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Clip description
With the ship held fast in the ice, Phillip Law decides to explore the largely unknown Larsemann Hills. The ship unloads a Weasel, an American over-snow vehicle, which will tow the specially constructed caravan, followed by a sledge. The plan is to cross 20 km of fast ice to make observations on the nearby shore, but the ice is unreliable. After some distance, the shore party encounters cracks. They return to the ship, just in time. The ice breaks up soon afterwards.
Curator’s notes
This is one of the incidents that upset the journalist Tom Hungerford and photographer George Lowe, who were documenting the voyage for the News and Information Bureau of the Department of the Interior. Phillip Law invited them to go with him on this short expedition, probably because he expected it to provide interesting images for their film. It was a typical ‘hit and run’ exercise, aimed at making a quick landing to gather basic information: photograph the landscape, take astrofixes from permanent features, such as an ice-free hill or rock formation, and a quick census of wildlife and geology.
Law was constantly leading such exercises, and they all involved degrees of risk, because they would have to cross fast ice – frozen but smooth stretches of sea ice connected to the shore, but with unpredictable depth and strength. Law was an experienced Antarctic hand, but the two journalists were not. They were unimpressed by this exercise, which could easily have found them stranded on a detached ice floe. In fact, Law perceived correctly that the ice was unsafe and returned to the ship. Nevertheless, this incident became part of the official complaint made by the two men when they returned to Melbourne, which Law was never told about (see main notes).
It appears that Phillip Law never quite understood how much he upset these two men. ‘George Lowe has had a marvellous day’s photography!’ Law wrote in his diary, after this trip. ‘Penguins, seals, Weasel trip, icebergs, sunshine and drama! What a film they can make on returning.’ Law’s biographer, Kathleen Ralston, writes in her second volume that the party got into difficulty in the first three kms.
(They) almost stranded the Weasel in two weak spots and had found a crack two feet wide in which sea water lay only nine inches from the top. The situation did not look good. Law surveyed the area with binoculars from the top of a Weasel and saw that the island where they wanted to go was fringed with blue water, making the journey a fruitless task. Much to the men’s disappointment, he decided to call off the trip and return to the ship.
Shortly after they returned the fast ice began to break up. ‘In less than 20 minutes the broken floes were floating out to sea, separated by wide lanes of water, with some of the floes still bearing the track marks made by the Weasel a short time before.’ We see these track marks at the end of the clip.
