The Nature of Ice (6 page)

‘Which of us should be more grateful?' Douglas spoke without caution. ‘Hannam for his surplus padding, or the rest of us for nailing extra braces to the framework of the hut?'

‘Poor old fat boy.' Hurley chortled and Douglas chided himself for disregarding a rule of leadership he'd admired in Ernest Shackleton: be fair, firm and friendly,
never familiar
.

The men had all filtered indoors except for Mertz, who pushed away on skis, head down, moving out of sight beyond the rise.

‘Look at her sitting there, timbers gleaming,' Hurley nodded to winter quarters, ‘an outpost of the Empire amid all this untamed glory. And beyond that rise, Doc, who knows what's in store for us?'

‘We, and your camera, will be the first to explore it.'

‘It's the kind of adventure every fellow dreams of.' Hurley turned to him. ‘From what I hear, a number of us were up against some stiff competition—older, more experienced chaps.'

‘Youth and vigour, Hurley. I needed men with the recuperative powers to withstand harsh conditions and extreme discomfort.' That was another thing he'd learned on Shackleton's expedition, hauling across an endless tract of ice not just a laden sledge but also an ageing sledging companion—his old geology professor and mentor; cajoling the Prof to keep moving, at times admonishing him as though he was a badly behaved child, turning at the sound of his cry to witness the horror of him scrabbling on hands and knees while their companion kicked him like a dog.

‘And here was I thinking I'd impressed you with artistic talent.'

‘Don't misunderstand me, Hurley. The need for a first-rate photographic record is the sole reason you are here.' Every camera enthusiast in Australia had applied for the role of expedition photographer. Though his colleagues thought Hurley a remarkably fine photographer, he had no cinematograph experience. ‘From personal know-how, some of the best scenes are to be got on sledging journeys. As fortune would have it, you came equipped with the necessary build and constitution.' Indeed, Douglas would have sacrificed the photographic results rather than include a weak link in the team.

He recalled the drive to raise fifty thousand pounds in less than a year from a British public who had already given generously to Scott's South Pole expedition. The appeal in London's
Daily Mail
to raise enough money for a ship to get started; months in their Lower Regent Street office first sending out requests to manufacturers, then letters thanking firms for tins of rabbit, plum pudding, sewing machines and tobacco, glaxo milk powder, candles—and soap, of which they'd received enough to lather the Southern Ocean. He could happily go on travelling for the rest of time, but to organise another expedition . . .

Douglas saw Mertz reappear, a compact figure weaving down the slope on skis, seeking out undulations that sent him gliding through the air. He watched as X eased to a standstill near the dogs.

‘The first Swiss to ski in Antartica,' Hurley said. ‘He makes it look dead easy,'

Ginger would have bowled X over had her chain been longer. She nuzzled under his arm as he untethered his skis. He scratched her back and she leaned her weight against his leg, her tongue lapping at the air.

Then the dogs pricked their ears in unison; penguins halted in their tracks. Douglas watched X smile with the sweetness of the melody rising from the hut.

Ginger laid her ears flat when X hoisted her up by her front legs and placed her paws on his chest. He stepped from side to side, one hand on his dance partner's back, the other resting on her paw. Mertz and Ginger swayed to ‘The Shepherd's Cradle Song'; the lullaby playing on the gramophone spilled across the bay. On each turn Ginger hopped and shuffled; with each step she licked her master's chin.

Douglas nodded. ‘The first to dance.'

Xavier Mertz at Land's End

FIELD
TRAINING

FREYA SAVOURS THE HOUR: too early for helicopters to begin their day. Her pack and camera case rest against her studio door, everything double-checked and ready to go. She fires off a quick email:
About to leave for field training. Hoping for fine
weather and photos to match
.
Back Sunday.
Within a minute her laptop chimes with her husband's reply:
TAKE CARE
OUT THERE!

Long ago, when he was her tutor, Marcus introduced Freya to Hurley's pictorial world, and led her to question the truth in her own photography.
Mediation and manipulation have been
part of photography from its early days
. He had held up a Hurley image before the class.
Take the process of composing, positioning
the subject, cropping objects the photographer considers extraneous
or an interruption. In this sense, doesn't every photo lie?

She studies Hurley's photo now.
Xavier Mertz at Land's
End
. Carefully posed near the ice cliff, the figure of Mertz offers more than scale to the icescape. An enduring Hurley theme was human fragility pitted against the might of nature. Hurley captures Mertz's awe as he gazes out across the sea ice, the low-angle light dragging his shadow back across the snow. Did Xavier Mertz have any premonition of what lay ahead?

When your own shutter blinks
—Marcus's eyes had swept the tutorial room—
think about the story you're showing. Then
look at what you're masking.

A.memory from earlier in the week dances before Freya's eyes.
Not a smart idea
, the man driving the bulldozer had said, unable to hide his disdain at finding her out on the ice alone. Neither smart, nor her proudest moment. Marcus, if she told him, would struggle to imagine his wife defying the rules.

In a small, primitive darkroom at Commonwealth Bay, Frank Hurley brought this image of Mertz into being, meticulously retouching the negative, using camelhair brushes and developer to tease out highlights and shadows. Hurley worked like an impressionist painter, drawing on brushstroke and colour to create light and shade, to reveal a deeper truth.

Sensate truth
, Marcus termed Hurley's art, and framed Freya's face with his gaze.

At the end of her final semester at the photography college, Marcus had encouraged her to stay in Melbourne and urged her to take her portfolio to a dozen contacts on a list he'd prepared, convinced she had the talent to strike out on her own. Of course she accepted his invitation to celebrate her first paid assignment.
To new beginnings
, he had toasted.

‘WE BEGAN HERE.' THE FIELD training officer traces on the map the route Freya had taken. ‘And we were looking sweet all the way up here. Waypoint 228,' Simon taps the map, ‘is where we started going walkabout.' The GPS, the size of a mobile phone and every bit as intrusive, is passed around the field training circle for all to acknowledge Freya's unplanned 5.2-kilometre detour. Latitude, longitude, minutes, seconds; dozens of satellites map the globe with frightening acuity, ten of their stealthy eyes fixed upon the ice edge where the training group confers.

‘If you have access to a GPS,' asks Travis, beside her, ‘why would you bother with a compass?'

Freya silently agrees.

‘Chances are, you won't use anything but a GPS over summer. They're all well and good until your batteries run flat, or your LCD gives out with the cold.' Simon rests the map on the seat of his quad bike. He takes Freya's compass and demonstrates again how to adjust for magnetic deviation. ‘Remember, folks,' he draws a pocket-sized book from his jacket and waves it like a spruiker touting programs at a fair, ‘Simon says. Whatever you need to know, the information is all here in your field manuals.'

The four trainees, Freya now at the rear, follow Simon Says in a single line back through iceberg alley, weaving between the same towering bergs, meandering past the same field of waist-high snow, avoiding the same crests of ice that Freya led them safely by when outward bound. She can't help dwelling on her ineptitude. What if other people's safety depended on her navigation?
A girl in need of rescue
, Marcus began calling her years ago, on the night she took a wrong turn while showing him her city, and hurtled down an alleyway to a dead end. He was as certain of his feelings then as he was of his sense of direction. After she moved from Melbourne back to Perth he had appeared unannounced on the doorstep of her unit, the fragrance of the bedraggled posy in his hand engulfing, as was her image of him smuggling hand-picked sprigs of daphne across the continent.

No unlit street signs to blame out here: just her own shoddy compass work, though no one is insensitive enough to say so. Simon and the training group are kind, encouraging, which only adds to Freya's sting of failure. All day her focus has been pulled and pushed by all this wonder, her mind raking through ideas on how to photograph the ice—dismissing the notion of black and white amid all this colour and texture, the quality of light, the incomprehensible magnitude of the place. Did she take a compass bearing as often as she ought? Did she add or subtract for magnetic deviation? Travis joked that she'd lured them astray on purpose. Everyone agreed that the path she blazed out to the ocean added a brilliant photo opportunity to an already outstanding day of navigational training—the water sparkling, the ice edge alive with the hubbub of penguins.

Freya has her work cut out keeping pace with the bikes ahead, her oversized helmet requiring constant attention to stop it sliding forward. This irrational dislike she has for enclosure—what kind of person knowingly chooses a helmet several sizes too large? She releases her grip on the handlebar and pushes at the headgear. She has less than a second to feel her body rise as her bike becomes airborne, launched by an unseen wave of sastrugi. Time moves in frames. She feels as weightless as a bird. Freya looks out upon a surface of crystal blue shimmering in silver light. She sees a blur of peacock green and red, the clothing and bike of the rider ahead wheeling through the ice. In the time it takes a shutter to blink, Freya captures the spark of a photographic idea: a summer aurora, its celestial lights streaked vivid through the ice. Her quad lands with a jarring thud, skittles over ice and returns with a flick of its tail to the furrow of tracks
.
The helmet droops over her eyes again like a forelock from an unkempt mane.

BANDITS HUT STANDS THIRTY KILOMETRES north of Davis Station. Another ten k's, a mere hop and a skip, and they would be at Walkabout Rocks, the station's northern boundary.

Pockets of steam lift the lid from a pot of melted snow, mist upon the window waxes and wanes. Though Freya feels weary from a full day of training, she leaves her companions to the warmth of the field hut, its gas heater glowing, a clutter of Scrabble tiles spilled upon a board.

Outside cold bites at her skin. Shadows stretch the length of the frozen fjord. Bergs on the horizon rest in evening light. Below, five quad bikes nestle between the shadow of stone and undulations of broken ice—the tide crack, which can be seen rammed against every outcrop of land. Freya breaks off a wedge of chocolate, her last bar, having demolished the rest of her monthly supply in her first two weeks at the station. She savours the bittersweet square as it thaws and melts inside her mouth. No matter that it's Old Gold and five years out of date.

Granite dykes meander the length and width of the Vestfold Hills, corridors of shiny black that crisscross the rocks like a cobbled road. On the southern horizon luminescence glows from the river of ice they call the Sørsdal; the large glacier with its fissured tongue slicks out across the ocean to mark the station's southern boundary. Beyond the hills the icecap, always the icecap, beguiling in its blush of rose. She turns in circles, drawing in the wonder of the place, giddied with the reality of being here, immersed in its beauty and expanse. She will photograph it all, from Walkabout Rocks to the Sørsdal Glacier, the calm and wild of the place. This, she knows, reaching for her camera, is joy.

The lookout above the hut is capped with boulders as crimson as the evening light. The air surrounding her is charged with life. Angel wings blur in Freya's camera shutter: snow petrels darting and swooping, agile with every turn. The night is filled with the chatter of these birds no larger than doves, flashes of white fluttering into and out of rocky crevices.

Freya hears a bird call. She kneels upon the rock and whistles a quavered note, then hears from beneath her feet a soft trill in reply. She releases her camera from its tripod and scrambles down to where she can lie flat and squint into a rocky cleft. She can see deep inside a pair of glassy beads peering out. The snow petrel, small and white, could fit in the cup of her hands. How does a bird so seemingly fragile exist in such a hostile place? Freya watches and absorbs, struck by a sense of the familiar, and remembers, Frank Hurley's image of a snow petrel, identical to the scene before her.
To shared discoveries
; Freya whistles and the snow petrel tilts her head, she studies Freya for a time. Finally, the bird plumps her breast feathers, closes her eyes and tucks her head into a curve of downy white. She knows she is beyond reach, safe, protected by her hug of rock.