Slicing the Silence

Slicing the Silence is one of the best books I have read about Antarctica.

The main chapters are interleaved with diary entries from a voyage Tom Griffiths took to Antarctica in the summer of 2002-03 on the Polar Bird, a supply ship for the Australian Antarctic Division.

Presented as a history of human encounters with Antarctica, he covers a lot of ground between Cook's expeditions to the Southern Ocean in the latter half of the eighteenth century all the way to the current scientific programs and burgeoning tourist industry. As an Australian historian traveling to an Australian base many of his stories have a different perspective to those I have encountered before.

The early expeditions of what he calls the 'heroic era' will be familiar to most readers, but it is an excellent introduction to anyone who doesn't know the stories of the likes of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and Mawson. However Griffiths has also uncovered a lot of less well-known, but no-less fascinating characters like Robert Cushman Murphy – a young curator from the Brooklyn Museum of Natural History – who was so desperate to see penguins that he voyaged south on a whaling boat.

Griffiths is also particularly good on the absurdities of the flag planting and territorial claims that followed this initial exploration. But where the book became totally absorbing for me was when we entered the post-War era and Cold War geopolitics started to impinge on Antarctic exploration and science. This is a story that I haven't heard before and fills in the gap between the early explorers and the late twentieth century which are both covered extensively in many other places. (Edwin Mickleburgh's excellent Beyond the Frozen Sea does touch on this, but doesn't fill in the detail as well as Griffith does.)

Also fascinating is his history of the Australian researchers, base personnel and the bases themselves and how – in the 1980s – science and research suffered as the lions share of the ANARE budget was spent on building and maintaining the bases.

Finishing with the story of Captain Scott's biscuit he returns to the heroic age and seems to be suggesting that the most important lessons from man's experience of Antarctica still come from this time.