The Nature of Ice Read online

  Chad blinks, fearing he’s missed the point.

  ‘Three measly snippets,’ Freya looks across at him with a trace of exasperation. ‘It doesn’t say a thing about what’s happening around him in the hut, the seventeen other men, what they did, who said what, not a word of what he’s thinking. And his fiancée—it’s practically his first mention of Paquita Delprat in the eight months he’s been at Commonwealth Bay. It’s as if she’s a postscript, tacked on after the weather and the dogs.’ Freya stretches the ribbon marker down the spine. ‘My husband says if you only relied on his journal you could easily think him unfeeling.’

  Chad thinks it unwise to admit he’d prefer that to the tripe some people fill their diaries with. ‘Why persevere with it?’

  ‘Research for the exhibition.’ She sighs. ‘Besides, it’s good to make up your own mind about these things.’

  ‘Big Douggie may not have been Prince Charming but I guarantee he never would have expected that one century on Freya Jorgensen would be critiquing his personal journal.’

  Freya smiles. ‘You have a point there.’ She snaps the book shut and yawns. ‘But he’s not going to beat me. I’m determined to figure out why everyone thinks he’s such a big hero.’

  Chad won’t let that one past the keeper. ‘For a start, Freya, if it weren’t for Douglas Mawson and John King Davis, you and I wouldn’t be here. There’d be no Australian territory in Antarctica.’

  Freya rolls onto her back and gives a gurgled groan. ‘You sound like my husband.’

  ‘And secondly,’ he says, wondering if he’s just been insulted, ‘they were all heroes. Not just Mawson and Davis—every one of their men and crew.’

  Freya rolls her eyes at his outburst.

  ‘They came down to Antarctica in an old Dundee whaler that leaked like a wicker basket, with gear and equipment up to the gunnels—Mawson even brought down a plane he used as a tractor sledge. If the plane hadn’t pranged before they left, it might have made the first Antarctic flight. It took weeks to find a rocky site to build a base on, and even then it was miles further west than they’d planned. Commonwealth Bay is nothing like the Vestfolds. It’s a wind bowl with a few ridges of rock surrounded by mile after mile of ice cliff. Mawson had no way of knowing he’d chosen the windiest place on earth to build his hut. They had no contact with the outside world. For all they knew, the ship could have broken up in pack-ice and never even made it back to Australia. Then no one would have known where to find them.’

  Chad gestures out the window towards the ice cap. ‘We’re in our heated hut within radio contact of the station. When they left winter quarters all they had was an ice cave plugged with a covering of canvas. In those days, if something went wrong when you were sledging, there was no rescue. No radio. No aircraft. You were entirely on your own.’ He draws a deep breath.

  ‘I had no idea you felt so strongly. Or knew so much about it,’ she says quietly.

  He knocks at his skull. ‘Some things seep into the grey matter. At least, you’d hope so after spending eight weeks at the joint.’

  She sits upright in her sleeping bag. ‘You’ve been to Commonwealth Bay?’

  ‘A few years ago now. Did some work on the hut with a restoration team. I can tell you one thing, Freya. Read all the books you like, but nothing compares with being there. Even Hurley’s photos seem different afterwards.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Every way. Take winter quarters—it’s tiny. Photos don’t give the scale. When you’re inside the hut it’s hard to imagine how eighteen men could have existed in such confinement—and for the most part got along. They would have been on top of each other, working, sleeping, eating, socialising.’ He pauses. ‘All I’m saying is, heroes like Mawson are everyday people. As flawed and as capable of stuff-ups as the rest of us.’

  Freya gives him a haughty look. ‘Speak for yourself.’

  Chad returns to his journal and reads back over today’s record. He retrieves his pencil and adds, Top day, not wishing to be thought of as dull.

  He reads the last weeks’ entries, staggered at how rapidly summer is passing. He has taken to working on the new accommodation module half the week, leaving the remaining time free to help Freya in the field. Touch wood, there’s been no serious gripes yet from his fellow chippies, although Adam Singer, the only tradie he can’t seem to warm to, makes a point of winding him up. This morning Adam stopped him on his way out: Watch her, he said, I can tell you firsthand she’s a prick teaser.

  He catches her studying him.

  ‘Have you seen many auroras?’ she asks.

  ‘Seen many auroras?’ he crows, setting down his journal. ‘You happen to be speaking to the man who’s clocked up nine winters in Antarctica.’

  She looks at him earnestly. ‘Is nine a lot?’

  ‘Is nine a lot!’ He flounders until he catches the teasing in her smile.

  She demands he tell her everything: colours, form, how an aurora travels across the sky, even how it makes him feel. The last question gives him pause for thought. ‘What’s all this in aid of?’ he asks.

  She hesitates. ‘It’s for a series of photos. These shots I’ve been taking of you and the bikes—and the others—out on the sea ice.’

  ‘Spill the beans, then.’

  ‘It will probably sound bizarre.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m wanting to “create”,’ she draws the quote marks with her fingers, ‘a summer aurora—bold, vivid colours swirling through the ice as they might in the night sky.’

  ‘Sounds alright,’ he says. ‘You know there’s as many auroras going on in summer as in winter.’

  ‘There are?’

  ‘We can’t see them in summer because of the perpetual daylight. But they’re there, in both hemispheres—the southern and northern lights are all part of the same loop.’ He turns to his trusty journal. ‘Well then, in the cause of research and the Arts, let’s see what we have in here.’

  He flicks back through the pages to the winter months. ‘Here we go. June nine. Auroral arch from north to northeast, visible 7.15 pm. Curtains changed to form a luminous green band. A ball of light travelled east and west.’

  He looks for something more impressive. ‘August seven. A deep red arch rose and broadened from the northeast, then folded back. At its eastern end, long streamers of turquoise. So bright it lit up the sea ice with reflected colours.’

  ‘August eight—’ He looks across at her. ‘You awake?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she replies without opening her eyes. ‘I’m listening. Visualising. It’s wonderful. Keep going.’

  ‘August eight. Lovely green and silver curtains. Curved fragments of bright yellow to the east. Pulses of light. Luminosity tracked to the east. Western end faded out.’

  Chad turns over several pages. ‘This one was a beauty. September one. You’ll like this: brilliant red aurora like a Japanese fan opening and closing. Spread out to the east. Colours from bright green and purple to a deep red around the ruffles. Continued … through … Freya?

  ‘Freya?’ he whispers.

  She answers with a snuffle and rolls over to face the wall.

  Chad sighs and rests his journal on the floor beside his bunk.

  Through the window of the Apple, he can see two adélies sleeping on their feet, their beaks tucked down into the crook of their wings. The evening light is velvet soft. For twenty years, now, summers and winters, this world of light and dark has been a part of him, each day of it on record in his journal. Is nine winters a lot? Five hundred and fifteen days he’ll have been here by the end of summer; more than once a longstanding member of the 500 Club, he could have skited.

  He turned down the last offer to summer at Mawson Station in favour of spending time at home. A balls-up he’d made of that: half of November moping at the bay pondering the end of another decade.

  The day he turned forty he’d had a gutful of himself; he was dressed and in the car before the morning chorus brought the bay to
life. He’d belted down the east coast highway like a bat out of hell, motored past Hobart before mist had fully lifted from the hills, and was waiting at the gates for the mill yard in Huonville to open. He picked up a trailer load of King Billy pine, celery-top and sassafras, some choice birds-eye Huon pine that had been put aside for him. Back in town he whiled away an hour at the Chandler stores down by the docks, talking himself out of a pair of topnotch binoculars that would have swallowed every cent of profit from the sale of one of his dinghies. Face it, he thinks, the old man and his prudence will always be a part of you. Then down to the river for lunch, as always settling on a bench in full view of the bridge.

  The rusting hulk of the Lake Illawarra still rests on the Derwent River bed. Twenty-four metres beneath the surface, the broken vessel lies too deep to be a hazard to ships passing above.

  When he left after lunch he should have driven straight back to the bay, but instead he pulled off at a phone box; stale smoke lingered in the mouthpiece. I leave for work at six, Jocelyn told him in a voice absent of emotion. Every time was to be the last; but like a moth to the light, once again he found himself merging the Jackaroo into the eastbound lane, its trailer load of timber brandishing a red rag, the pit of his stomach churning to lustful desire by the time he’d reached the rise of the bridge. He fancied he could feel when his tyres crossed the join where the new span of bridge abuts the old.

  Chad can’t remember when they abandoned the foreplay of a meal out, when each put away the last dressed-up vestige of social masquerade. Did she ever speak of him as her boyfriend? Whatever hopes she might once have held for him had long since been discarded, the promise he saw in her unfulfilled, the lees of their relationship a cojoining of bodies parched for touch and lacking the prospect of a different kind of joy.

  The sex was containment and release, a scrambling of buttons and zips, a belt unbuckled, a top pulled free, shoes pushed aside and socks left on, a stripping of straps, a tearing at clasps, the freeing of breasts too large for the gaunt frame that carried them. Ill-fitting bodies kneeling on scuffed wooden floorboards against a creaking bed, and the rough and tumble entry into an oblivion of fleshly warmth. It was his belly pumping against the angular fall of her buttocks with a stark reminder of his bulk in contrast to a rib cage pushing through the lining of its skeletal back. Lovemaking; hardly, there was none of the exploring and caressing or the slow, rising heat he dreams of with a different woman. Both were silenced by the tawdry afterglow.

  A benumbed mind and body carried him from the broken screen door to his vehicle in the lane. The same stupor navigated him back out to the highway. In a fug he made the turnoff to the coast. Only when he shifted down gears and began the rise into forested hills, passing beneath canopies of wattle and gum, did he think to wind down the window and draw in lungfuls of crisp bush air. And only once he reached the meandering downhill run to Triabunna and caught the familiar coastal comfort of kelp—on a full moon night he could trace the silhouette of Maria Island filling the bay—did dullness leave and feeling creep back in. He stopped at the Orford store for hot salted chips and a pastie with sauce, but not until he had wolfed them down and brushed salt from his shirt did he wonder at the gaping chasm in the base of his gut.

  He drove in wretched silence along the coast, window down, the orb of moon as white as quartz in the apex of the night. The moon lit up nuggets of granite glinting with mica at the side of the road. The moon scattered shadows through the bush. The moon cast a bridge of seclusion wider than a mile across water at ebb in Great Oyster Bay.

  An ice cavern carved from the sea

  THE REAL

  THING

  WIND RATTLES THE STUDIO. SNOWDRIFT blinds the bay. Freya sits at her desk cradling her drink, buoyed up by digital previews of her summer aurora. If her large format shots should prove as strong …She clings to the thought, trying not to fret about the quantity of large format film she has already used. She feels thankful for a day of poor weather to spend catching up in her studio; photos taken at Rookery Lake a fortnight ago are still waiting to be sorted.

  Chad McGonigal had spoken more in those two days than in all their previous outings combined. She had woken early in the Apple to see lying loose on the floor beside his journal a clue to his past, a tiny dog-eared print with 1974 pencilled on the back, the polaroid coating so bleached of colour that the woman’s beaming face, dappled with shade by her sunhat, looked otherworldly.

  You have your mother’s smile. She had returned the portrait when he awoke, her urge to ask questions subdued by the weight of his silence.

  Her laptop chimes with incoming mail. Breaking news: Hurley’s ice cavern. A knot tightens across Freya’s shoulders before she even clicks on the image. Her computer processor before she even clicks on the image. Her computer processor grinds, the timer icon asserting her husband’s effort and devotion with each circuit. Frank Hurley’s ice cavern bursts onto the screen, an ethereal figure wound in light. The photographic wizard who conjured this image into existence almost a century ago would have revelled in seeing it shining silvery on the screen, every bit as wondrous in pixelised glow. An ice cavern carved from the sea.

  >> Forget what I emailed you yesterday. I see this as a much stronger image for the catalogue cover, the other we’ll keep as a promo piece.

  Freya shrinks at her husband’s fervour. What began as suggestions has morphed into decrees; email by email, her project sequestered away. She slumps before her laptop, an upwelling of tears veiling the screen, frustrated not at Marcus, who has always been like this, but at her own submissiveness, at years of being swept along unresisting, dragged down, held too long.

  Freya had tried to leave Marcus once; late one night she drove to her parents’ house. In the morning, after Papa left for work, her mother dismissed her complaints of his overbearing–ness, scolding her like a child being marched back to school. Look at how he provided for you all those years, the studio, the kind and generous things he’s done to make you happy. You have a good husband, a lovely home.

  It ought to be enough. She should be grateful and happy. It feels churlish, then, to single out the patio—a birthday surprise from Marcus, the sky blocked out with sky-blue bonded steel, transformed from a sanctuary to a cell. Or the wall he built soon after, all under wraps until you got home—her husband brimming with such pride as he showed off all that planning and expense, rendered bricks the breadth of the block, a graceful curve around the largest gum tree. For privacy—he wound his arm around her and held her tight, smothered her with kisses—no more strangers on the street peering in. Freya couldn’t bring herself to injure him, seeing, beneath all that intellect and apparent confidence, a boyish need to be praised, revered—a man in constant need of bolstering. Is her husband’s vulnerability so different from her own, a disfigured woman needing to be cherished, wanting to be loved? She had smiled then, praised her husband for his triumph. Only on her morning walks, looking out across the escarpment to the Swan Coastal Plain, could she grieve for what she’d lost: lush expanses and aged, unfettered trees, views that stretched forever. She wept for a house that had once captured her heart with its balmy sense of space. She cried for herself. Ten years beholden, not to misguided acts of love, but to her own passivity, her own lack of fortitude. It was as much her own doing—their lovely home had been reduced to a suffocating cocoon moulded for two, and she felt a growing urge to take on more and more projects that took her away from it.

  She returns to Marcus’s email:

  >> Hurley had recently returned from a rescue mission to retrieve some sledging dogs from Aladdin’s Cave, and was inspired by the quality of light that filtered through the cave’s walls. On the last day of August, he and the surgeon, Leslie Whetter, set off from the hut with some alpine rope and scaled down the ice cliffs to the frozen sea below. There, they entered this magnificent cave where Hurley secured a series of five images. Whatever will the purists say to that? Not a fake at all.

  Freya scans t
he icy enclosure, the foreground canopy that for years was thought to have come from a separate negative, merged by Hurley in the darkroom to form a seamless composite. Art critics believed the image ‘fudged’, declaring it too dangerous for Hurley to have entered an unstable ice cave from an equally unstable platform of sea ice. They underestimated the lengths Frank Hurley would go to. Now Marcus writes that the photo has been re-examined and deemed the real thing, the new assessment verified by several of the diaries.

  It is Freya who is a fake. She conceals her growing discontent, keeps from Mama, from them all, her sorrow for a life that will never hear the squeals of children darting beneath a garden sprinkler, or even a dog panting at the flywire door. Focus on the good things.

  >> Hey you, not a word from the Frozen South this past week.

  Have I lost my wife to the wiles of the wild?

  Freya jumps at the banging on the door. Hot chocolate scalds her hand.

  Chad stands on the landing, his yellow jacket slapping like a sail in the wind.

  ‘Come in,’ she yells above the noise, but he keeps his distance, fishing a battered notebook from his overalls.

  ‘You’ve probably seen this.’

  ‘Come in out of the weather.’

  ‘Can’t stay.’ He turns his back to a squall to flick through calculations, notations, diagrams. ‘You asked what else I remembered from Commonwealth Bay. Here, for what it’s worth.’ He tears off a page and hands it to her. ‘I found this written on Hurley’s darkroom wall at winter quarters.’

  Chad is halfway down the stairs when she calls after him, touched by his offering. The words on the page send a tingle down her spine. Near enough is not good enough. Her thanks are snatched by a fresh blast of wind.

  The Adélie Blizzard

  October 1912

  DOUGLAS RETURNED FROM THE ROUNDHOUSE to a stifling pall of pipe smoke. Those seated at the dinner table cackled like a gathering of crones, Archie McLean fit for the part with his cheeks and lips sporting the remnants of rouge from Saturday’s theatricals.