Saving Mawson’s Hut
The lights are barely visible from the outside, as a 150km/h blizzard batters the Sorensen Hut, an Antarctic summer base at Cape Denison. But the five expeditioners cooped up inside aren’t even aware of the howling winds roaring off the polar plateau.
Brandishing a whiteboard marker pen, Ted Bugg is sounding off. And it isn’t all positive. The Tasmanian park ranger and Mawson’s Huts Foundation volunteer is concerned that the conservation team will struggle to complete its works programme – to install a new roof as part of efforts to stabilise and preserve Mawson’s Hut, the main exploration base of the 1911–14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE). At worst, Bugg says resignedly, the team won’t even make a start.
‘It’s just impossible – she’s absolutely buried,’ he says, furiously sketching some diagrams to illustrate his point. ‘Unless this weather clears and we get a big melt – and soon – there’s no way we’ll get onto that roof.’
Bugg’s concerns are well founded. The team had been airlifted in from the French Antarctic resupply vessel L’Astrolabe just three days earlier to find the hut virtually entombed under tonnes of snow and ice, following one of the worst winters ever to hit Cape Denison.
‘To see just 20 per cent of the roof area that we were expecting to work on, let alone any of the walls or other parts of the structures, was initially quite demoralising,’ says heritage carpenter Marty Passingham. ‘More than anything, the whole scene took a long time to comprehend – it totally changed our approach to what we had come here to do.’
From the air, all that is visible is the apex of the roof and flagpole over the living quarters and adjacent workshop. On the ground, the prognosis is even more grim. As Bugg notes, dryly: ‘We’ve gone from a simple overcladding job to an extensive archaeological dig.’
Continuing the debate amid the gale three nights later, Bugg – a heritage carpenter and senior ranger at Cradle Mountain, Tasmania – wants to contact the expedition planners at the Mawson’s Huts Foundation and Australian Antarctic Division in Hobart to suggest that the team is extracted from the site while their ship is still in the area.
However, while everyone agrees that they’ve arrived too early in the season to begin the work, the underlying suspicion is that the powers-that-be back in Australia won’t entertain any notion of an early evacuation, especially because of the investments already made in time, effort and money to get this far.
HOME OF THE BLIZZARD
Douglas Mawson thought he’d found the perfect spot to establish a scientific exploration base when the AAE sailed into Commonwealth Bay on a still and sunny day in January 1912. Not only were weather conditions extremely favourable, and food plentiful in the form of penguin eggs and seal meat, but exposed rock meant the base could be safely anchored. Such firm foundations would prove absolutely necessary.
Barely 24 hours after arrival, Cape Denison served up a ferocious onslaught of hurricane-strength winds and blizzards that were to become a constant in the lives of the AAE men for the next year.
Totally taken aback by the extremely savage weather conditions, Mawson later dubbed Cape Denison ‘the home of the blizzard’, and with gusts as high as 320km/h recorded since, the peninsula is now officially the windiest place on Earth.
For three of the five expeditioners, it’s a case of being back home in the blizzard. It’s the third trip to Cape Denison for Passingham and field leader and conservation expert Ian Godfrey, while it’s Bugg’s fourth.
In the first week, efforts are directed towards establishing field camp operations: erecting tents, finding a home for the power generator, stashing the fresh meat and other perishables in a deep snowbank and servicing the quad bikes, as well as making regular treks to Mawson’s Hut to check for any further dumps of snow.
Decades of abrasive, ice-bearing winds have steadily worn down the building’s original Nordic-wood fabric. In places, many planks have been worn so thin that conservationists fear it would only be a
matter of time before they are snapped off and blown into Commonwealth Bay unless the restoration work is carried out.
It was precisely this concern that led to the establishment of the Sydney-based Mawson’s Huts Foundation (MHF), which has, since 1997, led the effort to preserve the site. Four previous foundation missions to Cape Denison have overseen extensive work, including the restoration of interior structural beams, the propping up of collapsing ceilings and the removal of a massive amount of ice from inside the building.
However, the foundation hasn’t been without its detractors, especially when it comes to the issue of interior ice excavation. Some believe that removing the ice could alter the building’s stability, but Godfrey has every confidence in its structural integrity. ‘There was an argument made that if we removed all the snow and ice from the centre of the building, it should be tied down with strong cables, but structural engineers have looked at it and said there’s no need for that level of intervention.’
Still, there is a school of thought in favour of retaining at least some of the floor-level ice which, in addition to helping to further anchor the building, is also protecting some of the artefacts embedded within it. ‘The ice inside the verandas should probably be left alone, too,’ Godfrey says, ‘as it helps with the overall stability of the building and buffering of the internal environment.’
MANUAL LABOUR
Just one thing stands in the way of the roofing work: about 80 cubic metres of ice and snow. While the team has come equipped with some heavy-duty tools, there’s only one way to clear the worksite, and Passingham and Bugg get stuck into the back-breaking work with shovels.
A few metres away, Christian Gallagher is busy chainsawing bricks of ice while Godfrey pulls them out with his ice axe and loads them into a sled to dump elsewhere. Gallagher, in particular, is exercising extreme caution. Not only could a careless slice with the chainsaw put a few unwanted nicks in the original roof timbers underneath but, as team medic, he understands the consequences of a serious chainsaw injury occurring more than 2,600 kilometres from Australia.
‘Like the others, I was a bit apprehensive when I saw that we’d have to shift all this ice,’ he says. ‘The extra workload we’re taking on affects the safety aspect from a medical point of view. The risk management is heightened because we’re having to do a lot more chainsaw work than we originally expected.
‘We also came here expecting to put some scaffolding up to safely gain access to the roof. Instead, we’ve simply had to throw up rope barriers to stop anyone falling into the trenches we’re digging around the building.’
Before the second week is over, a two-metre trench is sunk along the southern wall and a similar start made along the eastern side. In between the spadework, Bugg, Passingham and Gallagher also find time to start overcladding the northern plane, the smallest, easiest and most sheltered side of the pyramid roof. Time is ticking on and they know that the job has to be finished before their scheduled departure just four and a half weeks from now.
Within a week, a fresh layer of sandy yellow tongue-and-groove Baltic-pine boards over a protective membrane is bolted into place and the team is happy it has finally made a start.
HISTORY NEVER REPEATS
Cape Denison could well have remained an undiscovered wilderness had Mawson not declined an invitation to join British explorer Robert Scott’s own ill-fated trek to the South Pole. The Australian was more interested in establishing a scientific programme, he told Scott, than the glory ultimately claimed by Scott’s Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen. With hindsight, his decision proved fortuitous, although Mawson himself nearly perished while leading the longest of the AAE’s explorative sledging trips into the icy interior.
Where Scott’s decision to not use dogs in the race for the pole ultimately cost him his life, conversely, the use of the animals almost meant the end for Mawson too. After setting out with friends Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz on 10 November 1912, disaster struck 500 kilometres from Cape Denison when Ninnis plunged to his death down a deep crevasse, together with most of their supplies.
Faced with no choice but to turn and head for home, Mawson and Mertz began the arduous trek back to base with just ten days’ food for a journey of at least 30 days. Before long, they were killing and eating their remaining huskies, before Mertz succumbed to vitamin A poisoning – a result of eating too much dogs’ liver. Mawson just about made it back to base, only to see the expedition ship, SY Aurora, which had returned to recover the entire AAE team, sailing away on the horizon. Six men had volunteered to stay behind in case Mawson or his sledging companions returned, and it would be another ten months before the Aurora sailed south once again to finally pick them up.
Midway through the 2006 programme, the Mawson’s Huts volunteers are hit with the news that they, too, will be stranded at Cape Denison longer than planned after a near disaster aboard L’Astrolabe. While returning to Australia after the initial drop-off, the ship suffers a huge engine-room fire and is left disabled and drifting without power two days south of Hobart.
For a few weeks, their evacuation date remains uncertain and the team finds distraction in the works programme, finishing the roof overcladding work ahead of schedule and carrying out some additional tasks.
TIME CAPSULE
After gingerly unthreading the original flagpole, which, like the roof planks, has been worn down to a toothpick by the abrasive polar winds, Bugg and Gallagher install a new mast. Inside Mawson’s Hut, Godfrey and Passingham begin to remove a huge chunk of the ice that has taken up residence. It’s a delicate job, as priceless artefacts remain encased unseen somewhere within the ice.
Sometime between Mawson’s last visit to the site in 1931 and the first Australian expedition visits to Cape Denison during the 1970s, the front door was left open and the hut eventually filled up with snow, causing immense structural damage, not to mention burying everything within.
‘As you dig deeper, you never know what’s going to come up,’ says Passingham. ‘Just to see all their food and supplies– bits of clothing, candles, lanterns and stuff – still intact is very interesting. There’s almost nothing amazing in what it is. To come across ordinary and everyday things and for them to still be sitting there like that epitomises life as it was for the AAE. Then they just upped and left.’
With the approaching centenary of the AAE, the MHF is turning its attention to further archaeological excavation and conservation, now that the main hut has been stabilised. A five-year plan, endorsed by the Australian Department of Environment and Heritage and backed up by a A$1.3million (£580,000) government grant this year, will enable annual southern summer expeditions to continue the extensive documentation and conservation of artefacts inside and outside Mawson’s Hut.
‘The focus now is on erecting a mobile laboratory on site to assist specialist conservationists to recover, identify, treat and replace all artefacts in their surroundings,’ foundation chairman David Jensen explains. ‘Until now, we’ve had to bring things back to Australia for conservation treatment, but from now on, we’ll be able to do all that locally and can place every item back in its spot – just as Mawson and his men left it.’
For more information about the Mawson’s Hut Foundation, or to make a donation, visit www.mawsons-huts.org.au
January 2008
Brandishing a whiteboard marker pen, Ted Bugg is sounding off. And it isn’t all positive. The Tasmanian park ranger and Mawson’s Huts Foundation volunteer is concerned that the conservation team will struggle to complete its works programme – to install a new roof as part of efforts to stabilise and preserve Mawson’s Hut, the main exploration base of the 1911–14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE). At worst, Bugg says resignedly, the team won’t even make a start.
‘It’s just impossible – she’s absolutely buried,’ he says, furiously sketching some diagrams to illustrate his point. ‘Unless this weather clears and we get a big melt – and soon – there’s no way we’ll get onto that roof.’
Bugg’s concerns are well founded. The team had been airlifted in from the French Antarctic resupply vessel L’Astrolabe just three days earlier to find the hut virtually entombed under tonnes of snow and ice, following one of the worst winters ever to hit Cape Denison.
‘To see just 20 per cent of the roof area that we were expecting to work on, let alone any of the walls or other parts of the structures, was initially quite demoralising,’ says heritage carpenter Marty Passingham. ‘More than anything, the whole scene took a long time to comprehend – it totally changed our approach to what we had come here to do.’
From the air, all that is visible is the apex of the roof and flagpole over the living quarters and adjacent workshop. On the ground, the prognosis is even more grim. As Bugg notes, dryly: ‘We’ve gone from a simple overcladding job to an extensive archaeological dig.’
Continuing the debate amid the gale three nights later, Bugg – a heritage carpenter and senior ranger at Cradle Mountain, Tasmania – wants to contact the expedition planners at the Mawson’s Huts Foundation and Australian Antarctic Division in Hobart to suggest that the team is extracted from the site while their ship is still in the area.
However, while everyone agrees that they’ve arrived too early in the season to begin the work, the underlying suspicion is that the powers-that-be back in Australia won’t entertain any notion of an early evacuation, especially because of the investments already made in time, effort and money to get this far.
HOME OF THE BLIZZARD
Douglas Mawson thought he’d found the perfect spot to establish a scientific exploration base when the AAE sailed into Commonwealth Bay on a still and sunny day in January 1912. Not only were weather conditions extremely favourable, and food plentiful in the form of penguin eggs and seal meat, but exposed rock meant the base could be safely anchored. Such firm foundations would prove absolutely necessary.
Barely 24 hours after arrival, Cape Denison served up a ferocious onslaught of hurricane-strength winds and blizzards that were to become a constant in the lives of the AAE men for the next year.
Totally taken aback by the extremely savage weather conditions, Mawson later dubbed Cape Denison ‘the home of the blizzard’, and with gusts as high as 320km/h recorded since, the peninsula is now officially the windiest place on Earth.
For three of the five expeditioners, it’s a case of being back home in the blizzard. It’s the third trip to Cape Denison for Passingham and field leader and conservation expert Ian Godfrey, while it’s Bugg’s fourth.
In the first week, efforts are directed towards establishing field camp operations: erecting tents, finding a home for the power generator, stashing the fresh meat and other perishables in a deep snowbank and servicing the quad bikes, as well as making regular treks to Mawson’s Hut to check for any further dumps of snow.
Decades of abrasive, ice-bearing winds have steadily worn down the building’s original Nordic-wood fabric. In places, many planks have been worn so thin that conservationists fear it would only be a
matter of time before they are snapped off and blown into Commonwealth Bay unless the restoration work is carried out.
It was precisely this concern that led to the establishment of the Sydney-based Mawson’s Huts Foundation (MHF), which has, since 1997, led the effort to preserve the site. Four previous foundation missions to Cape Denison have overseen extensive work, including the restoration of interior structural beams, the propping up of collapsing ceilings and the removal of a massive amount of ice from inside the building.
However, the foundation hasn’t been without its detractors, especially when it comes to the issue of interior ice excavation. Some believe that removing the ice could alter the building’s stability, but Godfrey has every confidence in its structural integrity. ‘There was an argument made that if we removed all the snow and ice from the centre of the building, it should be tied down with strong cables, but structural engineers have looked at it and said there’s no need for that level of intervention.’
Still, there is a school of thought in favour of retaining at least some of the floor-level ice which, in addition to helping to further anchor the building, is also protecting some of the artefacts embedded within it. ‘The ice inside the verandas should probably be left alone, too,’ Godfrey says, ‘as it helps with the overall stability of the building and buffering of the internal environment.’
Start the slideshow (10 pictures)
MANUAL LABOUR
Just one thing stands in the way of the roofing work: about 80 cubic metres of ice and snow. While the team has come equipped with some heavy-duty tools, there’s only one way to clear the worksite, and Passingham and Bugg get stuck into the back-breaking work with shovels.
A few metres away, Christian Gallagher is busy chainsawing bricks of ice while Godfrey pulls them out with his ice axe and loads them into a sled to dump elsewhere. Gallagher, in particular, is exercising extreme caution. Not only could a careless slice with the chainsaw put a few unwanted nicks in the original roof timbers underneath but, as team medic, he understands the consequences of a serious chainsaw injury occurring more than 2,600 kilometres from Australia.
‘Like the others, I was a bit apprehensive when I saw that we’d have to shift all this ice,’ he says. ‘The extra workload we’re taking on affects the safety aspect from a medical point of view. The risk management is heightened because we’re having to do a lot more chainsaw work than we originally expected.
‘We also came here expecting to put some scaffolding up to safely gain access to the roof. Instead, we’ve simply had to throw up rope barriers to stop anyone falling into the trenches we’re digging around the building.’
Before the second week is over, a two-metre trench is sunk along the southern wall and a similar start made along the eastern side. In between the spadework, Bugg, Passingham and Gallagher also find time to start overcladding the northern plane, the smallest, easiest and most sheltered side of the pyramid roof. Time is ticking on and they know that the job has to be finished before their scheduled departure just four and a half weeks from now.
Within a week, a fresh layer of sandy yellow tongue-and-groove Baltic-pine boards over a protective membrane is bolted into place and the team is happy it has finally made a start.
HISTORY NEVER REPEATS
Cape Denison could well have remained an undiscovered wilderness had Mawson not declined an invitation to join British explorer Robert Scott’s own ill-fated trek to the South Pole. The Australian was more interested in establishing a scientific programme, he told Scott, than the glory ultimately claimed by Scott’s Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen. With hindsight, his decision proved fortuitous, although Mawson himself nearly perished while leading the longest of the AAE’s explorative sledging trips into the icy interior.
Where Scott’s decision to not use dogs in the race for the pole ultimately cost him his life, conversely, the use of the animals almost meant the end for Mawson too. After setting out with friends Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz on 10 November 1912, disaster struck 500 kilometres from Cape Denison when Ninnis plunged to his death down a deep crevasse, together with most of their supplies.
Faced with no choice but to turn and head for home, Mawson and Mertz began the arduous trek back to base with just ten days’ food for a journey of at least 30 days. Before long, they were killing and eating their remaining huskies, before Mertz succumbed to vitamin A poisoning – a result of eating too much dogs’ liver. Mawson just about made it back to base, only to see the expedition ship, SY Aurora, which had returned to recover the entire AAE team, sailing away on the horizon. Six men had volunteered to stay behind in case Mawson or his sledging companions returned, and it would be another ten months before the Aurora sailed south once again to finally pick them up.
Midway through the 2006 programme, the Mawson’s Huts volunteers are hit with the news that they, too, will be stranded at Cape Denison longer than planned after a near disaster aboard L’Astrolabe. While returning to Australia after the initial drop-off, the ship suffers a huge engine-room fire and is left disabled and drifting without power two days south of Hobart.
For a few weeks, their evacuation date remains uncertain and the team finds distraction in the works programme, finishing the roof overcladding work ahead of schedule and carrying out some additional tasks.
TIME CAPSULE
After gingerly unthreading the original flagpole, which, like the roof planks, has been worn down to a toothpick by the abrasive polar winds, Bugg and Gallagher install a new mast. Inside Mawson’s Hut, Godfrey and Passingham begin to remove a huge chunk of the ice that has taken up residence. It’s a delicate job, as priceless artefacts remain encased unseen somewhere within the ice.
Sometime between Mawson’s last visit to the site in 1931 and the first Australian expedition visits to Cape Denison during the 1970s, the front door was left open and the hut eventually filled up with snow, causing immense structural damage, not to mention burying everything within.
‘As you dig deeper, you never know what’s going to come up,’ says Passingham. ‘Just to see all their food and supplies– bits of clothing, candles, lanterns and stuff – still intact is very interesting. There’s almost nothing amazing in what it is. To come across ordinary and everyday things and for them to still be sitting there like that epitomises life as it was for the AAE. Then they just upped and left.’
With the approaching centenary of the AAE, the MHF is turning its attention to further archaeological excavation and conservation, now that the main hut has been stabilised. A five-year plan, endorsed by the Australian Department of Environment and Heritage and backed up by a A$1.3million (£580,000) government grant this year, will enable annual southern summer expeditions to continue the extensive documentation and conservation of artefacts inside and outside Mawson’s Hut.
‘The focus now is on erecting a mobile laboratory on site to assist specialist conservationists to recover, identify, treat and replace all artefacts in their surroundings,’ foundation chairman David Jensen explains. ‘Until now, we’ve had to bring things back to Australia for conservation treatment, but from now on, we’ll be able to do all that locally and can place every item back in its spot – just as Mawson and his men left it.’
For more information about the Mawson’s Hut Foundation, or to make a donation, visit www.mawsons-huts.org.au
January 2008
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