Endurance Page 33
My sonorous patter is well honed, but I have not allowed for the rattle and hum of electric tram lines just outside the Palais. Nor was I expecting the accompaniment of raucous shrieking from the Big Dipper switchback railway at Luna Park next door, the noise of which erupts unpredictably throughout my lecture. So when Endurance charges into the icepack, splitting the floes left and right as she moves directly towards the cine camera, I hear in the background the ominous clickety-click of carriages mounting the highest point of the Big Dipper track. Then, just as Endurance bursts forwards, virtually off the screen and into the audience, there are ear-piercing screams as the Big Dipper plummets. Patrons in the front rows of the theatre duck for cover and I raise my voice in a fight to be heard. Indeed the whole show is a fight to be heard.
Epilogue
I sailed with Endurance only the once, but have now performed my synchronised lecture almost a hundred times. It is not all beer and skittles. I have lectured in grand town halls to crowds who were moved to tears and I have endured flea-bitten, rat-infested halls faced with utterly unmoved, unwashed, uneducated mobs.
Shackleton, desperate to clear expedition debts, has lectured in Britain and America three times more than this. He screwed a hard bargain on these Australian rights—especially considering the films are my own work! But it looks like paying off. The release of Shackleton’s book on the expedition did no harm in awakening interest after five long years of war. To think my film and photographs paid for the expedition, but he was so spiteful as to leave me out of the tributes in the book’s final chapter. Douglas Mawson may be threatening to sue me for not exhibiting his Australian expedition film, but he would not be so ungrateful as to cut me from his book.
The voyage with Shackleton in 1914 is the most famous trip I made. The voyage was a failure but people say it was a glorious failure, a part of the heroic age of exploration. I was still in my twenties then. It was that extraordinary time before the horror of the trenches on the Western Front. Those images won’t go away.
The things I have seen haunt me sometimes: young men’s corpses in the mud of no-man’s-land; shooting our sledge dogs on the icecap; slaughtering unsuspecting gentoo penguins while marooned on Elephant Island. These scenes are imprinted in my head. There was much I could not or would not photograph; I had such high ideals then. But the world lost interest in ideals and I needed an income. Or did I just grow old? No, I am neither old nor bitter; hardened, that is all, and a realist. I alone know what I have seen. It is for me alone to tell. My sense is it must always be this way.
This has been my story. Shackleton’s book is really no more than a sailor’s yarn in which I rate barely a footnote. I doubt they are even his words. There’s no mention of the fact he knowingly sailed Endurance to her doom. Perhaps nothing can be the whole truth. My diaries have been my closest companions all these years but they only know what I chose to write. The photographs are out there, of course, in books, libraries and galleries. You might think they’d be enough. But every photograph reveals and conceals. And one thing I have learned, even with photographs, is that people still see only what they believe. A photographer with all the skill in the world can only do so much. It is an art getting the perfect photograph and I worked hard at it, some say too hard, though I never called myself an artist. I was just persistent, single-minded even. Waiting alone for days to get the right light, followed by more days alone in the darkroom. This was of my choosing. And, yes, there were sacrifices.
As for my mother’s remarks, I kept them to myself. She stayed away. She rarely showed interest in the twins. I was now a family man, or at least I had a family to support. I found us a house overlooking the Harbour. The rent was high but I could not see myself being content looking into the backyards of others.
Work could not stop now I had mouths to feed. I was happiest working by myself and especially travelling. Inspired by Robert Service, my thoughts of travel and adventure moved from ‘the Pole unto the Tropics’. I liked the idea of having my own expedition and being the boss. New Guinea seemed the obvious destination. Only missionaries and gold prospectors went there. But for the time being it would have to wait.
My working life is virtually all I remember. Childhood is a faded memory of that very short crowded existence in Glebe with Ma and Pa before I ran away. Most of my time since then I have been a photographer. Photography was my opportunity to achieve something close to perfection from the mess of life. I grabbed that opportunity and the rest just happened. I learned the only person I could trust was myself. That’s why my images are more perfect than the real world, especially where man is involved. Certainly I have lived through catastrophes enough from the killing grounds of Grytviken to Ypres.
And people, even my own ma, will continue to see what they believe. That is why every photograph, just like every story, is a composition. Shackleton and Perris knew this. I wanted people, wives and sweethearts, whoever, and whatever they believed, to see what they would otherwise never see, to have an idea of what the world contained and I wanted to be the one to create that vivid picture. Bean refused to accept. He was stuck in his own vision. ‘An Incident in the Battle at Zonnebeke’ was an image of courage. Yes, it was taken from negatives of a training exercise in Flanders with Middle Eastern skies but it captured the imagination of everyone who saw it. The image endures beyond the events we witness and the lives of all witnesses. It is fame itself.
And I have become very used to being opposed. After all, life is one long call to conflict.
Author’s note
Although this novel is based on the life of the Australian photographer Frank Hurley and there is substantial accuracy both in the story and the historical context, it is a work of fiction. Most conversations are entirely imagined. The letters between Hurley and Elsa and from Hurley to General Birdwood are as imagined. Characters bear the names of real persons, but the characters have occasionally needed to be enlarged and some roles consolidated. The cogitations of Frank Hurley written in first person are those of the writer, albeit with the benefit of having read Hurley’s diaries and books and studied his photographs.
With the objective of authenticity, the novel contains quotations from and references to original sources, most of which are apparent from the text, especially the poetry and lyrics from the period. Extracts from the Hurley diaries in Chapters 4 and 13 and in the Epilogue, which is from Hurley’s book Argonauts of the South, are reproduced with the kind permission of the Hurley estate.
There are other occasions where I have drawn upon anecdotes and expressions found in the various diaries and original sources. I set out a number of instances below.
The remark ‘Hurley to bed, Hurley to rise,’ (Chapter 3) was originally made by Mawson. The argument with Whetter (Chapter 3) is referred to in several diary accounts. The menu in Chapter 4 is described in Hurley’s diary.
The newspaper excerpt in Chapter 7 is from the Daily Mail, quoted in Shackleton’s expedition prospectus. The initial conversation with the stowaway Blackborow (Chapter 7) is referred to in several accounts. The remarks ‘Endurance cannot live in this,’ (Chapter 8) and ‘What the ice gets, the ice keeps,’ (Chapter 9) were famously said by Shackleton. Orde-Lees’ description of smoking (Chapter 10) is from his diary of 28 July 1916, published in Elephant Island and Beyond: The life and diaries of Thomas Orde-Lees by John Thomson (Erskine Press, Norwich, 2003). Shackleton’s statement, ‘Don’t we look alright now that we have washed?’ (Chapter 11) is recorded in Orde-Lees’ diary of 30 August 1916.
Chapter 14 quotes from a recruitment speech Shackleton gave while in Australia in 1917. The sermon in Chapter 14 is inspired by the sermons in the book Christ and the World at War: Sermons preached in war-time edited by Basil Mathews (James Clarke and Co., London, 1917). The description of Antoinette as ‘raven-haired’ in Chapter 15 is from Once More on My Adventure by Frank Legg and Toni Hurley (Ure Smith, Sydney, 1966).
The spruiker’s words in Chapter 18 are based on an anecdote t
old by Hurley in a 1919 article called ‘Adventure films and the psychology of the audience’. In Chapter 15 the lines of poetry are of course from John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’; on the same page, ‘George’ is the subject of a Hurley photograph, thought to be Trooper George Redding, who was well over the maximum enlistment age.
There are a number of people to thank: helpful librarians, especially at the Mitchell Library and State Library of New South Wales; Alasdair McGregor for his comprehensive biography Frank Hurley: A photographer’s life (Viking, Camberwell, Victoria, 2004) and for his encouragement; Bob and Irene Goard of Photoantiques, Bowral, for showing me the cameras; Dr Tony Mastroianni for his insights on psychiatry; Jane Palfreyman for her expert guidance; and my agent Margaret Connolly. I acknowledge the influence of Errol Morris’s book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the mysteries of photography (Penguin Press, New York, 2011).
A very large thank you also to my family for their patience, feedback, love and support.
About the author
Tim Griffiths was living in Papua New Guinea when he first came across Frank Hurley’s photographs of that country, leading to a long-term interest in the Hurley story. He has had no experiences on the scale of Hurley’s adventures and is yet to have an opportunity to visit Antarctica, but has travelled through Europe, Asia and America. He enjoys bush-walking, cross-country skiing, sailing, kayaking, surfing, diving and cycling.
Tim lives in Sydney with his wife and four children. He works as a lawyer and arbitrator, and has a keen interest in Australian history. This is his first novel.