn, not far from Tryne Island, is a real thrill because you can open up the original box and look at the documents that were left there in 1939 and unroll the flag and let it fly. Wilkins left two other secret cairns from that expedition, concerned that the American expedition leader Ellesworth was claiming land for America that had already been claimed by Australia. Cookie’s been out looking for those too, but no luck so far. Wilkins described one of them as a three inch hole in the rock – he put a canister in there and put another rock over the top of the hole. Anyone who could find that deserves a medal.

But I digress. Until evidence is found to the contrary, it appears Caroline Mikkelsen landed on Tryne Island and not the Antarctic mainland.

That means when Ingrid finally achieved her dream of landing on Antarctica in 1937, with her daughter Sofie and two other women (Solveig Wideroe and Lillemor Rachlew), after three previous voyages to Antarctica and at least one attempted landing, she was in fact the first woman to step on the Antarctic mainland.

And – it seems no one has thought to go looking for her landing site yet. Scullin Monolith is much harder to get to than Tryne Island, so opportunities for searching aren’t as regular and it certainly wasn’t something a round tripper like me could fit in.

Now some of you are probably thinking why on earth would such a thing matter? Is there any importance attached to who got there first and if one landed on an island and the other didn’t?

I’m not sure if I can explain it, but I’ll try. Neither Ingrid nor Caroline were explorers in their own right – they got to Antarctica as companions for their husbands and many would think this isn’t deserving of recognition or of being written up in the history books. But remember – way back early in the trip – those newspaper articles I quoted about women wanting to go to Antarctica? A year or two after Ingrid landed, 1300 women applied to be included in one British expedition – none of them got a look in. Right up until the 1970s and even 1980s it was still damned hard for women to get to Antarctica at all. Female adventurers and explorers hadn’t found a way to get themselves to Antarctica and so, Ingrid, her companions, and Caroline were all pioneers, the first to take up one of the few opportunities for a woman to go south.

(Another digression – I did come across a fascinating anecdote about a Norwegian woman who stowed away on the whaling ship Christianna before 1932 so she could be the first woman to Antarctica, and then stowed away a second time after they attempted to dump her at South Georgia – but when I tried to find out the truth of the story in Norway and went back through old shipping records (with a lot of help, as they were in Norwegian), no one could find that a whaling ship of that name had existed.)

So it seems to me that Ingrid’s story is one that deserves telling. Although she and her husband would have travelled in comfort, if not luxury, the photos from the time show that the voyage was still very rough and long, and she would have confronted the whaling factory ships which were notoriously disgusting, with a stench that travelled for miles. So she was a woman with plenty of gumption, and the determination to leave her children and go four times to Antarctica.

Now, I have to take all of that unwieldy real life history of Ingrid and work it into a novel, which is something of a challenge. I haven’t managed to finish my first draft on this voyage, as I’d hoped, but I blame that on the extremely fast trip – I’m sure if we’d been sailing till next Wednesday I would have made it, though it would have been pretty rough around the edges. As it is, I’m reasonably close and now reckon I will have a better-than-rough draft done before Christmas, with the aim of having it polished and ready for the publisher by the middle of next year.

Antarctica breeds obsessions. Ingrid has become mine, for better or worse. And if you’re not a scientist or a tradesperson (or even if you are), it helps to have an obsession to get you to Antarctica.

Now I have to confide my dream. The story isn’t over for me… Imagine if I could go back to Antarctica and find Ingrid’s landing site…I have a plan.

Australian Antarctic Division, you haven’t heard the last of me.

Ciao for now – more later

Jesse xxx

Before I get on to the qualities of Antarctic silence, I just have to run you through my morning. Determined to halt the slow creep of time-difference-adjustment sleeping in, I set my alarm for 7.30, struggled up by 7.45, had breakfast, peeled spuds for an hour or two, and as things were so smooth I headed for the gym. However even a slight motion when you’re on a treadmill feels very weird – I had to run holding on to the bar and I felt a bit whoozy when I got off. Shower, lunch, at the desk by midday – except now I’m stuffed and want to have an afternoon nap.

Wilkins cairn

Anyway – cast your minds off the ship and back to Antarctica itself, out on my field trip. After we’d hung around Caroline Mikkelsen’s cairn, enjoyed the antics of the nesting Adelies and had a picnic by the Hagg, we climbed up Walkabout Rocks to visit the Wilkins cairn (which is where the earlier picture of me with the flag and Stay came from) and then set out again the Hagg to look for seals, bouncing along the sea ice and over the sastrugi, winding our way around azure blue icebergs.

This part of the Vestfold Hills is a known weddell seal pupping area, so it wasn’t long before we came across seals and their pups hauled out on the ice. Now I know most of the pictures you see of these guys look very endearing with their turned up smiley mouths and their big round eyes, but the truth is they spend much of their time lying on their backs asleep looking like giant slugs.

The impression is even stronger if they start moving around, as they glollop along the ground with their blubber rippling and wobbling. Not that I can point the finger at any other creature carrying a little excess condition. But you can stand and watch for ages and if you’re lucky they’ll open one eye, regard you for a moment, decide that you’re irrelevant and go back to sleep. It is very hard to resist the temptation to go up and give them a good poke. But of course as they’re pupping, the distance you have to stay from them is even further than usual.

To pass the time while the seals were sleeping, I was telling Laser Dave about a guy I met at the Antarctica conference in Canberra in June. It was a wild and wonderful conference hosted by the ANU School of Music and many previous Antarctic Arts Fellows were there, including a number from America who’ve gone down on the equivalent US program. Doug Quin was one of those – he works in sound recording and did underwater recordings of weddell seals. In one memorable conference session he turned off all the lights, turned up the sound and played us a quadrophonic soundscape of weddell seals underwater. I tell you – it’s another world down there under the ice. If you thought whale song sounded amazing, you’d love to hear the seals. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that these sounds could come from a mammal. The closest comparison I can give you is that album Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre from sometime last century. These guys are the original Moog synthesisers.

Anyway, as I was telling Dave about this we both paused for a moment and then… up through the ice… very faint… I heard one! Those alien synthesiser noises were coming up from the sea ice beneath my feet. I dropped to the ground and pressed my ear to the sea ice and caught a little more of it. The other three looked at me like I was mad, but I didn’t care. It was fantastic. Thanks Doug – if I hadn’t heard your recordings I doubt I would have noticed that faint sound coming up through the ice. It’s one of those moments that will really stay with me.

Actually I’m being a bit tough on the seals – even asleep they are fascinating. They don’t have any land predators so they flop down and snooze in a manner that’s the epitome of unconcerned relaxation. The pups are much more lively and interested in people – they peer around to look at you, then hide a bit, then look again. If you’re patient and watch for mother and pup interacting, it’s very endearing.

Sunset in fjord

After the seals we headed inland, moving away from the coastal areas where there are lots of icebergs frozen into the sea ice, and into the fjords. You can see why it’s named after a part of Norway – these long fjords twist and snake around, with dozens of little bays. I was mesmerised by the sea ice – the different colours and textures, how translucent and blue it looks at times, the cracks and shapes in it. The sea ice and snow look like sky and clouds. In some places it seems like it’s frozen when the water was choppy and the surface is covered with little wavelets.

Snow petrel

At the end of one of the fjords we came to Platcha Hut. I think this was my favourite spot on the field trip – and that was even before I realised it was the picture I’d had on my computer desktop for years. The sea ice was aqua blue, a great wave of snow hung over it from the plateau above, and little white petrels fluttered around the rocky cliffs in the evening light.

I had another moment that I’m storing away in my memory, hopefully forever. After dinner, as it was getting late, I went out by myself and walked onto the sea ice, out into the middle of the fjord. The big Antarctic silence was all around, broken by the soft plink, crack, whisper, hiss of the sea ice itself.

The ocean is down there a metre or two below the surface and the tides are still coming in and out, so the ice is always in motion.

Antarctica is big and sometimes overwhelming and they’re two memories I can easily hold on to. The sound of the weddell seals and the sound of the ice.

Jesse xxx