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Clip description
The SY Aurora probes the coastline of Antarctica looking for a suitable site for a winter base. In a sheltered section of Commonwealth Bay, they find an ice-free inlet, which they call Cape Denison. With fine weather, the unloading proceeds well and a prefabricated hut is soon assembled on the foreshore. The fine weather is an illusion: they soon realise that this is one of the windiest places on earth. After the worst of the winter, the expeditioners prepare for the main scientific missions, a series of sledging journeys with different parties heading in different directions. Photographer Frank Hurley joins Robert Bage and Eric Webb for a 960 km round trip to the South Magnetic Pole. Douglas Mawson sets off with Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, and two dog teams, to explore the coast as far east as possible. They will have to cross what Hurley describes as ‘a nightmare region of bad crevasses’.
Curator’s notes
These are some of Frank Hurley’s most famous images, although he was not the first to take a movie camera to the Antarctic. Herbert Ponting took one with Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition of 1910–13, and Carsten Borchgrevink probably took the first moving image camera during his expedition of 1898–1900. Hurley had no training for moving image cameras as such when he applied to become expedition photographer, so the expedition leader Mawson arranged for him to train at Gaumont, a leading newsreel company. Hurley went south with an array of cameras, both moving and still. In his biography (named Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life, 2004, Viking, 2004 ISBN 9780670073511), Alasdair McGregor writes that Hurley took a borrowed Prestwich cinematograph camera, with various lenses and accessories. Gaumont supplied 10,000 feet of Eastman film, the Lumière company another 7000 feet of equivalent stock. Hurley himself brought along four Graflex stills cameras and the British manufacturer Newman and Guardia supplied another ten stills cameras, all of them adapted for Antarctic conditions. Kodak supplied almost 600 glass plate negatives of varying sizes and a large quantity of sensitised paper for Hurley’s darkroom work.
Working with this equipment in these temperatures required great ingenuity, perseverance and determination, none of which Hurley lacked. Even so, his images of the wind at Cape Denison are remarkable. Sir Douglas Mawson would write later in his book The Home of the Blizzard, published in 1915, that Hurley’s photographs of penguins and seals were so good that most of the other members of the party who had cameras ‘withdrew from competition’:
His enthusiasm and resourcefulness knew no bounds. It was soon recognised as futile to await calm days, and ways were found to secure records even in the face of freezing gales. Occasional days, during which cameras that had been maltreated by the wind were patched up, were now looked upon as inevitable. But the taking of still pictures in the wind was as nothing compared with the difficulties and painful frost-bites associated with cinematography under the same conditions. However, our photographer was determined not to be beaten, and eventually succeeded in filming wonderful illustrations of the blizzard itself. Many devices were improvised for screening the camera; even then, the instrument soon became clogged with drift-snow and put out of action, which meant several hours of hard work in the Hut cleaning, drying and repairing the mechanism. It was by no means easy to get about in high gales, with the awkward cinematograph camera, as was illustrated one day when it was arranged to take a picture from the lee of a rock shelter. Webb and Hurley were devoting their united efforts to the task of carrying the camera across from the Hut, when they were picked up clear of the ground and blown some yards away, resulting in sundry damages all round, more especially to the instrument.
The first images in this clip are from soon after their arrival on the ice. One of the clues is that we see penguins and seals, most of which had gone by March 1912 rather than face the Antarctic winter. In the latter half of the clip, the images may be from late winter or spring, as there is a great deal more snow around the Hut. The images of the dog teams are particularly valuable, because these shots are likely to feature Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis, who looked after the 49 Greenland huskies brought from London. Hurley mentions the preparations for the summer expeditions, in which he was sent south with Lieutenant R Bage, astronomer and recorder of tides for the expedition, and Eric Webb, the chief magnetician. Theirs was an epic and difficult journey, but they made a safe return. Mawson’s party struck east, taking both teams of dogs. Mawson was the only one who survived, including the dogs. That makes these images especially poignant – they are likely to be the last moving images of the dog teams, and their two handlers. Read more about this journey in the notes for clip three.
