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New recruits to Australia’s Antarctic and Southern Ocean programs have a lot to endure, not least the rusty humour of the old sea dogs they are forced to work with. Inevitably, one of these will lean over your shoulder and tell you that the whales and penguins and seals you see swooping about in the water are threatened by something much worse than rising sea temperature, declining krill stocks or overfishing. Really, you’ll ask, by what? ‘Kodak poisoning.’ they’ll say, just as you’ve fired off your 145th shot of that leopard seal.
It’s true that our first response to something as visually stunning as Antarctica is to reach for a camera. There’s no harm in that. It’s natural to try to capture the emotional impact of the loneliness, the magnificent light, the pure spectacle of an ocean frozen into jumbled blocks, stretching to the horizon in every direction. We want to share this with others, to point in awe, to save this life-changing encounter for another time.
It’s a little saddening then, to look at your pictures later and realise that they do very little to convey the almost religious presence of Antarctica. Your happy snaps of penguins are repetitive and boring. Your picture of an iceberg looks like a floating fridge and you missed that magnificent breaching whale because you forgot to take the lens cap off. You swear to yourself that you need a much more expensive camera, or a night class in photography or some serious time learning how to use Photoshop.
And then Doug Thost will show you a few of his startlingly beautiful images, and you’ll be glad that you’re really quite good at marine science, or carpentry, or cooking or driving boats – because you haven’t a hope as a photographer. Doug has ‘the eye’, you see, that particular gift that filters out all the extraneous matter, composes the frame, tests the light and operates the technical bits like you or I would tie our shoelaces in a hurry. The result might be a vast frozen wilderness with a tiny orange ship, or a sleeping seal or magnificent plumes of snow curling off a volcano a thousand miles from the nearest landfall.
The exhibition we’re here to see tonight turns that talented eye on something else familiar to all Australian expeditioners, to Hobart locals and to scores of international guests who have travelled with her – our own ship-of-all-work, the Aurora Australis. Marine scientists call her a well-equipped laboratory suitable for weeks at sea, operations managers see a floating fuel tank with a million litres of fuel on board, helicopter pilots use her as a moveable airport and wintering expeditioners, tired and hairy and longing to go home in the spring, call her ‘The Big Orange Taxi’, and bless the day she comes through the pack ice and into the harbour.
I’ve been privileged to travel on the Aurora Australis, to places I will probably never see again. I remember a rescue mission far, far away in remote Prydz Bay, with the Aurora stubbornly head-butting her way through metre-thick ice to offer a tow to an ice-bound ship. I thought then that she was like a spacecraft, visiting another planet under her own power and capable of taking us all home again when the job was done.
They say that all ships are female. If the Aurora is a woman, she’s a tough old bird in an orange jumpsuit, with her sleeves rolled up and an Elvis tattoo on her arm. She’s strong and she’s fearless, and if she has a few scars, she’s earned them. She’s as Australian as they come, plain-talking and laconic, a battler who will never let you down. You might not see her for years, but you’ll never forget her.
Doug Thost is a gifted photographer, I hope you will agree, and he has given us a collection of beautifully rendered images that speak of a hard life spent at sea and in the ice. The Aurora Australis is a part of Antarctic history, like the tough little ships that went before her: the Nella Dan and the Wyatt Earp and the Discovery, right back to the first Aurora, which carried a 29-year old geologist named Douglas Mawson with his expedition from Hobart to Antarctica almost 100 years ago.
Many here tonight have sailed on the Aurora Australis and this exhibition will bring back memories. Many more will see these images in the future and make them the stuff of dreams.
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