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Clip description
An Australian Landing Ship Tank, LST3501, arrives at Heard Island in late 1947 to establish an Australian base, for both strategic and scientific purposes. The men must initially unload everything by hand, until heavy equipment can be landed. They roll 600 drums of oil ashore through freezing waters and begin to erect the prefabricated huts in which they will live in the coming year. The leader of the expedition, Group Captain Stuart Campbell, claims the island as Australian territory. He and the LST captain, Lieutenant-Commander George Dixon, sign a proclamation of occupation and raise the flag. The ship leaves 15 men behind in the forbidding and freezing landscape, watched only by penguins and seabirds. The men don’t expect to see another ship for 15 months.
Curator’s notes
This is the beginning of Australia’s occupation of the sub-Antarctic region in the modern era, and the beginning of the film program that has accompanied that work for most of the last 65 years. The official photographer for this voyage was David Eastman, from the Department of Information. He shot most of the scenes we see here, but some scenes may be by Alan Campbell-Drury, who was the radio operator on this expedition. He would become the Antarctic Division’s first official staff photographer soon after this trip.
The sequence here establishes a number of motifs that occur again and again in the Antarctic films. There is an emphasis on building, the works of man beside the works of nature, and an obligatory and often clumsy attempt at humour, usually involving penguins. The mail-stamping ritual recurs often too. There is also a desire to imbue the images with a sense of heroism and romance, harking back to the 19th century and the age of exploration. The film was shot silent, with no direct sound. The editing was likely to have been completed in Sydney, at the offices of the National Film Board during the middle of 1948, where the narration was added. The film may have been shown in cinemas, distributed by the Department of Information, as free material screening before feature films. There was no television in Australia at the time, so newsreels were a popular way to spread information. It was almost certainly used by the Antarctic Division as a training film.
Phillip Law, who became the acting head of the division in January 1949, spent much of his time, when back in Australia, giving public lectures to promote the work of the Antarctic Division. He did hundreds of these lectures every year. This was partly an attempt to shore up public support for the work being done at the new bases at Heard Island and Macquarie Island. Australia was in the midst of serious postwar shortages of materials and money. There were questions within government about the usefulness of this scientific work, and the films made from 1948 on were all at least partly a way of addressing those questions. Antarctica 1948 was also shown widely overseas, probably for political purposes: Australia wanted other countries to know it was occupying the areas it had laid claim to in 1933.
