The Nature of Ice (35 page)

THE PULSING IN HIS CHEST engulfed his body in the seconds between knocking and waiting for the door to open. It was not Paquita but her mother, Henrietta, who welcomed him with a hug, crying,
Dear, dear boy
and gesturing with a sniff and her handkerchief towards the sitting room doors.

The image of the girl he'd left so long ago now blended with the woman edged in light at the window, taller than he remembered in her frock of ribbon and lace. He chose to ignore the flicker of shock that Paquita blinked away as she traced his haggard body with her eyes.

Words momentarily failed him. He felt at risk of breaking down.

‘You have had a long time to wait,' he whispered, not trusting his voice to deliver more words. Paquita slowly nodded.

He reached inside his jacket; his fingers turned to butter, letters and his house plans slipping to the floor.

Then Paquita stepped towards him with open arms, drawing him to her with the strength of her smile. He closed his eyes to the press of her body and the gentle folds of home.

Frank Hurley

A NEW WAY
OF SEEING

FREYA RISES WITH THE LIGHT. The trail, once a railway line linking the Darling Scarp to Perth, leads her through bushland chill with shadow; it's too early in the day for June's winter sun to warm the face of the escarpment. These morning walks through the bush, beyond earshot of the drone of commuters pouring westward to the city, away from the hisses and groans of road trains lumbering up Great Eastern Highway, clear Freya's head and resurrect a world beyond the acrid turmoil at home.

Freya leaves the trail and scrambles uphill through bush. She reaches her favourite outcrop of granite that looks across the tops of jarrah and marri, down through a sweeping valley to the Swan Coastal Plain. She turns an ear to the rush of a distant waterfall revived by winter rain. The first gleam of sunlight touches her back and silvers the brook snaking through grass trees and scrub. She sits for a time, drinking in the view. She will miss these things, will crave them, even.

Freya doubles back to the opening of the abandoned railway tunnel, where a kookaburra peers down at her between the branches of a tree.

The date carved into a limestone block reads 1895. She has entered this masoned archway only once before, Marcus gripping her hand in his, rallying her through the eight-hundred-metre-long enclosure. Now Freya walks once more through the blackness, the frigid tunnel closing around her in a press of lifeless air. Water drips and echoes. Her boot catches an aluminium can and sends it rattling over stone. For a moment she thinks to turn and run but when she looks back towards the entry, the daylight beyond is no longer defined by an arch of stone. She has come so far that the blackened lens of tunnel has reduced the light in the distance to a pinhole, to an aperture closed down.

MUSIC FROM THE FAR END of the house belies the dissonance.

Freya spends the morning reclaiming her shambles of a studio, filing remnants from the photographic exhibition, archiving the last of negatives and proof sheets. She is thankful, now, for her husband's insistence (ultimatum, her sister called it):
We will finish what we began, Freya.
She owed him that and more. She, in turn, has behaved above reproach, has, for longer than the agreed-upon trial—
if you still want to go after
the exhibition I won't stand in your way
—dutifully played out the futile charade.

She spreads an armful of proof sheets and prints across the work bench—ocean and icebergs, shots around the station, a man's black and white portrait she refused to destroy.

When she studies her photographs of Davis Station, she can see that the spirit of community is as vibrant now as it was in Douglas Mawson's day. The portrait she has of Frank Hurley, dressed in full sledging gear, reminds her that though aircraft and vehicles have replaced sledges and dogs, the terrain they cross is a layer of the same. She has learned from her summer on the ice, that for every hero of the past, another waited at home for their return. And for her own small part, through some gradual, curious process that has you absorb a place until it forms a part of you, Freya has been vested with a new way of seeing. Her concept of Antarctica began with Hurley's black and white images from a century ago. Her vision now flourishes with colour, and will forever hold an image of two people upon a limitless expanse of ice. Truth and understanding, she sees, perhaps a glimpse of love, can be found in frozen places.

Freya sorts through proofs of a broken red skidoo retrieved from a crevasse on the Amery Ice Shelf and flown back to Davis Station for repair. She hears the garage door, sees Marcus make his way towards her studio with a satchel of papers, his head down. She won't let his heartache undo her.
No,
Marcus
; without hesitation she turned down his offer that they start a family—
begin again
—a forlorn and desperate plea. Freya knows now that some things can't be fixed, no matter how you try.

WINTER
SOLSTICE

DAWN. THE JUNE SUN PALE and low. The water is a shimmer of glass, broken only by a pair of wooden blades that form coronas of bubbles as they dip and rise. The oars are evenly weighted in his hands. On this, the winter solstice, the sounds are of the bay, nothing more. Chad listens to the cry of gulls, glides over baubles of kelp, hears the gurgle of water beneath the newly varnished planks. He nods to the silver-haired lady in tartan pants who stands at the end of the new timber pontoon that has replaced the crumbling granite breakwater, for years the bay's single eyesore. Each morning at this hour she does a sprightly walk to the rocks, on to the pontoon, then returns along the beach to her easel and paints to catch the light. What began a few days ago as an insipid wash and a few wavy lines, this morning, when he wandered over to say hello and take a look, captures refractions of winter light thrown across the bay.

Jim Buckle's boat is hauled high up on the beach, tethered to the hub of an old tractor wheel. Come winter the Buckles, and others of their ilk, leave the bay to escape the cold. Revived by Queensland sun, the pair will stay north until Roma can be convinced that spring has thawed the last skerrick of frost from this small southerly isle.

When Chad pulls on an oar to veer the boat down the bay he feels the morning sun touch his face. Through the trees he can see the oiled wood of his deck, now completed. He's been home eight months. He passes the old dead gum where this time each year a pair of white-bellied sea eagles adds new scaffolding to their nest of sticks. Time feels as steady and smooth as the stroke of an oar.

The water at the stern flashes between aquamarine and cobalt blue when a mollymawk crisscrosses the sun. The big bird trails his wake as Chad makes his way past the quarry; it quickly learns the pattern of a man's day, discovering the treasures a net can hold.

Chad rests his feet against the wooden foothold repositioned to suit his height. He's as happy as Larry with the new lease of life he's given his grandfather's old dinghy. He spent the last month—time he should have put into a shamefully long-overdue delivery—restoring the wood: sanding back timber and planking the floor with new King Billy pine. He honed smaller handles from the original Huon pine oars he'd watched his grandfather turn before Chad was old enough to use the lathe on his own. If Pop were here now he'd run the flat of his hand along the planks to judge the kind of varnishing job the kid has given her. He'd not find too much to tut-tut about; the waterproof skin of the dinghy gleams.

Chad rolls up his sleeves and reaches down beside the dinghy to retrieve the wooden buoy. The mollymawk skims the water, tucks its wings in close, bobbing a respectful distance away. Man and bird peer down through the water at the glint of silver held fast in the mesh. Chad frees the remnants of a parrotfish and throws it well away. The mollymawk, in a flutter of wings and gangling legs, squawks across the surface and stakes its claim before any marauder dares approach. Chad pulls in fistfuls of netting, and with it a trevally and two good-sized trumpeter, the last struggling to shake free of his hold in a shower of glassy scales.

HE RACES AGAINST HIS BEST time home, working his arms and upper body, stretching and flexing his back. When he rounds the point to the bay he lets the dinghy drift, regaining his breath, absorbing the sun, water burbling beneath the keel. He can see the artist on the beach in conversation with a second woman.

Chad rows leisurely across the deeper water towards the pontoon. At the shoreline the figure of the new arrival treads across the sand, keeping step with the pace of his oars. Her movement seems distinctive and for a moment his breath stops, but when she takes off her hat he can see her hair is darker, that she wears it cropped, that this woman in jeans is slighter than the one who lives in his thoughts.

He hooks the dinghy's painter around a cleat and sits on the edge of the pontoon, his feet dangling inside the boat. He holds the fish bucket in his lap, admiring his bounty that continues to flip and flop. He turns to see that the woman has reached the rocks and stops to stare in his direction. She tilts her head quizzically, her face divided by shadow. With a start he realises the puzzle she ponders is
him
. Chad is in peril of being winded; he stands, clutching the handle of his bucket, stepping forward, lingering, hesitating, unsure still if his mind is playing tricks. She scrambles over the rocks, jumps barefooted from one stone to the next as lightly as a bird. He just has time to think,
Of course it's Freya
, before he becomes dizzy and has to firmly tell himself to concentrate lest he careers off the edge of the pontoon.

She steps onto the planks and raises her hand. He feels her steps vibrating through the wood, the distance between them dwindling. She strides towards him, fearless, and though he tries to move he cannot, apprehension ringing in his ears like shattering glass.

Freya stands before him, smiling, crying, flyaway strands of her hair floating in the sun. He pushes the bucket to the crook of his arm and takes her outstretched hands—he grips them hard, incapable of less. He feels fifteen years old, his limbs ungainly. He shakes his head, tongue-tied, looks downwards for words, certain his voice will quaver when he speaks and finally blurting,
You waited a long time
.

His utterance echoes as a couplet; she speaks the same words in return.

Chad meets her iceberg-blue eyes and it's Freya who laughs first. He stands fixed to the pontoon, fish slapping the bucket, his hands covered in scales, but he's not letting go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE NATURE OF ICE
WAS written as part of a PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, with the support of a Postgraduate Research Scholarship and a stellar supervisor. For wisdom, guidance and goodwill, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Richard Rossiter and to fellow writers Amanda Curtin and Annabel S mith.

While
The Nature of Ice
is a work of fiction, it rests on a foundation of research reinforced by the expertise and experiences of colleagues and friends who shared information, material, anecdotes and views.

Nancy Robinson Flannery, along with Ian Flannery, contributed in myriad ways to my understanding of Paquita Delprat and Douglas Mawson. Nancy also permitted me to use and research her ideas on smoking as a factor in Xavier Mertz's demise.

I am indebted to Gabrielle Eisner of Switzerland who translated Xavier Mertz's German diary transcript in its entirety and to The Friends of Mawson for financial assistance.

Particular thanks go to Maya Allen Gallegos, the ANARE club (especially John Gillies, Bruce McDonald and Selwyn Peacock), Philip Ayres, Sasha Boston, Henk Brolsma, Ingolv Bruaset, Dave Burkitt, John Bryan, Mike Craven, Amy Cort, Chris Forbes-Ewan, EC U library staff and the Document Delivery Service, Malcom Foster, Pete Gill, Stephen Haddelsey, Deborah Kerr, Syd Kirkby, Estelle Lazer, Elle Leane, Lynne Leonhardt, Ben Manser, Gary Mason, Dave McCormack, the late Jessica McEwin, Alasdair McGregor, Doug McVeigh, the late Mollie Mundy, Thomas Pickard, Estelle de San Miguel, Bob Silberberg, Max and Muriel Sluce, Mike Staples, Clive Strauss, Tashi Tenzing, Amanda Till and Rosy Whelan.

The South Australian Museum/University of Adelaide allowed me to publish Hurley's and Mertz's photographs, and with Gareth Mawson Thomas, kindly consented to me reprinting archival material from the Mawson and Delprat Papers. The generosity and enthusiasm of Mark Pharaoh, curator of Mawson's Papers, added to the enjoyment of the research process. I am grateful to the Mitchell Library for assistance with archival material, and permission to publish Hurley's and Mertz's images from their collection. Bill Hunter granted permission to reprint extracts from his father's diaries held at the National Library of Australia; Allan Mornement allowed me to use several excerpts from Belgrave Ninnis's diaries housed at the Scott Polar Research Institute. While these and other quotes have since metamorphosed into scenes and dialogue, they have been an invaluable part of ‘getting it right' within the creative process.