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Clip description
Tim Jarvis is now alone on the ice. His companion, John Stoukalo, representing Xavier Mertz, has left the walk at the same point at which Mertz died in the original expedition, after 320 km. Jarvis must go on alone for another 160 km to complete the journey. In the tent during a blizzard, he says that his greatest fear is failure. After two days, the storm eases and Jarvis is able to continue walking. He says he found himself getting quite depressed during the blizzard. In a re-created sequence in black-and-white, actor Jason Stewart portrays Mawson at a similar point in his journey, discovering that the soles of his feet had separated from the flesh.
Curator’s notes
The film tells two stories in tandem, switching skilfully between them. In black-and-white sequences, filmed in Australia and New Zealand, actors portray Mawson and his companions throughout the original ordeal in 1912–13. Tim Jarvis’s trek is shown in stunning colour footage, all of which was shot on the Antarctic ice by veteran Australian cameraman Wade Fairley. Jarvis and Stoukalo were accompanied on their attempt by a small crew of four – film director Malcolm MacDonald, Fairley, Frederique Olivier who did sound, and Dr David Tingay. They travelled on open skidoos towing sleds, but they observed strict rules about contact with the walkers. The film crew travelled separately but nearby, and camped away from Jarvis and Stoukalo. Their only contact was during actual filming. Jarvis says in the accompanying book, Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica (2008, Miegunyah Press, ISBN: 9780522854862) that he found it difficult to have contact with the filmmakers during the hardest part of the journey. He began to feel they only wanted to talk to him about the things he most feared:
It was to our minds remarkable how warmth, plentiful food, modern equipment and motorised travel utterly removed others from the experience we were having. I likened it to bystanders watching marathon runners going through a private hell, grappling with mental and physical pain as they fight to keep their tired bodies moving. Observers can witness the grimaces on the runners’ faces and the heaviness of their step and hear their laboured breathing, yet still be a world away from understanding the battle going on inside the runners’ heads and how heavy the prospect of personal failure weighs. Central to the success of any expedition such as this is the ability to keep negative thoughts under control and to focus on positives. Practically, this meant not even uttering concerns, as doing so made them seem more real and less easy to put behind us, a problem exacerbated by the film crew’s desire to discuss our problems with us in great detail.
In this sequence, we get a strong sense of the extraordinary hardship of the original journey in 1913, as well as the attempt to re-create that journey using the same resources in 2007. We also get a sense of the beauty of the landscape of Antarctica, something that is hard to capture on film. Very few documentaries and almost no feature films have been made on the Antarctic ice in the way this one was, with a crew travelling continuously for a number of weeks, with little shelter other than the tents in which they camped each night and the interior of the over-snow transport.
