IQ/EQ issue 26

There’s nothing like a wintry blast to remind us of what lies south of New Zealand. Antarctica does coldness like no other place on the planet – Silent, desolate, ferocious and fragile. we look at ways this frozen continent has inspired artists, scientists and explorers

A White Silence Day

When it hasn’t disappeared completely for several months, the light in the Antarctic is a magician, cloaking night skies in a “trembling lacework”of auroras, turning grey snow into “a geometry of rainbows” and throwing mirages towards the sun. Hoping to find out what else the Antarctic may be, Antarctica New Zealand, in partnership with Creative New Zealand, has been sending writers, poets, painters, print makers, sculptors, ceramicists, fashion and textile designers, jewellers, furniture makers, photographers, composers and choreographers down to the continent every summer since 1996. The results as artists share their experiences of the Antarctic environment through their various mediums are fascinating and often exquisite. Artist Grahame Sydney has ventured twice to the bottom of the world with his camera, capturing shots of crevasses and apricot light sandwiched between leaden skies and ice. There’s an air of desolation to memorial images and historic huts, while photos taken during October’s half light reveal an unexpected old-world softness as vast and empty spaces fade into hazy, pastel hues. Including a beautifully written introduction, this book succeeds in what Grahame hoped to achieve: “… to tell the story of what fascinated me, what moved me most, and what I am privileged to have seen”.

The Ice Was Here, The Ice Was There…

“And now there came both mist

As green as emerald”

Having never been to the Antarctic, Coleridge was only speculating when he described the scene his Ancient Mariner sailed through yet, as websites devoted to the famous poem point out, his descriptions of the frozen South were remarkably accurate. Green icebergs do occur when the ice contains organic matter. Other bergs are pink, crystal clear, brown and blue as
well as the ubiquitous white.

More than 700 photographs illustrate these strange and frequently beautiful phenomena, along with just about everything else the world’s driest, coldest, windiest region has to offer, in a new encyclopedic publication, Antarctica: Secrets of the Southern Continent. Written by an international team of Antarctic scientists, expeditioners and historians, this weighty tome covers the region’s geology, ecology, geography, meteorology, wildlife and explorers and is a fascinating resource for anyone who has longed to know more about the world’s wildest and most forbidding region.

Coming in from the Cold

A past recipient of the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship, Laurence Fearnley ventures only as far as Invercargill for the setting of her latest novel, Mother’s Day, but the coldness there seems just as grim for protagonist Maggie as it once was for Robert Falcon Scott and his fellow explorers hunkering down on the ice. “No matter what time of year it was, regardless of the season, her room was dank and miserable. She could never get warm. There was always some gap that let the draught in. It never let up.” Yet it’s an emotional Antarctica from which Maggie suffers most. A solo mother, raising a grandchild as well as two teens, the 40-year-old home-help caregiver is so worn down by her lot she’s become inured to life’s pleasures and built a glacial wall round her heart. With immaculately controlled pace and sparing prose, this touching story is frosted with grief – not just for the deaths of characters but for lives never lived and words never said. While Maggie’s endless grind is sometimes less than engaging, this gritty portrayal of a very ordinary woman is ultimately heart-warming and glows with hope as emotions thaw and Maggie is brought in from the cold.

Mother’s Day, by Laurence Fearnley, Penguin Group, $28

Stepping into Space

By all accounts, visiting Antarctica is not too different from a trip into outer space, according to writer Francis Spufford. “Every scrap of food, fuel and equipment” must be taken into the inhospitable world and both are accessible to just a privileged few.

For those who make it to Antarctica, the purchase of Awa Press’ excellent Antarctic Cruising Guide is practically a prerequisite but for less financially agile Wellingtonians at least, the great white continent can still be experienced via a trip to The Film Archive. Squeezing into a tent with poets Bill Manhire and Chris Orsman and painter Nigel Brown in the documentary Art in the Freezer might not be everybody’s idea of Antarctic wildlife, but type “Antarctica” into the Archive search engine and more than 120 entries for films appear. From flickering black-and-white footage of Shackleton’s ship Nimrod being loaded at Lyttleton Harbour in 1908 to the 1956–57 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Marcus Lush’s more recent investigations of the ice, seemingly every Antarctic documentary with a New Zealand connection is held in the Archive collection which is free to view.

Winter Warmers

Anyone who’s ever drooled over recipes and food illustrations knows that half a cookbook’s pleasure lies in its ability to feed the imagination. Possibly the most fantasy-inducing, pored-over recipe book of all time was a “small penny cookery book” salvaged from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance before it was crushed by Antarctic pack ice in 1915. Kept intact during the crew’s marathon struggle for survival, the book became increasingly important as food rations dwindled. Eventually reduced to a diet of “old seal bones that had been used once for a meal and then thrown away … dug up and stewed down with sea water”, the 22 men stranded on Elephant Island were read aloud one recipe from the book each night. “This,” wrote Shackleton, “would be discussed very seriously and alterations and improvements suggested and then they would turn into their bags to dream of wonderful meals that they could never reach.” The sorts of meals that may well have filled their dreams are within grasp in this beautiful new cold-weather cookbook. Thankfully, award-winning food writer Jane Lawson bypassed Antarctic menus of recycled seal carcasses and delved into the snow-cloaked regions of the Northern Hemisphere for her collection of rich, hearty fare. Alongside hot toddies and heated liqueurs, she offers slow-cooked comfort food, full-flavoured and sustaining, such as goulash with dumplings, borscht, Kurnik chicken pie, rabbit in red wine and meatballs with vodka dill cream sauce followed by decadent puddings.

The sumptuous photography alone would have reduced Shackleton’s men to tears. Snowflakes and Schnapps, by Jane Lawson, Murdoch Books, $79.99

I Am Just Going Outside And May Be Some Time …

Existing like some fairy-tale realm, the Antarctica of the Imagination was frequented by writers long before any explorer touched down on the ice.
From Dante’s account of Ulysses’ last voyage to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, the inaccessible land of ice and snow has been creatively mined for its silence, purity, desolation, mystery and untouched otherworldliness. What happened when writers and explorers actually made it on to the ice is captured in Granta’s new anthology, The Ends of The Earth, covering each pole in a separate volume.
The Antarctic captures the changing perceptions of visitors to the continent during a century of exploration. It includes excerpts from classic narratives such as Scott’s record of his party’s tragic death and Cherry-Garrard’s marvellously understated worst journey in the world (crevasses in the dark do put your nerves on edge). Themes of romantic imperialism and physical discomfort give way during the book to more modern takes including Jenny Diski’s neurotic version, H.P. Lovecraft’s paranoid fantasy version and Nicholas Johnson’s Dillbert-on-ice version. The book ends with Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant short story that slams the myths of Antarctic courage – “compared to life in the world, it took no courage at all to walk across the polar cap … It was daily life that was hard and sticking it out that was heroic.”

White on White

It may sound like a form of sensory deprivation but as journeys to both Antarctica and Christchurch Art Gallery have revealed, white on white is far from dull and monotonous. Brimming with the imaginative possibilities of the colour, exhibition White on White, running until 31 October, features works by Eileen Mayo, Ando Hiroshige, Peter Robinson and Jude Rae, among others, and includes interactive exhibits to keep youngsters entertained. Other exhibitions feature Seraphine Pick, Ronnie van Hout: Who Goes There and et al: That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!