WHEN the helicopter lifts off and disappears north over the sea ice and the only sound you can hear is the penguins, that’s when it hits – boy are we alone. The five of us, our food and gear has just been dropped off at Cape Denison, Antarctica; ‘The Home of the Blizzard’, the windiest place in the world, 2500km south of Hobart. For the next month, the nearest people are at the French base 120km away. The second closest, some nights when its orbit dips down over the deep Southern Ocean, are aboard on the International Space Station.
In 1911, Douglas Mawson and the men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) made Cape Denison their home. They built a big wooden hut and some outbuildings and set about exploring. Mawson went east across the icecap with two other men and returned alone after a series of disasters, almost without food 500km from help. On top of the loss of his friends, his relief ship had sailed without him. A small relief party nursed him back to health before rescue came the next season. One hundred and eleven years of near-constant blizzards later, Mawson’s Huts still somehow still stand, a priceless treasure of Australian Antarctic history among the first buildings erected on the continent. Our job, over the
