Visiting Antarctica

No, it's not me who is visiting.

I wish.

Through a programme called Artists to Antarctica, a number of New Zealand writers, painters and photographers have been able to spend time on the ice and explore the place through their work, with the Fellowship's stated aim of increasing our "understanding of Antarctica's value and global importance". 
There is also a United States program run by the National Science Foundation; a New Zealand photographer called Anne Noble won this in 2008 (the only non-American that year) and took some beautiful shots, including this (see others on my previous post):

The book that I mentioned in my previous post is called These Rough Notes. 
The cover doesn't show up well because it is white.

It is a slim volume published by Victoria University Press, and it contains Anne Noble's photographs; poems by another Antarctic Fellowship artist, Bill Manhire; and a CD of the poems set to music by Norman Meehan and sung by Hannah Griffin, a jazz and blues singer who was once one of my students.

The title of the book is from some of the last words written in polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s diary from 100 years ago, and some of the poems refer to that ill-fated expedition. There is also reference to the Erebus plane crash in 1979 in these haunting lyrics.

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Here are two of the poems/songs - for, by and about some of those visitors to Antarctica.

                        

Scott Dead

                

I never thought to pay this price

The wind takes every word I write

The wind's another kind of knife

We sink and sail beneath the ice

I never thought to pay this price

Each day I dream of dying twice

And every day I pay the price

I hardly feel the cold frost bite

We sink and sail beneath the ice

We sink and sail beneath the ice

The wind's another kind of knife

In the midst of death we are in life

I never thought to pay this price

I write a final letter to my wife

beneath the ice, beneath the ice...

 - Bill Manhire

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Erebus Voices: The Mountain

I am here beside my brother, Terror.

I am the place of human error.

I am beauty and cloud, and I am sorrow;

I am tears which you will weep tomorrow.

I am the sky and the exhausting gale.

I am the place of ice. I am the debris trail.

I am as far as you can see.

I am the place of memory.

And I am still a hand, a fingertip, a ring.

I am what there is no forgetting.

I am the one with truly broken heart.

I watched them fall, and freeze, and break apart.

- Bill Manhire

Pictures from here (Grahame Sydney), here, here, here and here.

Thinking about Antarctica

I've been thinking about Antarctica 

- and not (just) because it is so hot here, and has been for months.

Many New Zealanders have a strong sense of connection to Antarctica. 

Growing up in Christchurch, we had a keen awareness of the US base 

adjacent to Christchurch airport, where Americans came in large 

numbers in (our) spring, to prepare for their summers on the ice. 

Operation Deep Freeze began in 1955, and continues today.

I remember seeing the huge Air Force Globemasters when I was young, 

and being taken to visit the Antarctic wing at the Christchurch museum. 

A statue of Sir Robert Falcon Scott stood in the city, commemorating his death in 1912, 

while he was returning from his journey to the South Pole. 

Sadly, it was one of the many monuments and statues which was toppled by the 

earthquake in 2011.

In 1979 we lived near the airport, and another strong memory is of lying awake for hours on a night in November, desperately hoping to hear the engines of Flight TE-901 which was hours overdue from its sightseeing flight from Christchurch to Antarctica and back. 

The plane had collided with Mt Erebus; all 257 people on board died.

These musings about the frozen continent are happening because I have been reading a beautiful book on the subject. I had intended to tell you about it, but this post is long enough, so I'll keep it for another time.

 

Pictures 1 and 6 by Anne Noble, from here; picture 2 from here; pictures 3 and 4 from here; picture 5 from here