Damian Thorn, who would winter over as base cook, was looking forward to that. ‘I can’t wait until it gets dark. I hate the sun. This constant sunlight is doing my head in, to say the least.’
It also did his head in to work a 17.5 hour shift to prepare a dinner at Scott Base in honour of Prince Albert of Monaco. The principality had signed up to the Antarctic Treaty and the monarch had decided to tour all 27 bases on the continent. I saw him after his meal – a short, tired man who spoke with an American accent. Thorn could be found on the smoking deck, biting down on a cigarette at midnight, in the full glare of that cursed sun. The next day he was given the wrong numbers for lunch and had to face diners holding empty plates, and that morning there was a mad rush to supply packed meals for a departing flight – no one had notified the kitchen. He was not pleased. Outside, there was the terrible poetry of the mystical, ancient Antarctic; inside, there was the actual stuff of life.
It was a happy ship, run with generosity, kindness and humour. Scott Base operates as a government agency, set up to provide scientific access with minimal environmental impact. It runs on a tight annual budget of eleven million dollars. Ground staff suffer the usual joyless dictates of OSH – Occupational Safety and Health – and put in long hours. After work, they get outside, skiing, climbing, opening themselves to the amazingness of the elements. They sometimes received unexpected gifts – a hike up Mount Aurora led to the discovery of a discarded 35-kilogram jet rocket. It was nabbed, put in a backpack, and taken back to base to send home for conversion into a potbelly stove.
Country music pitched its high, warm, lonesome sound throughout the base, courtesy of Steve Locke, a Telecom technician from Christchurch who operated the radio station, among his various duties. He first came to Scott Base in 1999 ‘to upgrade for Y2K. We all knew it was cobblers but who’d turn down a trip like that?’ He had prior experience of living in obscure corners of the Earth: in 1984 he had gone to the Chathams for six months and stayed thirteen years. This was his third summer at Scott Base and his eighth visit but he wasn’t game to winter over. ‘There’s a saying here. The first time you do winter is for the experience. The second is for money. The third is because you don’t fit in anywhere else.’
And then he quoted another saying. ‘Americans come here for booze and we go there for sex.’ He meant the Americans over the hill at McMurdo Station. He added, ‘There’s probably more action when people come in for events.’ He meant the scientists who arrived for field trips. You had to watch your step on Scott Base; according to legend, the shared dormitory bedrooms meant private assignations were held in the library, the drying room, the first aid room. For most, though, sex conformed to the governing ethic of Antarctica: absence. No night, no trees, no humidity, no scent, no TV or cellphone reception, no hunting, no fishing, and – most artificial of all – no children, anywhere.
All else was the presence of nature, the weather and, possibly, God. At the terribly pretty Chapel of the Snows at McMurdo, I found Wellington priest Father Phil Cody. ‘A lot of people get involved in a spirituality down here,’ he said. ‘They are struck by the awesomeness of the place, and also its isolation – they need something to sustain them.’ I asked how many people attended Sunday service. ‘Fifteen,’ he said. McMurdo has a population of about a thousand.
God was in Hell. Death had dominion. You saw it every morning from Scott Base, looking upon Erebus, knowing what happened there. As Mike White wrote in North & South magazine, ‘We don’t even say “Mount”, we leave out “plane” and “crash” and just say “Erebus” and everyone knows what we mean.’ It didn’t look much from Scott Base, just a small white lump. From the air in a helicopter it looked vast and awful. Even that close you couldn’t comprehend the impact and the horror of what happened there at 12.49 p.m. on November 28, 1979. In his Royal Commission report into the annihilation of all 257 people on board Air New Zealand flight TE901, Justice Peter Mahon was moved to describe Antarctica as a ‘white silence’.
I have a copy of the report I bought second-hand. The previous owner had left in it a clipping from the Listener – a column by Tom Scott, published on May 16, 1981 in response to Mahon’s shocking report, which blamed Air New Zealand for the tragedy. ‘The frailty of human judgement is a persistent, if unwitting, theme to the Royal Commission findings,’ Scott wrote. And then, with some prescience: ‘Mahon’s central conclusion just might be subject to the same frailty.’
Air New Zealand has always refused to accept any blame. It also refused to apologise to families of the victims until Mike White’s North & South cover story appeared in November 2009, headlined: ‘Erebus: No peace, no apologies, no end to grief. Will the 30th anniversary be any different?’ A week after the magazine went on sale, Air New Zealand got around to answering the question: it apologised to the families.
Swedish vessel Oden, regarded as the world’s best icebreaker, docked at McMurdo. It was a big brutal thing that coughed black smoke and added to the impression that this corner of America in a foreign field looked like a dark satanic mill. It took about an hour to walk there, up and over the hill from Scott Base. There was something intensely satisfying about being able to walk from New Zealand to America. It would have felt even more intensely satisfying were it not for the sheer agony of
