Endurance Read online

  My mind turned to the future beyond Mawson’s recovery. The small kernel of expedition experience made me a more determined person than ever, but to do what? Frustratingly, I still did not know, even though I was now twenty-seven years old. With every nautical mile Aurora left in her wake, I thought more and more of the camaraderie of the hut and being on the trail with Azzi and Bob Bage. It seemed a lifetime ago I had filmed our departure from Hobart. I remembered Aurora sailing out the Derwent and my first meeting with Mertz and Ninnis when they came aboard with the dogs. I had been stirred by their dedication and enthusiasm in those early, heady days. With that thought I went to the only place I would now find them: my darkroom.

  5

  Back to Antarctica, November 1913

  Shortly after returning to Australia in mid March Captain Davis agreed I could accompany him back to Commonwealth Bay, but could not say when that would be.

  ‘Unless we get funding,’ said Gloomy, ‘Mawson won’t be coming home this year. I am hoping we can count on you to exhibit AAE photographs at fundraising dinners in the state capitals.’

  However, not long after my return to Sydney, the Royal Dutch Steamship Company engaged me to do a series of travelogue and tourism photographs throughout the Dutch East Indies. It was an opportunity too good to refuse, even though it meant I was unavailable for AAE work.

  Davis, meanwhile had to travel to England in search of donations. It was only after Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George gave him a thousand pounds that the Australian prime minister, Joseph Cook, came good with five thousand pounds.

  I made it back to Hobart by November 1913, just in time to embark on Aurora for my second voyage to Antarctica. I was glad to be on board. There were few opportunities at that time which could compete with a voyage offering exclusive access to a field of photography my peers could only read about.

  But Davis baulked at my request for extra time to take photographs on Macquarie Island.

  ‘Mr Hurley, I’m anxious to reach Commonwealth Bay at the earliest opportunity—and I’m afraid it won’t be soon enough.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something’s amiss down there,’ he said, frowning at me. ‘In late August, we started receiving a flurry of wireless messages all times of day and night. There was mention of threats. Then we received a message sent by Dr Mawson himself that he and Jeffryes, the wireless operator, were leaving the hut and that the other five had lost their senses. The next day we received a message from Mr Bickerton telling us to ignore the previous messages, that it was the wireless operator Jeffryes who was insane. Then all messages just stopped.’

  ‘But that could just be the blizzard bringing down the radio mast.’

  ‘And the threats?’

  ‘Well, in life there is constant threats.’

  ‘Mr Hurley, someone is causing trouble,’ said Davis with conviction.

  I thought about this before observing, ‘Bob Bage is solid as a rock, Dad Mclean, Bickerton, Madigan, Hodgeman—you couldn’t get better.’

  ‘And I recruited Jeffryes,’ said Davis. ‘There’s no doubt about his ability and he’s only been there since February. Actually, the person I’m worried about is Dr Mawson.’

  On 13 December, in the early hours of the morning when there was no darkness to discriminate night from day, Aurora pushed carefully into Commonwealth Bay. As we passed the Mackellar Islets, the ramshackle ice-framed hut of the Australian Antarctic Expedition came into sight. No one there stirred. Back from the hut, and quite prominent on the brow of a nearby hill, stood a newly erected wooden cross, a symbol alien to the landscape and defiant of the blizzards which ruled this place.

  Aurora was jostled by the gusts that swept down the icy hinterland and fiercely struck the water. It was more than an hour before Captain Davis was confident his anchor had an invincible hold on the Antarctic continent. He launched a boat to shore.

  John Hunter and Davis were with me in the boat, along with my Macquarie Island companion Les Blake. Davis led the way up to the door of the hut; there was still no sign of life. We paused and listened but the only sound that could be heard was the wind buffeting the hut. I stood alongside Davis as he pushed open the door and we both peered into its dark interior.

  ‘Hello, Davis, back so soon?’ came a voice I could scarcely recognise. It was Mawson. I could not see him but knew him well enough to recognise his cold sarcasm.

  There was then a massive clamour from inside and, as I followed Davis in, there were shouts of ‘Hoyle’ and ‘Johnnie’. We had literally caught them napping. They had seen Aurora early on, but grew tired of waiting for her to anchor. I found myself hugging each one of my former companions: good old Bage, pipe in hand and totally unchanged, Bickerton and Dad Mclean, Alf Hodgeman, even Madigan—and, of course, the good Doctor. I confess I was strangely misty-eyed to see my friends and to stand again in the hut where we had lived an almost monastic existence so close together for so long. Mawson was very composed but greeted me warmly. He had lost much weight and the bones in his face stood out. It was only when he stepped outside into daylight that I saw the full impact of his ordeal. He had turned old. He had lost most of his hair and that which he had was silver-grey. His face was gaunt, his eyes deeply inset and his brow quite furrowed. Most of all, he had lost his impressive fitness, and now looked quite frail. When Mawson alone had finally appeared on the hill above the hut in February, he was unrecognisable. Bickerton’s first words to him were: ‘Which one are you?’ But our questions were suppressed for the time being, and Mawson promised without prompting to give a full account of things once we were on board and away from Commonwealth Bay.

  Within a day everything considered of human value was taken on board Aurora and the hut was boarded up to keep out the blizzard. One last time Aurora slipped her anchor to depart Commonwealth Bay. The polar wind raced down from the plateau across the shore, darkening the water as it hastened us away. The hut was soon lost from view and my gaze fell upon the cross which stood on the very crest of the hill. Erected as a memorial to the two not returning, it was the last sign of our sojourn in the now-uninhabited landscape. I believed that as a result of our endeavours the hut would soon be home to new visitors. In fact, with the South Pole reached and an imminent crisis in Europe there were new fields for man’s imagination. It was not just one year or several, but some decades before the door of the AAE hut was reopened.

  To my surprise, once on board Dr Mawson insisted that, instead of proceeding straight home, Captain Davis head west so as to chart further sections of the Antarctic coastline. There was no enthusiasm on board for more surveying. Our route was perilous as we skirted icebergs in gale-force winds. I watched Gloomy shrink with exhaustion; he stood at the helm when I retired in the evening and was still there when I rose the next morning. No doubt sleeping only gave him nightmares of the disaster that befell the Titanic. He and the Doctor, normally firm allies, were plainly at odds as to the ship’s course. The Doctor’s dry humour had been a casualty of the expedition. His relations with Davis were icy to start and did not improve. And among the seven rescued expeditioners there was little conviviality. They had had enough of each other. The absence of Mertz and Ninnis hung heavily with us all. Jeffryes, the wireless man, would not shake my hand. He avoided all conversation and my camera. He had a wild and frightened look. I gathered from Bage that after some months in the confines of the hut, working through the night trying to make contact with the outside world, Jeffryes became delusional. Eventually he was removed from the position as he could not be trusted. Bickerton took over, though he was not as proficient.

  After dinner one evening, Mawson gathered us together in the mess and presented in an almost formal way an account of his eastern sledging journey. It was as if he was practising for lecture halls at home. He explained how Mertz, leading the way on skis, followed by Mawson with the first sledge, had successfully passed over a snow-filled crevasse. Ninnis was in the rear with the second sledge. Shortly afterwa
rds Mawson saw Mertz had stopped and was looking back. Mawson turned around to find Ninnis and his dog team and sledge had vanished. The snow bridge had collapsed.

  ‘We stayed for hours calling out for Ninnis. We could see one of the dogs on a ledge some hundred and fifty feet down. It was alive, most likely with its back broken, and whimpering, though mercifully not for long. That sledge had the bulk of our food, the food for the dogs, our fuel and our tent. We could see the tent wedged in the ice. My sledge meter showed we were three hundred and fifteen miles from Commonwealth Bay.

  ‘Mertz and I turned for home. We slaughtered the dogs one by one. Each dog pulled until it dropped. Malnutrition was our worst problem, along with frostbite. We both suffered stomach cramps and gastric complaints. Mertz became ill, very ill. He had bad diarrhoea and stopped eating. He said eating dog did not agree with him. He became delirious and could not continue. He died in his sleeping bag on 8 January. I covered his body, still in the sleeping bag, with blocks of ice. I made a cross from broken sledge runners and read a burial service.’

  The Doctor explained how he had then struggled on alone for a further three weeks. There was no doubt his suffering was intense and his will to survive almost superhuman. As it happened, he found the cairn where Dad McLean, Hodgeman and I had left food and directions. He reached this cairn the same day we departed from it to return to the hut.

  Mawson ordered Davis to steer Aurora back into the ice time and again through Christmas and New Year and all of January. I was content enough, but the others were impatient to be home. We all breathed a sigh of relief when, in mid-February 1914, Aurora finally turned north for home.

  On the return voyage I had a number of long conversations with Mawson. He wanted to know how I was going with compiling the photographic records and what had been done to raise funds to meet the expedition’s debts. He was surprised to learn I had been away to the Dutch East Indies. It certainly had been a contrast to my Antarctic experience, I told him.

  ‘Do you remember how, in the middle of those winter blizzards, we talked of going to a tropical island? I went from fifty degrees below zero to a hundred degrees above. Instead of freezing, the cinefilm was melting in the heat. What got to me most were the hordes of natives and no one speaking English. I tell you one thing I discovered, Doc: I prefer the isolation of the icecap to the crowds of the East Indies any day.’

  ‘Is that right? Well, I suppose there is now no corner on the globe that can hide from your camera. As for me I have had quite enough of the rigours of the frozen world.’ He sighed and when I looked at his sunken eyes and weary figure I could see he had decided his adventuring days were over.

  6

  Australia, 1914

  Aurora made a triumphant return to Adelaide, Mawson’s home town. He must have been heartened by the crowds that came to the dock in the summer heat: such fanfare and speeches and press photographers. Then he was whisked away to a private dinner and the next day to the university. There was a public reception at the town hall, which Mawson’s young fiancée, Paquita, attended with him. I thought her very pretty. But the fanfare was for Mawson alone; there was no opportunity to gather all the expedition members together. Bage and I and the others one by one went our separate ways. Wild was back in England, Azzi was in New Zealand. We remained unknowns.

  There was talk of Shackleton leading a new expedition across Antarctica. Frank Wild had signed up apparently. Bickerton was keen. Mawson told me Shackleton’s backers had seen my work and wanted to engage my services—but Shackleton, he warned me, could not be trusted. ‘And don’t forget, Hurley,’ he added, ‘I need you here in Australia until we have collated all the photographs and cinefilm.’

  ●

  In early March I arrived by myself at Central Station in Sydney with several boxes of glass plates, film and equipment. With nowhere else to go, I landed on my mother’s doorstep.

  ‘I was wondering when my bad penny would turn up,’ she said, as she kissed me on the cheek.

  At Kodak’s offices I worked on developing, printing and labelling. Mawson arranged a small advance from AAE funds to tide me over. I wrote to Shackleton, but his plans sounded very up in the air. There were invitations to speak at camera clubs, but the audiences were full of buffoons. The adventure was over. I struggled to work out why things didn’t seem the same and yet everything was the same. I had become accustomed to a way of life that could not be had in my family home. Life back in Glebe was for the time being both inescapable and intolerable.

  It was during one of our customary long silences over dinner that my mother quite startled me. ‘And I ’ave read you are going back there with Shackleton.’

  ‘The Antarctic, you mean? I may be. I really don’t know if he is going.’

  ‘Your pa would not approve, even though Mr Shackleton’s an Irishman. He’s more crazy than Mawson and Scott put together. No good has come of their antics but mothers weeping for lost sons and husbands.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong. Pa would have been proud. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the family. Didn’t write me a single letter between ’em. And when they’re here, barely a question as to what it was like.’

  ‘Don’t you be feeling sorry for yourself,’ she peered at me and raised her voice. ‘Just because you’ve got no money, no job and no wife. Jamie, it breaks my heart to see you—thirty years old and sleeping on your mother’s couch.’

  ‘I’m not thirty!’

  ‘Near enough. Your brothers and sisters are busy with their own families, that’s all. They mean no harm. But you must know I care about you. If I didn’t care, why would I have written to Dr Mawson?’

  I stopped chewing and looked up at her.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘I wrote Dr Mawson when he first appointed you saying that he shouldn’t take you to the Antarctic. I didn’t think you should go. Your pa worked so hard on the postcard business you walked out on.’

  ‘It was you who wrote to Mawson?! What on earth did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him you had poor lungs and suffered the cold badly, which was true enough.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God, Ma, surely you’re not serious? That letter almost cost me the whole expedition!’

  My mother was unmoved. ‘I did what your father would have done had he been alive. You was always too wilful for your own good, Jamie.’

  ‘So have you written to Shackleton now?’ I demanded.

  ‘There’s no reason to be like that. I have not written Mr Shackleton. You’re a man now, be it on your own head what you do. But why would you go back there? You have all the photographs you need. I read in the paper Dr Mawson is getting married next week—you should do the same.’

  ‘Mawson is a damn sight older than me, and while he’s off getting married he’s still got me working away on his film.’

  ‘No one says you’re not a hard worker, Jamie, but you are almost thirty years old.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry to get married,’ I snapped.

  She glowered at me and I decided to reveal some of my own news. ‘But as it happens, I am planning on going away—not to Antarctica, but the Gulf of Carpentaria. You can read about it soon enough in the papers. I’m going with Francis Birtles, and no, we are not going on his bicycle, we’re being given a car and cameras to make a film on the outback. And there’s good money in it for me.’

  ‘When’s this happening?’

  ‘Easter. We’ll be leaving from the Royal Easter Show, actually. Birtles likes a crowd.’

  ‘Well, you will be in the papers, won’t you, with Francis Birtles and all—why, he’s more famous than Dr Mawson. I’ll be there, Jamie, but don’t you ignore me now—you ’ave to come and talk to your ma, you’ll have to look out for me.’

  I was gone some three months with Birtles. We clocked up six thousand miles at a whirlwind pace in an open-top Ford with a twenty-horsepower engine. Birtles taught me how to drive. And we didn’t just stick to
roads; Birtles knew all the stock routes. It was hard to believe the ease with which the Ford carried my equipment across areas that had taken the explorers Leichhardt and Burke and Wills months to tramp on foot. It was the best introduction to the outback a city boy could have. It was desert, but not as forbidding as the desert of the Antarctic plateau.

  I learned a lot from Birtles; he lived the life I wanted to lead. He was a man of surprises and resourcefulness. He had set records, written books and made a film. He was a true adventurer. Although not a scientist, he had an appreciation of the land. He had spent time with the Aborigines and learned bushcraft. He was a good shot and kangaroo was our staple meal.

  I was fascinated by Aboriginal hunting and fishing methods using the crudest of weapons. I found myself wanting to film the people more than the landscape. They made good subjects for my camera, despite being as black as the ace of spades. It was something special to see the toughness of the men, their cheeky lubras and piccaninnies. Birtles said their way of life should be filmed before they died out. The footage it occurred to me would then prove quite valuable. There were however the challenges of the heat, dust and flies.

  We stayed a while in an idyllic spot on the Nicholson River in Arnhem Land only a few hundred yards from an Aboriginal camp. Birtles had been negotiating for several days for permission to attend a corroboree, but nothing was happening, despite gifts and inducements.