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The chartered Danish ship Kista Dan encounters a thick field of ice 50 kms from the Antarctic coast. They launch one of the Auster aircraft to try to find a way through, and to look for a site for the new base. Phillip Law sights a perfect horseshoe-shaped harbour that is free of ice on the nearby coast. The ship begins to ram a path through the hard ‘blue ice’, backing and charging and making barely 15 metres with each charge. Adélie penguins rush into the new channel opened up by the ship. They have had to cross 30 kms of ice to reach the sea to feed, an indication that the ice is much more extensive than usual. The penguins use the new road created by the ship as a fast lane to food.
Curator’s notes
The narration suggests that the site for the new base was discovered during the flight of the Auster aircraft. In fact, Phillip Law and Sir Douglas Mawson had spent many hours poring over photographs taken by the US Navy just after the Second World War, when their aeroplanes photographed the whole Antarctic coast. Law had arranged through the Australian Embassy in Washington to obtain copies of the relevant photographs.
Mawson was a member of the government’s Antarctic planning committee, one of the few Australians who had knowledge of the Antarctic coast. He was already a legendary figure; in 1911, he led a three-year Antarctic expedition to Commonwealth Bay, and between 1929 and 1931, he led two British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions (BANZARE), which produced a huge amount of scientific data. He was the driving force in Australia’s decision to set up a permanent Antarctic base after the Second World War. He and Law had settled on Horseshoe Bay as the most likely spot well before the ship ever set sail from Melbourne.
Law might still have changed his mind once he arrived south, although it would have been unlikely. Bob Dovers, who was to be Officer-in-Charge of the new base, had inspected the site before Phillip Law and counselled against it, because of the extremely high winds. Law overruled him. In his history of the first 50 years of ANARE, The Silence Calling: Australians in Antarctica, 1947–97 (1997), Tim Bowden writes that Horseshoe Bay is ‘the only natural harbour on the whole coastline of Greater Antarctica’. It provides complete protection against storms for any visiting ship. Law would later describe it as ‘one of the best sites for 4000 miles’ (6400 km). ‘Not only is there this lovely enclosed harbour where a ship can just run cables out fore and aft to the shore and hold itself, but it’s an amphitheatre. The arms of the horseshoe are elevated, and then it comes around like a curve of a horseshoe – saucer shaped – sloping up to a high ridge at the back. In this hollow we built the station so we got semi-protection from the ridge at the back…’
The scenes of the penguin highway are amongst the most charming in any Antarctic film. Phillip Law shot this footage, as he was the designated photographer on the voyage. He is also the man we see beside the ship, standing too close for comfort. The captain had called down and told him not to do this, that the ice could break up around him at any moment, but it tells us a lot about Phillip Law that he did it anyway. Not only does he climb over the side of the ship to get the shots, as any good photographer would want to do, but he stands in the shot, to make it more dramatic.
Law was an accomplished photographer and an even more accomplished self-promoter, according to some of his critics. These shots may not have found favour with some of the bureaucrats in Canberra who felt that much of the Antarctic Division publicity was in fact Phillip Law publicity. Even if there is some truth in that accusation, it’s probably unfair to Law’s own motives. It is likely that he knew that the shots would be more dramatic if a person stood beside the ship as it charged forward; it’s also true that he would not have asked anyone else to endanger themselves.
