The Nature of Ice (13 page)

CHAD POINTS OUT THE LOCATIONS of the three adélie colonies in the vicinity, the furthest an easy thirty-minute walk ordinarily, but something of an ordeal, he fears, if they have to lug her heavy camera gear. He gives a silent
yes!
when she chooses the closest colony to photograph; its feathered residents are visible from the Apple, close enough to pick up their acrid odour.

They trundle over snow-covered rock laden with her cases and packs. She carries more than her fair share and he's surprised at the weight she manages; but how she thought she would do this project alone is beyond him—with her swag of cameras—digital, 35-millimetre, large and panoramic format—as well as lenses, film and tripod, she has more in her kit than any one person can carry.

The rookery is all brays and bustle, the to-ing and fro-ing as frenetic as any mainland city rush hour.

‘If you're sure you don't need my help,' he says, ‘I thought I'd take a wander across the rocks, check out the other two colonies. You still have your VH F?'

Freya pats the radio in her pocket. ‘I'll leave it on channel eight, same as last time.'

‘Call me if you need a hand?'

‘Promise.' She shouts after him above the din: ‘What time do you want to meet for dinner?'

‘Eight-thirty at the Apple give you enough time?'

‘Eight-thirty it is.' She gives a businesslike nod.

The middle colony Chad treks to is a hurly-burly of nest building, stone-stealing, dustups and full-on flipper-smacking, beak-battering brawls. At the same time, however, first-time couples, and new arrivals reunited after a winter apart stand together in a swoon, displaying the distinctive adélie breeding ritual: chests swelling, necks extending like concertinas, eyes rolled down and a hypnotic swaying of heads as they bray
.
Established pairs take turns at egg sitting, one mate taking custody of the nest until the other returns from foraging at sea.

Stones may be gold to an adélie, but to a south polar skua the bounty of a penguin's nest lies within. Chad sees two skuas strategically positioned on the perimeter of the rookery. A third does a flyover, scrutinising the colony. The skuas bide their time, waiting for a squabble to break out and a tasty penguin egg to lie exposed or inadvertently tumble from a nest. Sure enough, within minutes the skua in the air swoops down amid the throng and rises again with an egg clutched in its beak. The area directly under siege shrieks; neighbouring penguins hunker down.

Chad ambles over the rocky hill towards the third and furthest colony, skirting around a fresh scrape of rocks when he hears the
kek, kek, kek
warning from a skua hovering overhead. Most people hold skuas in low esteem, repulsed by their practice of snatching live penguin chicks as well as eggs to feed their young. But Chad regards the feisty birds with quiet admiration. Skua parents will tackle any intruder— feathered or human—who encroaches on their territory. They will dive bomb the unwary, or fly straight at you, a formidable beak and a murderous glint in their eyes, dropping their feet in readiness to thwack your skull and unhinge your frontal lobe. They'll hammer you with their beak while you cringe and cower, shadowing you even as you run for dear life. Only then, once you have reached a respectable distance and found a place to recover while your heart stops pounding, will they settle down two metres away to let you admire the view. They'll plump their coffee-coloured feathers, tuck in their wings and blink at you adoringly, as docile as doves.

An adélie versus a skua? Give him a skua any day. Such vehement protectiveness could measure up to that of any doting matriarch; could even rival Ma's.

Chad remembers counting the hours until her expected return. His father had initially proven a poor second in fulfilling his requests for special treats. Dad couldn't whip up a plate of chocolate crackles festive in paper patty cases; nor could he produce, as Ma would magically have done, a brand-new comic book or even a choo-choo bar set aside for just such a crisis. His stitches aching, Chad had lain in bed bored and morose, his stack of
Richie Rich
,
Phantom
and
Casper
comics reread too many times.

But his father's one startling effort was compensation for any lack of matriarchal wizardry: he had given Chad the transistor radio to put next to his bed. The reception, his father warned, twisting the aerial this way and that, would be weaker during the day than at night. Chad would have to settle—
I don't want
any grizzling
—for whatever they could raise on the dial. Still, to be entrusted with his father's prized possession had made an eleven-year-old feel grown up, almost a teenager.

Yet the glow soon wore off. No matter how he wound the dial or wiggled the aerial, Chad failed to pick up above the static anything more audible than the ABC's agricultural report. Not a single cricket test, no songs, no serials, just the announcer's posh and proper voice droning away about Tasmania's fruit export industry being on the verge of extinction.

The rhythmic monotony of the report was suddenly interrupted by
an important news bulletin
. The reporter's voice had a new edge to it:

Repeating earlier headlines of the Tasman Bridge disaster. At nine-thirty last night, the
Lake Illawarra
, an 11,000-tonne bulk ore carrier transporting a load of zinc concentrates from Port Pirie, lost steerage in the Derwent River and struck the Tasman Bridge. The ship collided with two sets of pylons near the eastern end of the bridge, causing the collapse of three deck spans. At first light, divers . . .

A collapse of the bridge? The Tasman Bridge.
Their
bridge.
Dad!

A hail of roadway above the impact point guaranteed the same fate for the ship as the ship brought to the bridge: tonnes of concrete and girders of steel rained down upon the
Lake
Illawarra
along with a brief cascade of cars that plunged through the blackened chasm, carrying motorists to watery tombs. Within minutes the blighted ship had sounded like a whale, straight down to the river bed with its cargo of Broken Hill zinc and seven crewmen mustered in the smoke room with no prospect of escape.

IT IS CLOSE TO DINNER time when Chad approaches the Apple, its red dome aglow in evening light. He sees no sign of Freya returning; she must still be lingering at the rookery with her camera, soaking up the light. He walks by the shallow tarn and sits down on a rock. For as long as he's visited the area this lake has been the venue of a skua club: dozens of birds congregate here to bathe and socialise. Their gregariousness is a little-known endearing side of an otherwise maligned disposition. Outside their individual territories, neighbouring birds will sit together at the edge of the tarn, preening their feathers and clucking like old pals kicking back at the baths.

Freya's camera gear sits heaped on the hidden side of the Apple and it strikes Chad that she would have made two trips to ferry it back on her own. Three adélies confer around the assorted gear, their pea-sized brains entranced by the array of shapes and stone-like shades. When Chad tries the hut door he finds the handle locked; he can hear Freya rustling about inside.

‘Who is it?' she answers his knock.

He shakes his head, looks around wryly. ‘Who were you expecting?' There is a discord of squawks from the three musketeers.

It takes him a moment to register that the girlish laugh from within the Apple is hers. ‘Just a minute,' she calls.

The door soon opens to a billow of steam and a delectable aroma wafting from the stove. The inside of the Apple is adorned with party balloons and a birthday banner. There's beer, wine, cake, candles to blow out, even fancy Swiss chocolates sent down by her husband, Marcus,
to tide me over
. There's a birthday gift wrapped in paper serviettes and tied with twine— two chocolate cherry bars and a packet of his favourite gingernuts.

He cradles his plate on his knees, sipping wine from an insulated mug, assailed by balloons; the gas heater is glowing, door ajar, penguins pad past. He feels ten years old again, indulged and special, a birthday boy as tipsy with pleasure as he's growing from wine.

After dinner he reclines on his bunk beneath the Apple's porthole window, completing his journal entry.

November 25. Rookery Lake. 42nd birthday (you old bugger). Clear
sky, wind nil. Assistant to Freya. Adélies on eggs. Plenty of skua action
at middle and northern rookery. Slap-up dinner.

Curled in her sleeping bag opposite, Freya turns the pages of her book, her elbow propped on a pillow.

‘How's Mawson's diary coming along?'

‘Okay,' she says half-heartedly. ‘He can be a little dull.'

‘Dull?' Chad bellows, past caring that he's three sheets to the wind. ‘I heard you and Malcolm singing his praises the other day. Now you don't like him.'

‘Oh, stop.' She laughs. ‘It isn't that I don't like him. He's just a hard person to know; there's so much he doesn't say.'

She should talk. ‘Like what?'

‘Well, now Captain Davis, he tells it straight, no holds barred. But with Mawson, there's so little emotion. It's all so rational and stoic. It's hard to imagine there's a real person with feelings beneath the words.' She responds to Chad's puzzled expression. ‘Like this,' she says, leafing back through the pages. ‘Since we're onto birthdays.'

19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in a bad
way. This is Paquita's birthday.

Chad blinks, fearing he's missed the point.

‘Three measly snippets,' Freya looks across at him with a trace of exasperation. ‘It doesn't say a thing about what's happening around him in the hut, the seventeen other men, what they did, who said what, not a word of what he's thinking. And his fiancée—it's practically his first mention of Paquita Delprat in the eight months he's been at Commonwealth Bay. It's as if she's a postscript, tacked on after the weather and the dogs.' Freya stretches the ribbon marker down the spine. ‘My husband says if you only relied on his journal you could easily think him unfeeling.'

Chad thinks it unwise to admit he'd prefer that to the tripe some people fill their diaries with. ‘Why persevere with it?'

‘Research for the exhibition.' She sighs. ‘Besides, it's good to make up your own mind about these things.'

‘Big Douggie may not have been Prince Charming but I guarantee he never would have expected that one century on Freya Jorgensen would be critiquing his personal journal.'

Freya smiles. ‘You have a point there.' She snaps the book shut and yawns. ‘But he's not going to beat me. I'm determined to figure out why everyone thinks he's such a big hero.'

Chad won't let that one past the keeper. ‘For a start, Freya, if it weren't for Douglas Mawson and John King Davis, you and I wouldn't be here. There'd
be
no Australian territory in Antarctica.'

Freya rolls onto her back and gives a gurgled groan. ‘You sound like my husband.'

‘And secondly,' he says, wondering if he's just been insulted, ‘they were all heroes. Not just Mawson and Davis—every one of their men and crew.'

Freya rolls her eyes at his outburst.

‘They came down to Antarctica in an old Dundee whaler that leaked like a wicker basket, with gear and equipment up to the gunnels—Mawson even brought down a plane he used as a tractor sledge. If the plane hadn't pranged before they left, it might have made the first Antarctic flight. It took weeks to find a rocky site to build a base on, and even then it was miles further west than they'd planned. Commonwealth Bay is nothing like the Vestfolds. It's a wind bowl with a few ridges of rock surrounded by mile after mile of ice cliff. Mawson had no way of knowing he'd chosen the windiest place on earth to build his hut. They had no contact with the outside world. For all they knew, the ship could have broken up in pack-ice and never even made it back to Australia. Then no one would have known where to find them.'

Chad gestures out the window towards the ice cap. ‘We're in our heated hut within radio contact of the station. When they left winter quarters all they had was an ice cave plugged with a covering of canvas. In those days, if something went wrong when you were sledging, there was no rescue. No radio. No aircraft. You were entirely on your own.' He draws a deep breath.

‘I had no idea you felt so strongly. Or knew so much about it,' she says quietly.

He knocks at his skull. ‘Some things seep into the grey matter. At least, you'd hope so after spending eight weeks at the joint.'

She sits upright in her sleeping bag. ‘You've
been
to Commonwealth Bay?'

‘A few years ago now. Did some work on the hut with a restoration team. I can tell you one thing, Freya. Read all the books you like, but nothing compares with being there. Even Hurley's photos seem different afterwards.'

‘In what way?'

‘Every way. Take winter quarters—it's tiny. Photos don't give the scale. When you're inside the hut it's hard to imagine how eighteen men could have existed in such confinement—and for the most part got along. They would have been on top of each other, working, sleeping, eating, socialising.' He pauses. ‘All I'm saying is, heroes like Mawson are everyday people. As flawed and as capable of stuff-ups as the rest of us.'

Freya gives him a haughty look. ‘Speak for yourself.'

Chad returns to his journal and reads back over today's record. He retrieves his pencil and adds,
Top day
, not wishing to be thought of as dull.

He reads the last weeks' entries, staggered at how rapidly summer is passing. He has taken to working on the new accommodation module half the week, leaving the remaining time free to help Freya in the field. Touch wood, there's been no serious gripes yet from his fellow chippies, although Adam Singer, the only tradie he can't seem to warm to, makes a point of winding him up. This morning Adam stopped him on his way out:
Watch her
, he said,
I can tell you firsthand she's
a prick teaser
.