From A Great Adventurer On Behalf Of His Long-gone Hero: A Plea To Britain To Help Preserve History Frozen In Time
The Age
Tuesday January 23, 2007
SIR EDMUND Hillary has attacked the British for leaving New Zealand to pick up the bill to save the Antarctic huts used by English explorers a century ago.
Sir Edmund made a nostalgic visit yesterday back to the hut built by Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose adventures in the Antarctic had enthralled him as a child and motivated him to became a polar explorer himself. But the man famed as the first up Mount Everest and, more latterly, as a conservationist slated Britain for failing to aid efforts to prevent the huts succumbing to the harsh Antarctic weather, despite requests from New Zealanders to give them a hand. "They seem to completely ignore huts like these. I can't understand it," said Sir Edmund, who has returned to Antarctica 50 years after he established the first New Zealand base there. "I send the message around a lot of important people in the UK, suggesting that these huts here, Scott's and Shackleton's, were really memorials to some great British explorers and the British really should take some more interest in them. It's a bit disappointing that they haven't." He and Prime Minister Helen Clark visited the small New Zealand-led team, which has spent the summer working to save Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds from succumbing to the weather. The team has endured temperatures of minus 40 and for the past three weeks has included James Blake, the 20-year-old son of yachtsman Sir Peter Blake.Miss Clark announced that an Antarctic Youth Ambassador scheme would ensure that each year young New Zealanders would continue to get the chance to help the Christchurch-based Antarctic Heritage Trust's work at the huts.Miss Clark also visited the nearby hut at Cape Evans that Robert Falcon Scott left in 1911 to reach the South Pole, never to return. The hut still features Scott's bunk, complete with his fur sleeping bag and hot water bottle. On his table nearby lies a copy of the Illustrated London News and a dead emperor penguin. Miss Clark said she was amazed by the evocative quality of the huts but saddened by the British Government's failure to help New Zealand save them, despite years of high-level lobbying by her and others. "It's amazing to see huts that are just as they were when the people left them, pretty much a century ago," she said. "Anywhere else in the world where there are people around, they would have been ransacked. I think the opportunity there is to keep these huts as they were is incredibly important." She had raised the issue with British Prime Minister Tony Blair as recently as November and, although no help has followed, it could be coming. "We've certainly got advocates in the British Government and I remain hopeful," she said. The New Zealand Government met all the infrastructure costs of the Antarctic Heritage Trust, so that every dollar it raised from outside would go towards saving the huts built in the "heroic age" of Antarctic exploration. Three of the four huts are on Ross Island near New Zealand's Scott Base, which celebrated its 50th anniversary at the weekend. For Sir Edmund, his final visit to Shackleton's hut was the chance for him to soak in the atmosphere of an adventurer who had inspired him. Yesterday, he sat amid the bunks in which 15 men spent an Antarctic winter before making an attempt at the pole that ended 156 kilometres short. Sir Edmund said that he took Shackleton as his role model and became "the completely unreliable type who'd make decisions on where we'd go and what we'd do according to what seemed best at the time"."I think, in the end, my plan worked out rather more successfully. "I feel I was slightly more irresponsible and the sort of Shackleton type and I was happy to be that way."
© 2007 The Age
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