We were up at 11pm, but so much time was absorbed in making a special stew for Christmas from some of the bones that it was not until 2:30 am that we got under way. To make the spread more exceptional I produced two scraps of biscuit that I had saved up, stowed away in my spare kit bag, as relic of the good days before the accident. It was certainly a cheerless Christmas; I remember we wished each other happier anniversaries in the future, drinking the toast in dog soup.

—Douglas Mawson

What a contrast this passage shows to the lavish Christmas dinner I enjoyed on Scott Base in 1989.Our Christmas dinner in 1991 would be far more frugal due to unforeseen delays from bad weather, but nowhere near as bad as Mawson's Christmas in 1912!

We moved from Escalade Peak to the southern end of the Boomerang Range on 16 December, traveling more or less in a giant U-shape to avoid crevasses that radiated out from the base of the mountain peaks. It was another long day of traveling that involved crossing two crevasse fields, both unmarked on our maps. Although we encountered some large crevasses, Brian's skilful guidance kept us from penetrating further into these dangerous areas by steering us out more towards the center of the Skelton Névé.

Large scalloped sastrugi hindered our progress between Escalade Peak and the Boomerang Range, causing one sledge to topple over twice. One of these overturns threw the first aid box off the sledge. It broke open, scattering various bottles and packets of tablets onto the

snow. This also caused some minor damage to the handlebars of the sledge. Brian drilled out the broken bolthole by hand, inserted a larger bolt and made a new bracket for the wire frame. These repairs held us up for about an hour. At 7:00 P.M.we arrived at a spot about four kilometers out from the face of the Boomerang Range, not far from where we had seen the huge spouting fans of snow blasting up off the cliff faces about a week earlier.

The next day was to be the first in a long string of frustrating days involving bad weather, intermittent bad weather, and just waiting around with nothing to do while the hazy near whiteout conditions alleviated. We were now camped at an elevation of 1,300 meters. The temperature that morning was 14°F and winds blew gently from the south at around 5 to 10 knots. We were expecting helicopter NZ01 to fly in later that morning to drop us more food and mail plus some new lashing ropes, and to possibly to pick up our mail for home, if the weather was suitable for a helicopter landing.

Outside it soon became rather sticky, a mixture of dense, powdery snow, and light wind creating poor visibility with virtually no ground definition. A thick blanket of snow covered the mountains that we wanted to search, so any ideas of working there were dismissed until conditions improved. The day was spent mostly reading. I did a pencil sketch of the mountains that were visible from our camp in my notebook, also noting that it had become much colder that day with an increasing wind-chill factor.

The helicopter came that afternoon, hovering just above the ground to drop off our supplies and mail, as the pilot didn't want to risk landing due to poor ground definition, so unfortunately we weren 't able to send any of our letters back home.

I received a tape of music and talk from my family that day, plus a letter from Gary Morgan, then the Curator of Crustaceans at the Western Australian Museum. His letter relayed the necessary paperwork I needed to bring home a giant marine isopod specimen I had been given for the museum collections.

Margaret loaned me her Walkman to listen to my tape from home. Eagerly I curled up in a corner by myself and listened to it, relishing every word of my wife and children's voices. They had selected a series

of my favorite songs as well as humorous pieces. There were also songs sung by my own children, Sarah, Peter, and Madeleine. It brought home to me how much I missed them all and, in all honesty, more than a few tears flowed during that marvelous hour, especially when my youngest daughter, Maddy, then only three years old, told me that she loved me and missed me and hoped I'd be home soon. It was the best possible gift one could ever get. It had some sort of profound effect upon me as later that afternoon I had a wash, including my hair, and changed my underwear. This was the first time I'd done this since we set out on this trip 32 days before!

Having a full body wash involved first firing up both primus stoves to get the ambient air temperature inside the tent as high as possible. Then, after heating up some water in the camp oven, I stripped off so that I could quickly wash myself with soap and a warm sponge. After toweling myself dry I squatted down over the camp oven and scooped hot water over my head and applied some shampoo, and later rinsed it off back into the camp oven. I was able to use the leftover warm soapy water to wash my underclothes and socks in. The washed garments are rinsed in a little fresh water and hung outside with pegs over the tent ropes to freeze solid. Drying winds slowly ablate away the ice from the material, leaving them soft and dry, although still very cold, by the next day.

Continuing poor weather conditions greeted us the next morning. Outside visibility was hazy due to a light snowfall. I felt compelled to examine the outcrops of Aztec Siltstone exposed in the southern end of the Boomerang Range that I could see through the binoculars, although access to the outcrops appeared to be difficult from where we were camped.

I grabbed a shovel and began making a cleared roadway down to the blue ice by leveling out the intermittent sastrugi, some of which were about half a meter high and very irregularly shaped. A line of flags on bamboo poles was then placed to mark the route in case visibility became worse. I tested the new route by slowly driving the Skidoo over it. As it was fine I went back to camp and told the others I was going over for a small reconnaissance trip to the mountains by myself. Armed with a few handfuls of food and a thermos of drink in a

backpack, I slowly headed out across the blue glacier ice on the Skidoo. Periodically I'd stop to place flagpoles in cracks between the ice, or sometimes propped them up with small cairns of rocks. Such precautions are vitally important should the weather suddenly turn foul as visibility could be reduced to almost nothing. In this case the flags and my compass bearings would be my only recourse to find my way back to the camp.

It was only four kilometers to the other side of the glacier. Rocky moraine formed a scree slope leading to the base of the mountain range. After searching for an easy way up to the outcrops, it became apparent that there was no safe access route onto the mountain. The outcrops of the Aztec Siltstone were very high up from where I stood, possibly another hundred meters or so. The base of the mountain was formed of almost sheer vertical rock walls, a characteristic feature of the Beacon Heights Orthoquartzite that nearly always underlay the beckoning Aztec layers.

I had a quick search in the loose rocks at the base of the range for fallen lumps of rock that might contain fossils, but didn't find anything of interest so then headed back to camp, picking up the flags as I went. It snowed lightly the whole time I was away, causing visibility across the four-kilometer width of the glacier to fluctuate from poor to bad.

I spent rest of the afternoon diligently reading papers on the geology of the region and finishing my novel, The Miko, by Eric Van Lustbader. It was an easy day, but frustrating in having to just wait around until the weather fined up. I had a clear view of the mountains all around us and knew that much of this exposure had never been searched for fossils. It was virgin paleontological ground, the best kind.

Damn, I thought to myself, as I peered out of the tent next morning. It was still snowing. Visibility had worsened. We could not move on so were forced to remain there and wait it out until the weather cleared. The temperature was unseasonably quite warm at 21°F, although we were quite aware of the fact that warmer temperatures often heralded blizzards. I spent that morning reading Leon Uris' Mitla Pass and doing very little else. It's amazing how many good books you get to read while tent bound. Occasionally, we ventured out for short walks

around the camp to stretch our legs, but it was an all pervading gloomy white-grey outside, a perfect kind of bright hazy light that would be ideal for getting snow blindness if you didn't wear your sunglasses.

For lunch that day we decided to cook a gourmet meal as we had all the time in the world. Later we sampled the experimental dehydrated yogurt that the field store supply man had asked us to test drive, but all agreed that it was pretty bad (far too watery). After dinner we clambered around the radio for our evening's entertainment. We heard news from Scott Base, passed on Christmas messages to be forwarded to the other groups in the field and dictated telegrams to be sent to our families back home.

Once more we awoke despondently next morning to the quiet sounds of snow falling on the tent. After our radio schedule to Scott Base at 8:00 A.M.most of us went back to sleep, tired largely because without any physical activity we were not sleeping very well each night. It didn 't take much of this before our daily routine became out of sync with regular activity. For example, we had breakfast about noon, then I spent the afternoon reading and skipped lunch. I decided that I would prepare a really superb evening meal that night, mainly to give me something challenging to do to pass the time.

That night I cooked my most ambitious Antarctic field dinner yet: Thai satay beef with khao padt (pronounced like “cow pat”), which is Thai for fried rice. I had worked several field seasons in Thailand over 1988-90 searching for fossils, during which time I had acquired a love of authentic Thai food. The thought of a spicy hot Thai meal cooked in a polar tent in the remote deep field of Antarctica was a delicious contrast. The beef satay was easy, but the fried rice took a hell of a lot of effort. The rice had to be first boiled (after snow was thawed for the water), then each grain dried with paper towels. I rehydrated the dried onion and peas in hot water, then patted them dry and fried them lightly in oil. Some egg powder had to be mixed with water and milk powder to make a thin “omelets” which was then cut into thick egg noodles. Finally, I fried the whole lot with plenty of chopped bacon, oil, and butter. We had our last can of beer each from the recent resupply to accompany the meal. Later I read in my sleeping bag until I'd finished my novel at about 12:30 A.M.

The weather was still bad when we woke sometime late next morning; it was Saturday, 21 December. It had been snowing all night but later during the day occasional patches of blue sky appeared above. I walked down to the blue ice and found that the freshly fallen snow was now over 30 centimeters deep in places. It was a very cold day, so we didn't venture outside much. Wind blew the new snow around like grains of sand in a desert storm.

I spent that morning sewing up the tatters of my inner gloves, then began reading Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. The rest of the day passed slowly and uneventfully, but later that night the weather seemed to be clearing up. We could see Mt. Metschel and Portal Mountain bathed in sunlight out on the Skelton Névé. I went for a quick run around outside about ten o'clock to warm myself up and stretch my legs. Shortly afterwards I was sitting up in the tent inside my double sleeping bags eating chocolate and sipping Twining 's peppermint tea. I wrote sarcastically in my diary those immortal words of Robert Falcon Scott: “God this is an awful place!”

The following day, our hopes were once more dashed as it continued snowing with winds gusting to about 15 knots, creating very poor visibility. We couldn't move on. We were forced into passing yet another day waiting inside the tent.

After a light breakfast I studied a draft of a paper that Gavin Young, Alex Ritchie, and I had just submitted on the new fossil crossopterygian fishes of the Aztec Siltstone. This group contained the predatory lobe-finned fishes whose only living relative was the coelacanth, Latimeria, discovered alive off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Only recently, in late 1998, another population of these living fossil fishes had been discovered off the coast of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. The Devonian crossopterygian fishes of the Aztec Siltstone included one giant creature up to four meters long, which we named Notorhizodon, as well as smaller blunt-headed forms with very small eyes, like Koharolepis. This latter species belonged to an endemic group of lobefins that we named the canowindrids, after the genus Canowindra, coincidentally named after its locality, the town of Canowindra in New South Wales. The canowindrids have so far only been found in East Gondwana, from sites within Australia and Antarctica. When British paleontologist Keith

Thomson described the first member of this group in 1973, its relationships were obscure. It could be placed with at least two major groups of ancient lobefins (called Porolepiformes and Osteolepiformes). This puzzled me for some years and in 1985 I had the opportunity to study the original specimen and write a new description of it. This time I emphatically placed the beast with the osteolepiform fishes, the group on the direct lineage leading to the first tetrapods.

My placement of the group as a primitive kind of osteolepiform was soon after reinforced by my description of another canowindrid, which I named Beelarongia, from Mt. Howitt in central Victoria. This second genus was older and more primitive than the first. Finally, the discovery of an even older member down here in Antarctica, which was clearly the most primitive member of the family, cemented the group at the very base of the osteolepiform radiation, and demonstrated beyond doubt that the eastern side of Gondwana (Australia and Antarctica) was once home to some very peculiar endemic fishes.

As I read over the draft of the paper I kept thinking how any day now, when we could get out onto the mountains to collect, we were probably going to find more of these fabulous yet enigmatic fishes and I would have to amend the draft manuscript with details of all the new discoveries! Although we did find other good specimens of these fishes in the latter part of the trip, we didn't add this into the original paper because waiting for the preparation of the new specimens would have held up the publication for too long. However, we did include all the new locality information for these finds to make the monograph complete.

I noted in my diary that we had no chocolate that day. We had to go easy on the food rations from then on as we were running low on certain items. Originally, we had intended to be at this site for only a couple of days then head back to our depot at the head of the Deception Glacier. We had stowed away our special treats for Christmas Day on the other sledges which were then waiting for us about 30 kilometers to the north. The weather that evening was still intolerable, with no sign of clearing. I stayed up reading my novel until the wee hours of the next morning. Then, just before turning in to sleep, I poked my head outside the tent and was amazed to see clear blue sky! My hopes

were now soaring that the next day would be fine and sunny so we could get on with our work.

I eagerly looked outside the next morning only to be sadly disappointed. Complete whiteout conditions prevailed. I couldn't even see the Boomerang Range four kilometers away from us. Our mood was very dismal. We were not talking very much amongst ourselves at that time, instead each of us seemed to be more introverted, passing time reading or listening with headphones to their own music. It had been a full week since we became stranded at this same spot.

Each day we made our scheduled radio contact with Scott Base. Sometimes the Kiwis relayed to us news items deemed to be of “world news interest. ” Most days this might be a cricket score, who won the last Rugby test, or maybe news about some major accident back home in New Zealand (like some lady's washing blowing off the clothesline). Then, one day between cricket scores they told me incidentally that Australia had a new Prime Minister. Bob Hawke had been “retired” and Paul Keating had taken his place. No details accompanied this historic message, and they then went on to tell me that this had actually happened some while ago. I suppose that at the time it just didn't seem to rate as “interesting news” to them, because the sports always came first!

That evening after dinner we all worked outside to clear away the snow from the skidoos and sledges and off the outside of the tents. We made sure everything was secured for the night in case a storm came. Sometime after dinner we played a game called “throw the tea bag into the clown's mouth.” We had built a snowman and colored him with various food items and attempted to swing used tea bags into his mouth. Well, at least it passed the time for a short while.

The next morning was Christmas Eve. It started off as a clear, cold day but with moderate winds gusting from 15 to 20 knots. By 10:30 A.M.it started snowing once more. My job was to clear out the make-shift toilet, which had filled up with drifting snow overnight. Initially we thought we were only going to be camped at this place for a day or two, so we had not gone to any trouble to build an elaborate “loo.” It was simply a wall of cut ice blocks piled up around the portable loo, barely enough of a structure to cut off the person using the amenity

from the view of the tents. It felt very cold squatting over the outside ig-loo when snow was being blasted at you from the open N évé at 15 knots! I used sludgy water to patch the holes in the ig-loo walls, letting it freeze up over the gaps.

Despite shortages of certain items like instant coffee, sugar, and most of our milk powder, the food was lasting well. We estimated that we had a maximum of another eight days of food left, if rationed carefully. Our Skidoo fuel supply was fine, but we were low on kerosene for the stoves. We knew at this stage that we would have to make a dash for our depot within the next week at all costs, despite the weather, as once fuel for the stoves ran out we couldn't cook or make water for drinking. Our predicament was starting to worry us all a little. Brian, for want of a physical job to do, went out that day and built us a better-sheltered, underground loo.^* It was our Aladdin's cave, complete with a toilet down the bottom of the icy stairwell.

Christmas Eve was actually our eighth day of being tent bound. This sarcastic little poem highlighted the mood we were all in at the time:

Tent bound, eighth day in a row

Because of the bloody snow

The worst of it is not our plight,

Least we have warmth and a bite

But that the rocks are covered

Their ageless secrets smothered

By that bloody snow.

After dinner that night we played cards (pontoon) for a while as we waited eagerly for our radio contact at 8:00 P.M., desperately hanging out to hear any news of a break in the weather. That evening I received a telex from Ken McNamara, my colleague at the Western Australian Museum, passing on some interesting news items from home. The skeleton of a very large Diprotodon,an extinct fossil marsupial somewhat resembling a wombat the size of a rhinoceros, had been discovered south of Karratha in the Pilbara region. A Western Australian

Museum field party, led by my friend Alex Baynes, had gone out with a team of volunteers to excavate it. I could just imagine them in temperatures of 113°F sweltering away with jackhammers and generators over the giant fossil bones, while I was here languishing in the −4°F range. It snowed throughout the rest of the night, further dashing our hopes of a move the next day.

On Christmas Day, 1991, I awoke to find nothing at all in my smelly woolen socks, and was very disappointed to find that the biscuits and orange drink I'd left outside the tent for Santa hadn't been touched. It was quite windy, gusting at around 20 knots with the temperature strangely warm at 21°F. Visibility was becoming better that day, although the sky still had 100 percent cloud cover, so ground definition remained very poor. After our 8:00 A.M.radio call we slept in until 10:30 A.M., then Brian made us a rare treat of percolated coffee using some of his own private supply of ground coffee beans that he'd been saving for the occasion. It looked like we would have to sit out the bad weather a bit longer, so we decided to make the best of Christmas Day, despite being unfestively low on food and almost completely out of grog supplies.

Some of the guys in the radio room back at Scott Base sang us a somewhat unmelodious but heartwarming rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas ” over the radio, and Brian and I retaliated with a blaring yet woeful chorus of “I Saw Mummy kissing Santa Claus.” Fraka then came over to our tent and the three of us played cards for a few hours while Margaret was busily preparing our sumptuous Christmas dinner. My job was to make a cheesecake out of a packet mix for our dessert. It was an easy job. To set it you simply place the fry pan with the cake mixture outside the tent for a short while.

At about 8:00 P.M.we jovially commenced our Christmas Day feast. The only alcoholic beverages we had left was a wee nip of Bailey's Irish Cream each and a small 50-milliliter bottle of Dimple Scotch that my bottle shop man in Perth gave me just before I left Australia. He told me to take it to Antarctica for Christmas, so I stowed it away in my kitbag, protected inside one of my boots. It was the only bottle we had to share on this festive occasion. Carefully we rationed out about 13 milliliters each and then made a small toast for Christmas.

It somehow reminded me later of the strange combinations of Christmas drinks drunk by some earlier expeditioners. Bages and his men on Mawson's Southern Sledging Party held their Christmas celebrations a couple of days later on 27 December, and had some rather diabolical homemade “wine”:

There was a general recovery when the “wine” was produced, made from stewed raisins and primus alcohol; and the King was toasted with much gusto. At the first sip, to say the least, we were disappointed. The rule of “no-heel taps” nearly settled us, and quite a long interval and cigars, saved up for the occasion by Webb, were necessary before we could get courage enough to drink to the Other Sledging Parties and Our Supporting Party.

Our Christmas dinner was immensely enjoyed by all, despite the dire shortage of drinks. In a way I sort of felt that this was my atonement for indulging in such a lavish Christmas dinner on Scott Base three years earlier while Margaret and her colleagues were toughing it out on the Darwin Glacier. Still, it wasn't a bad meal at all. We started with packet chicken soup followed by apricot chicken with a light whisky sauce, served with peas and rice. Margaret had concocted the sauce using a little of the remaining Bailey's Irish Cream mixed with apricot jam and soaked apricot pieces. Then we had some crackers and cheese, sweets that had been saved for the occasion, and an apple each, the very last items of fresh food from the last re-supply.

I had brought a present for each of the other field members and they had also brought along little gifts which we gratefully exchanged with our goodwill all round. I opened a Christmas present that I 'd brought with me from home and was delighted to receive a book from my parents-in-law by ABC^* journalist and Antarctic historian Tim Bowden, entitled Antarctica and Back in 60 Days. We all concealed our chronic homesickness well that day. A few tears were shed by all of us in our own way, in our own space, when the others weren't meant to be looking. I only had to listen to my tape from home and could barely hold back my emotions. Thoughts of Donna and the kids having Christmas with all the family in Melbourne filled me with great joy, closely followed by the sadness of realizing just how far away from

them I was at that moment. We joked that day about how we considered ourselves to be the most isolated bunch of humans on the planet to be celebrating Christmas.

Margaret and Fraka had adorned their tent with silver and red foil and some colorful paper hangings. Christmas cards were strung up, and we all pulled Christmas crackers and listened to the more melodious parts of my Christmas tape from home. Finally we sang all the carols we could remember until about 11:20 P.M., then turned in to bed, sober, but in very good spirits.

The next day the sky was clear and the sun shone brightly, but the winds were noticeably stronger, gusting at around 30 knots or more. It was very warm at 21°F. We were indecisive about moving, but due to our pressing circumstances decided that we would attempt to get to our depot at all costs, so reluctantly we packed up the camp in the strong winds. We left the tents up until the very last minute in case the weather suddenly took a turn for the worse. Finally, just before noon we pulled down the tents, lashed them to our sledges and slowly headed off towards Alligator Peak, following north up the front of the Boomerang Range. I noted that the strong winds were blowing the snow off the mountains in big white clouds, exposing the rocks! This was a good sign for collecting fossils.

It was a hard day of traveling as the sastrugi were jagged and high, and the ground definition was very poor as everything was draped with the newly fallen snow of the last nine days. Sledging was made difficult by many unexpected sudden crashes as we went blindly over hidden depressions. The winds blew between 20 and 40 knots constantly, sometimes much stronger in fierce gusts. By about 2:15 P.M.we had traveled 17 kilometers to a point about four kilometers or so out from the prominent saw-toothed ridge of dark volcanic rock known as Alligator Ridge. It was so named because it looks very much like the snout of an alligator in profile.

We pitched camp and ate a hearty dinner. Our depot was still about ten kilometers to the north of us, but there were good exposures of fossil-bearing Aztec rocks here so we were all keen to get some work done, despite being low on food and fuel. Strong winds howled all night between 40 and 50 knots.

At least, finally, we have moved from that accursed spot that trapped us for ten days, I thought to myself as I lay snuggled up in my sleeping bags that night. I was looking forward to searching for fossils again the next day, weather permitting. We planned to remain there and work on Alligator Peak if the weather improved. However, if the weather remained bad and we became desperately short of fuel and supplies, at least we could attempt a dash to our depot.