The Nature of Ice

By Robyn Mundy

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2009 Robyn Mundy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-576-3

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE,
TO THE ANTARCTIC AND SUCCESS,
DAVIS STATION,
STEEL CROSSES,
FIELD TRAINING,
SLUSHY,
A THOUSAND RIVERS,
ZOLATOV ISLAND,
ROOKERY LAKE,
THE REAL THING,
DRESSED TO KILL,
CURLICUES OF FILM,
SUMMER SOLSTICE,
CHRISTMAS DAY,
PIONEER CROSSING,
PAQUITA DELPRAT,
CRIMSON BERGS,
THE BIRTHPLACE OF BERGS,
A MEMENTO,
ANOTHER WOMA N’S PAST,
FANG PEAK,
NORTHWARD BOUND,
THE BAY,
A NEW WAY OF SEEING,
WINTER SOLSTICE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ARCHIVAL SOURCES,

CHAPTER 1

TO THE ANTARCTIC AND SUCCESS

AURORA AUSTRALIS YAWS IN THE roll of the storm, four days out from Hobart and hurtling southward beyond the edge of the known world. Freya’s world, that is. During the night the cabin has turned into a dance floor for Blundstone boots, a fluffy seal, an empty water bottle missing its cap. As if in an act of surrender, a drawer flings open and jettisons a roll of large format film. Freya Jorgensen watches from the top bunk as it tumbles over carpet to join the motley collection.

From along the hallway, sounds of retching spill from a cabin. A tingle rises through Freya’s jaw and spreads across her lips as she teeters on the edge of nausea. If she could only open the porthole, stand before the moonlit night and draw in great gasps of cold ocean air. Her stomach rises and falls like an untethered buoy, its rhythmic wave keeping time with the curtains that fringe each bunk and glide freely on their tracks. She wedges her body diagonally and determines again to concentrate on breathing, dismiss each new thought that entices distraction. She weighs up the energy required to maintain purchase on her bunk with that of abandoning sleep and escaping the cabin altogether. Her travel clock reads 2:20 a.m., forty minutes since the last time she looked. She gives sleep one more chance, though she knows a lost cause when she sees it.

FREYA REELS ALONG THE SHIP’S corridor, out through the heavy double doors and onto the covered stern deck where she pulls on gloves and zips a padded jacket over her pyjamas. She leans against the railing above the trawl deck and looks out at the rolling mountain of ocean lit by the floodlights of the ship. With the wind screaming and steel groaning, the ship ought to tear in two, continually pummelled and pulled by the yank of the storm. Yet she feels secure aboard this ice-strengthened vessel, her feelings a contrast to the mix of dread and excitement she remembers as a child — seesawing across oceans and hemispheres to a strange southern land.

Flood lamps bathe the protected surrounds with an amber glow that drains the hurry from the ship’s lurid orange paint. Freya relishes the mood of this working deck where few stay longer than to smoke a cigarette. In the roughest seas she can stand at eye level with the ocean and watch wind peel back the caps. In daylight hours she photographs albatross and petrels wheeling across the wake, their wing tips skimming the waves with a precision that astounds her. How easy it would be to mistime the peak of the swell, to fly too low, to flounder. And yet the sea birds toy with the ocean, spiralling upward, weaving in great playful arcs, circling the ship time and again.

Aurora Australis slides into a trough and shudders to a standstill. A wave of vibration stutters down its spine, reverberating through her hands and feet. Before the ship has time to regain momentum, a new crest of water gallops forward, lifting the hull on its shoulders.

Freya moves to the first run of steps leading down to the trawl deck, but even from here she sees how easily she could lose her footing in a roll. She grips the handrail and leans out into the night.

It takes time for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark, to realise that what she took for cloud-covered moonlight is something else again. The movement is subtle at first, little more than a mystical shroud tinted with the softest hush of green. The wisp of colour begins to swell, its edges inhaling and exhaling like a creature stirring into life. She has an image, fleeting, of lying beneath such a sky roiling with emerald and gold. But Freya is not inclined to rely on childhood memories; her first eight years are filtered through the countless recollections of her mother who, after three decades in Western Australia, still yearns for the seeming perfection of their Norwegian homeland. Is she so very different from Mama, always wanting more?

‘Willing us to get there faster?’

The man pauses at the top railing before walking down the steps. Adam Singer is one of the carpenters heading to Davis Station. A few of the younger girls have been talking about him and Freya understands why: drop-dead gorgeous is right.

‘Didn’t mean to startle you.’

His gaze disarms her, and though it seems foolish — a married woman of thirty-six — she suddenly feels unsure of herself. ‘Do you think that’s an aurora out there?’

Adam leans into her side and nods. ‘First time south?’

‘Is it that obvious?’ She smiles. ‘I still can’t believe I’m on my way to Antarctica. That it’s not a dream.’

‘A year-long dream. If Davis is like Macquarie Island we’ll have plenty of good auroras through winter.’

‘I’ll have to find a way to come back. I’m only down for summer.’

‘That’s a shame.’

The ship heaves and jolts. Freya grabs for the handrail but misses. She feels herself teeter backward, stopped by Adam who snags her waist. A rush of ocean cascades over the stern and jams open the trawl gates with a deafening ring. Beneath the gridded steps they stand upon, water floods the deck. Adam does not loosen his hold and she in turn lingers, registering, in this surreal light, the invitation proffered. As intimately as a lover, he combs back threads of her white-blonde hair blown across her face while she stands mesmerised, leaning towards his touch. With an air of fascination Adam traces his finger around the birthmark that spreads across her cheek like a stain. Perhaps his blatant trespass onto tainted skin, perhaps her own returning sanity, makes her break away, her discomposure heightened by the hardness in his eyes.

He holds up his hands in a gesture of retreat. ‘Only wanting to help. Nothing more.’

Freya turns her blemished cheek away, confused, stammering thanks and apology in a single sentence. She stands rigid until Adam has gone. She looks back to her shining sky but not a wisp remains, nothing but stars strewn across the night, wind scouring the waves. AURORA AUSTRALIS LEAVES STORM AND darkness in its wake and moves through higher latitudes towards a summer of perpetual light. Within the course of a morning the air drops below freezing point, the sea chills to one degree Celsius, an indicator that at some intangible moment they have crossed the dotted line on the chart marking the Antarctic Convergence. With each changing minute of latitude illuminated on the GPS, the Southern Ocean yields to the influence of ice. Waves ease to ripples, ripples to calm, the ocean, punctuated with white, rises and falls lazily. Beyond the windows of the bridge, ice stretches towards the curve of the horizon. Ice in myriad forms. The ocean surface cools until frozen needles cluster together to form frazil ice. The ship crosses a thin sludge of grease ice that disintegrates on contact. At times they motor through pancake ice, lily pads that bob and turn. Aurora swings past crystal fields of multi-year pack-ice that rise two metres above the water’s surface. Living up to its classification, the icebreaker shears through the stratum of first-year pack-ice. At the height of each day, channels of ocean thaw, only to refreeze into fragile sheets that raft one upon the other — panes of glass the vessel snaps in two. On the radar, a tabular berg edging the sky measures fifty kilometres in length; Freya mistook the berg for a long, low cloud.

Aurora‘s captain, no older than she, has a pageboy haircut that moves in one slick motion with each turn of his head. He reminds her of photos of her husband Marcus as a boy. The captain veers the ship towards a stretch of ‘water sky’, an ominously dark band that on any Australian horizon would signal rain. Here, the sky is a chameleon, stained dark by an underbelly of ice-free ocean. ‘Look at the difference there.’ The captain points to where the sky brightens to a luminous glow. This he calls ‘ice blink’, an upward reflection from pack-ice and bergs. ‘That’s where we don’t want to end up, stuck in heavy ice and chewing through fuel. Ice blink and water sky were all they had to go on in the early polar days,’ the captain says, flicking his hair as he leans down to scan the radar. ‘You’ve got to hand it to’em, finding their way south through this.’

Aurora eases past bergs whose skirts of icicles thaw in the late afternoon light. Freya sets up her camera on the flying bridge, wishing they could turn off the engines and listen to the streams of water, could simply drift awhile with no direction in mind.

Ice crunches beneath the hull. Squadrons of cape petrels keep pace with the ship, the small birds with their black-and-white chequered wings forming a graphic blur against the electric orange hull and crystalline ocean.

Behind the viewfinder her focus is rarely deflected. She has tempered the promise of the perfect photo into disciplined restraint, resisting the wonder of the moment to weigh shape against tone and texture, to balance shadow and light. Marcus calls her driven, seldom as praise. Freya is reminded of the difference between herself and her husband when she sees him in their overgrown garden where he will sit and read for hours, seemingly oblivious to a litter of leaves, the influx of snails and weeds. Occasionally she still arms herself with clippers and a faded memory of a garden once so lush with colour and native birds, she never questioned the time she used to put into it. She has let her photography become so consuming, she wonders has she lost the ability to be part of a world beyond the boundaries of a 4 x 5 inch transparency? Not part of the programme, she averts the subject to stem her mother’s not-so-gentle reminders of time marching on, and women who want it all then leave it too late. This, she persuades herself, is all she wants. Thoughts of home and things she’ll never have eased by the unutterable beauty of ice. Freya draws back from her camera to absorb the vision that spills beyond the frame. She turns slowly on the deck as she feels against her pocket for sunglasses. She had anticipated the glisten of white, the glare of ice painful to the unprotected eye. Her collection of oversized books picked up from discount bins had long since imprinted her mind’s eye with the blue of bergs. Never had she expected this opalescence of light and colour. How can any camera capture such an impossible expanse?

She was first drawn to Antarctica through the images of Frank Hurley, photographer on Douglas Mawson’s 1911–14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. An Antarctic heaven, he named the pack-ice. Freya was still a photography student when she gazed in wonder at Hurley’s black and white photographs, fell through them as if to touch the ice. She wonders now how Frank Hurley reconciled himself to the knowledge that every nuance of colour displayed before him would be reduced to tones of grey.

Freya catches sight of a familiar face at the far railing. She knows Travis from her pre-departure training in Tasmania where he helped untangle her prusik loops and distinguish alpine butterflies. She makes her way towards him but is intercepted.

‘Freya? I’m Kittie. Davis Station weather forecaster. Fine-weather forecaster, I’m known as.’ Kittie holds out her camera. ‘I was hoping you could give me a rundown on my new toy.’

‘Happy to.’ Freya takes the camera.

‘They say when all else fails consult the manual. All else has failed, including the manual, which I managed to leave on the kitchen counter at home.’

‘Mind if I listen in?’ calls Travis, holding up his point-and-shoot.

The three sit down on the flying deck in a circle. Freya could be running one of her university extension weekend courses, giving Travis tips on how to override the automatic settings in tricky lighting scenarios, working through the different modes and menus on Kittie’s high-end SLR.

She glances up to see Adam Singer propped against the railing. He nods in her direction but declines her gestured invitation to join them.

‘You’d be all digital?’ Kittie asks.

‘For small format work. And stuff I play around with in Photoshop. I still use film for images I want to enlarge into murals.’

‘Film?’ Travis banters. ‘We’re talking acetate, chemicals, darkrooms? I wouldn’t have pegged you for a luddite, Freya.’

Freya shrugs. ‘Part of me still likes the idea of creating an original transparency. Something you can hold in your hand.’

‘Digital artist meets traditional craftswoman.’

Travis is a volunteer field assistant who will be stationed out at the Amery Ice Shelf. He looks scarcely old enough to have finished a science degree, let alone be sporting a wedding ring. Like Freya, it’s his first time south. ‘Fine-weather’ Kittie, a title that seems to extend to a sunny and boisterous disposition, has summered and wintered twice before.

‘Any tips for the uninitiated?’ Travis asks her.

Kittie snorts. ‘Out at the Amery Ice Shelf all summer? An hour’s flight away from the politics of the station? My advice, you lucky bastard, is to pinch yourself now and again.’ She raises her camera in a toast: ‘To Antarctica.’

‘To the Antarctic and success,’ Freya seconds.

Travis checks his watch. ‘And to one more sumptuous five-thirty evening meal, never mind the nursing home hours. See you down there.’ He springs to his feet and bounds away.

Kittie points at Freya’s camera. ‘What exactly is your project?’

‘My husband and I are putting together a travelling exhibition of Antarctic images, my photos alongside Frank Hurley’s first photos. A sort of Antarctica-then-and-now.’

‘Whoo-hoo!’ Kittie gives her a mock punch. ‘A breath of fresh air among the science and trades projects.’

Freya is tempted to explain more but thinks better of it. Not everyone shares your passion for Hurley’s art, Marcus would caution.

In her first, unsuccessful application to the Arts Council she had worded her proposal Themes from Hurley’s photos linking to my own. When the Council recommended further development, Marcus had comforted her: It’s certainly not a failure. What you have is the kernel of a very good idea.

‘Is he a photographer?’

‘Frank Hurley?’

‘Your husband, you schmuck!’

Freya laughs. ‘Marcus is an academic. Communications. Though in some ways he knows more about photography than I do: he taught visual theory in the early days.’

‘Dr Marcus didn’t try to stow away as your field assistant?’

‘He has teaching commitments,’ she offers, ‘and he’s busy with some research.’ Freya hesitates. ‘To be honest,’ she confides, ‘my husband tends to be a bit of a homebody.’

‘Ah.’ Kittie gives her a knowing nod. ‘My partner’s a would-be homebody. Has visions of being a stay-at-home parent with a brood of kids.’

Encumbrances, Marcus had dismissed children the one time she broached the topic. ‘You have children, Kittie?’

‘Not yet. Diana and I are hoping to adopt.’ Kittie registers Freya’s blink of surprise. ‘Believe it or not,’ she says, ‘I do tend to be closeted when I’m at the station. Doesn’t pay to stir up the homophobes.’ She taps a finger in the direction of Adam Singer at the opposite railing. ‘Case in point,’ she whispers.

‘How do you mean?’ Freya leans closer, curious in spite of herself.

‘I get the weirdest vibe from that dude. I’m here to tell you, I can pick out the egomaniacs and misogynists from a hundred paces.’

Adam? She can’t be serious. Freya is unsure whether to laugh. ‘That’s a bit harsh. You make the place sound like a hornets’ nest.’

‘Nah, there’s always one or two that come crawling out of the woodwork. The difference from home is there’s no ready means of escape. As for the rest of us, it’s a mandatory requirement to be off-centre. You would have had the unspeakable joy of the psych assessment?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Freya shudders, remembering the written test, the hour-long interview, the evaluation. You appear to be fiercely independent and professionally self-assured, yet the written tests indicate a tendency to be submissive — at times you operate out of a sense of duty.

‘It went on forever,’ she recalls. ‘How would I integrate into a tight-knit community after working so long on my own? Did I have my husband’s full support?’ Who wouldn’t feel on edge with some of the intimations? — an underlying vulnerability, a lack of self-esteem — the psychologist’s focus all the while honed in on her birthmark. He had quizzed her at length over Marcus, interjecting: But outside of the house, what do you do together — for fun? Freya had found herself back-pedalling, defending her husband and her marriage. ‘I half-expected to be told I wasn’t suitable.’

‘At mine,’ Kittie says, ‘the security guy escorted me up in the lift. When the interview was over I said to the psych, Shall I let myself out? She gives me this go-crawl-back-under-your-rock look and says, Unless you’d rather jump out the window.‘ Kittie twirls her fingers. ‘And a good day to you too, DrH appy!’

Freya drums her fists on the deck with a peal of laughter. She opens her eyes to catch Adam’s smile.

‘So there you have it,’ Kittie says. ‘We’re both certifiably insane enough to go to Antarctica.’

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Nature of Ice by Robyn Mundy. Copyright © 2009 Robyn Mundy. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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