Diary Of A Sledger The Ice On The Cake

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 1, 2007

Steve Meacham

IT IS a verbal picture which today might be taken as evidence of global warming - a group of Australians stripping to their undies as they sledge across the icy Antarctic plateau towards the South Pole.

Unfortunately Frank Hurley, arguably the greatest Antarctic photographer, did not set up his camera to record the scene.

But he did make a note in his diary on December 19, 1912: "Sledging was so hot, that we divested ourselves of our fleece suits & sweaters & hauled in shirts and combinations. What freaks we looked - it was like an Australian summer's day and we could really have partaken ice-cream with relish."

Hurley's sledging diary - scrawled in pencil between November 10, 1912, and January 10, 1913, during his first trip to the southern continent with Sir Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition - is the centrepiece of an online exhibition launched this weekend.

Hurley sold the diary to the Mitchell Library in 1919, along with the photographs he took on his three voyages south between 1911 and 1914 to record the activities of Mawson's team.

Since then, it has been available to scholars. But the entire diary can now be read by the public for the first time. Every page has been photographed, with a transcription deciphering Hurley's sometimes illegible scrawl.

Considering he quit school at 14, Hurley was a fine and evocative writer, says Stephen Martin, the library's Antarctic expert. "He wrote a quite gripping account of his sledging journey towards the South Magnetic Pole. It was a genuinely exploratory journey, going up to unexplored territory on that vast Antarctic plateau. Along the way Hurley took a few photographs, and recorded what happened in his diary."

Among the rarely seen photographs of that trip is a rediscovered self-portrait. Alan Davies, the library's photographic curator, said the picture had been somehow overlooked - at least since the 1980s when Hurley's collection was put onto an analogue archive. When the collection was digitalised, curators went back to Hurley's original negatives and found it.

Davies noted that for all Hurley's reputation for daring and recklessness, he had tethered himself in case the ice cliff broke beneath his feet.

During the sledging expedition Hurley survived falling down a crevasse, writing in his diary: "One's heart seem to jump into the mouth as he falls through in space and looks into blue nothingness."

At other times, the serenity was breathtaking: "There was not even enough wind to stir the tent and although zero, it was warm. I thought it seemed as if camped in the Australian bush and was only brought back to Antarctica by the vigorous boiling of the cooker."

Hurley and his colleagues ran out of rations on the way back to base. "They nearly got themselves into serious bother," Martin said. "But this was the beginning of Hurley's international reputation.

"Even now, more than 40 years since he died, he has almost cult status. For the first time you can read one of the early diaries and see how it started."

See the collection at www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover-collections/

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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