Collecting Seaweeds on Macquarie Island with A.N.A.R.E., December 1960

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By Ann Savours (Mrs A.M. Shirley, Hon. D. Litt)


I am not a scientist, but between 29 November and 16 December 1960 I took part in the relief expedition to Macquarie Island in the ice-strengthened vessel, Magga Dan. She had been chartered from her Danish owners, Lauritzen, by the Director of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), Dr P.G. (Phil) Law, AC, CBE. She was to transport scientists and other personnel to the south from Melbourne during the austral summer, in order to relieve the wintering parties of the Australian scientific stations on the Antarctic Continent, as well as on Macquarie Island, the first relief voyage.

Lying in the Southern Ocean, one thousand miles south of Hobart, between Australia and Antarctica, Macquarie is a small narrow green island. It was discovered in 1810 and named after an early Governor of New South Wales. Sealers then exploited its shores, killing Fur Seals for their pelts and the far larger Elephant Seals for their oil. Its history, written with scholarly care by Dr J.S. Cumpston, was published by the Australian Antarctic Division in 1968. A Dependence of Tasmania, after decades of the cruel massacre of seals and latterly penguins, the island was declared a bird and animal sanctuary in 1933, largely through the efforts of that great Australian explorer and scientist of Antarctica’s “Heroic age”, Sir Douglas Mawson. In 1948, A.N.A.R.E. established a meteorological and scientific station on Macquarie Island, whose results have appeared in the ANARE series of reports.

It so happened that in November 1960 I was visiting ANARE headquarters, then in Melbourne, during a sabbatical year of absence from Cambridge, where I was Assistant Librarian at the Scott Polar Research Institute. My duties included those of Curator of Manuscripts, Maps, Charts and Pictures. The Librarian, H.G.R. (Harry) King and I also, contributed entries, with two other staff who specialised in Russian and Scandinavian languages, to the Bibliography of Recent Polar Literature, published with every issue of the Institute’s journal, Polar Record. Financed by the British Federation of University Women, with a travel grant from the British Council, I departed from England in the P. & O. liner Arcadia in March 1960, for a year to be spent compiling a catalogue of manuscripts of polar interest in Australia and New Zealand.

Provided with a pleasant room in University House, Canberra, and designated an Honorary Research Fellow by the ANU (Australian National University), I spent an interesting and enlivening twelve months in libraries and repositories further afield. These included the Mitchell Library, Sydney and the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand. Many enjoyable weeks researching in the State Archives of Tasmania resulted in a contribution (on return to Cambridge) of a paper in Annals of Science, Vol. 39, 1982, p. 527 – 66, followed by another published by Durham University Geography Department in 1997 detailing the history of the Rossbank Magnetic Observatory. This was set up in 1840 by Captain James Clark Ross, R.N. and Sir John Franklin, then Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). The observatory was built in the grounds of Government House, Hobart and staffed by two naval officers detached from the celebrated exploring and scientific voyage of H.M. Ships Erebusand Terror, commanded by Ross from 1839 – 43, which circumnavigated the Antarctic regions. That paper, written with the late Dr Anita McConnell of the Science Museum, London, was a contribution to the history of Antarctic science.

But to return to Melbourne and ANARE headquarters: the following extract from my year-long Antipodean diary relates to my experiences during the relief voyage. I much appreciated the invitation by Dr Law to act as field assistant to Miss Elise Wollaston of the University of Adelaide in collecting sea weeds from the coast of Macquarie Island in plastic bags and in measuring stranded lengths of kelp torn from the sea by the waves and deposited on the shore. We lived aboard the Magga Dan and travelled daily to the shore by DUKW (amphibious small craft). One of my most vivid memories is of the return in the dusk across the phosphorescent sea, watched by silvery seals, heads above the waves.

Together with Isobel Bennett, a marine biologist from Sydney University, and Hope MacPherson, Curator of Molluscs at the National Museum of Victoria, Elise and I formed a group of four women expedition members. Mrs Nel Law, a talented artist, travelled with her husband. She subsequently made a voyage to the Antarctic continent, resulting in some fine works of art, some of which, if my memory is correct, later hung on the walls of their home.

My diary begins at ANARE headquarters in Melbourne where Mrs Ida McMahon was the Librarian.