Share
Clip description
The ten men who will man Mawson Station for the next year wave goodbye from their Weasel, which heads back over the ice to their new base. The ship heads east, hoping to explore the region around Prydz Bay and the Vestfold Hills. Phillip Law leads a landing party at the Vestfold Hills, where second-in-command Richard Thompson brings an Australian flag. The four men build a cairn of rocks, raising the flag and giving three cheers. Six days later, as the ship rolls alarmingly, the narrator explains that they have just emerged from a life-threatening storm, during which the ship was in grave danger. The Kista Dan arrives back in Melbourne, battered but safe.
Curator’s notes
There is just a slight hint in the narration of the drama that unfolded once the ship left Mawson station. Phillip Law had always intended to explore the area east of the new base after their work there was done, but Captain Petersen was reluctant to keep going into the pack ice. The innocent diagram we see here gives no clue of the danger. It was the beginning of March in a year in which the pack ice was much more extensive than usual. The ship had been beset by ice more than once and the captain knew that Law was hard to dissuade from any path he had chosen. For his own part, Law was impatient with the captain’s reluctance to follow his well-established plans. The terms of the ship’s charter stated that the captain was to do what Law requested unless the ship or its crew were in danger. Law and Captain Petersen argued for two days about whether to go south towards the Vestfold Hills. When the matter was resolved in Law’s favour, the ship ran into bad weather once it reached the Vestfold Hills, delaying it further.
The precise reason for the visit there is open to interpretation. They had been visited only twice before, the last time in 1939 by the American explorer Ellsworth Lincoln, with the Australian aviator Sir Hubert Wilkins. Law had decided before the ship left Melbourne that this was a landing he wanted to achieve; whether it was important is another question. Certainly, Law’s loyal lieutenant, Richard Thompson, the man we see carrying the flag, felt that there was more than one agenda. He wrote an amusing account of this landing in his diary.
At the beginning of the clip, we see this expedition dropping off two men on what was later called Magnetic Island to take magnetic measurements. After the motorboat got out of sight of the main ship, the engine broke down and the radio failed. The engine broke down four more times in the next 30 minutes. Dick Thompson (quoted in A Man for Antarctica: The Early Life of Phillip Law, 1993, by Kathleen Ralston):
Eventually it seemed to settle down and work okay but I mistrusted it, and between that and the lack of contact on the radio I was rapidly developing ulcers. Get the picture – Phil is foolhardy, knows nothing of boats and has no conception of their pitfalls and risks; Arthur (Gwynn) is in another world, birds, nothing else … Shaw is a know-all, and dull, but young enough not to have any imagination and has no boat experience at all. We eventually get to the mainland, where Phil proceeds to run us aground (not seriously) while I’m fiddling with the radio. Howls of anguish and martyrdom from Dick; ‘I wonder where the penguins are’ from Arthur; ‘Why don’t you do this’ from Shaw; and 78 concise, clear, direct, ambiguous and conflicting orders from Phil. We push off and land on some ice across which we are to trek to the shore. I had a flagpole and flag, of course. ‘Dick, leap ashore carrying the flag’ … Phil, of course, was taking it all on his cine camera. That was the reason for the histrionics. We struggled ashore, built a cairn out of rocks, planted the flag on its pole, while Phil took our picture. Then I took photos of him with the flag, and a cine film of the three of them waving their caps like a trio of scat singers.
