Fifty years ago, in February 1953, a young man called John Béchervaise walked up the gangway of a former Norwegian sealing boat, the Tottan, in the port of Melbourne. He was bound for a remote and inaccessible island that was, and still is, almost unknown. Béchervaise was sailing south to spend 12 months as the new officer in charge of Heard Island, silently annexed by Australia only six years earlier. Heard Island had been acquired only two years after the end of the Second World War, when small vacant dots in the oceans around Antarctica had briefly become desirable for the harbours they might offer shipping. It was known that some German vessels had used southern islands for shelter and fuel during the two world wars. Britain had urged postwar Australia to declare its sovereignty over Heard Island and to occupy it. The Australian declaration apparently came also from a desire to forestall attempts by the United States to settle Heard Island. Although such action was unlikely, the island’s first sighting had been by an American, Captain John Heard of the freight ship Oriental. On 25 November 1853, his wife Fidelia provided a description of the island which is published in Heard Island (2003). She wrote:
It was remarkable that Heard, at 53° south, should have stayed hidden for as long as it did, considering that the island of Kerguelen, only a few days sailing to its north, had been discovered generations earlier, in 1772. At the time of Heard’s discovery, shipowners had only just begun to direct vessels along the newly adopted great circle route, an economical passage taking them further south in more easterly waters of the Indian Ocean. Thus Heard was unveiled. The normally unoccupied island has been of interest to few. It was a base for whalers and sealers in the nineteenth century, and for voyages of science and exploration such as the British Challenger expedition of the 1870s. After Australia’s claim in 1947, small parties from ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition) lived there continuously until 1955, and since then it has been visited occasionally by mountaineers, sailors, a few visiting national scientific parties and even fewer tourists. The Challenger’s scientists were commanded by Sir Wyville Thomson, for whom Heard held little beauty. He wrote dryly in his published memoir from the voyage:
This was not how John Béchervaise saw Heard Island. He was an outdoor man, an observer of nature and a writer. To him, the island represented a chance to think and write in a bleakly beautiful place. In trying to explain his reasons for the attraction, he wrote to his friends in a letter, now held in the National Library:
We can all imagine the pleasures of life without cars, money and postage rates, but I wonder exactly how he viewed the impending lack of ‘feminine society’, remembering that at the time Béchervaise had a wife and four young children. When the island came into sight on Sunday, 22 February 1953, Béchervaise wrote in his diary:
Not only was Béchervaise exceptionally articulate, but he was also assiduous in keeping a diary. His papers in the National Library of Australia, which he himself arranged and annotated for the Library, include detailed diaries for the year on Heard Island. Béchervaise kept these diaries with an eye to his own records, and with an eye to posterity. He typed each day’s entry (making a carbon copy), usually late at night in the biology hut after he had finished supervising the tasks involved in maintaining the base. After the lights went out at midnight—when the station’s generator was turned off—he often lit a lamp and continued his typing by lamplight. In 1953, 13 men had been sent to replace the previous year’s ANARE party and to winter on Heard Island, with Béchervaise as the officer in charge. The men’s work included creating and maintaining the huts, meteorological observations, regular radiosonde balloon releases, radio communication, feeding and caring for themselves and the dogs, and ‘gash’ (rubbish) runs, all of which left very little time for expeditions or ‘jollies’. Feeding the 50 or more sledge-dogs they had with them on the island was part of the daily rhythm of life. Every few days, the men killed a seal for the dogs, an activity that provided Béchervaise’s earliest memory of the island. He wrote:
Since 1955, when the Heard Island base was closed down and ANARE activity moved to continental Antarctica, there have been only occasional periods of occupation at Heard. The most recent was during the summer of 2000–01, when, as an article in the Australian Antarctic Magazine describes, the Australian Antarctic Division sent a total of 55 people over a five-month season to live and work on the island at Atlas Cove, Spit Bay or Brown Glacier. During this time, the old base used by Béchervaise and his party at Atlas Cove was largely dismantled. One of the most remarkable of the old huts was Admiralty Hut, built in 1929 by the crew of the whaling ship Kildalkey, used for shelter by Douglas Mawson’s British, Australian and New Zealand Research Expedition later in the same year, and enlarged in 1948 with the addition of an old sealing hut from Corinthian Bay, to make a dispensary and store for the men of ANARE. Only one of the older buildings at Atlas Cove, the recreation hut, remains capable of giving shelter today. Was it here that the men celebrated the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953? Among Béchervaise’s papers is the menu for the evening:
I have not found Edinburgh pudding in any recipe book so I suspect that, like some of the other dishes, it was christened specially for the occasion, to make it a more ‘Heardian’ celebration. Other uniquely named items include Big Ben cigars, or Azorella, which has nothing to do with olives—it is a robust-looking cushion-forming plant Azorella selago, designed to endure the bitter winds of the Subantarctic. Even so, some menu items were genuinely indigenous—Kerguelen cabbage, for example, is the native plant Pringlea antiscorbutica, with cabbagy rosettes of leaves that taste something like tough rocket. And we know from journals of exploration that penguin breast is quite palatable. Drygalski mutton was semi-indigenous, being a freshly killed sheep from the small herd unloaded by the Tottan when it landed the men’s supplies. After the sheep were released, they had quickly made off and taken up residence in the vicinity of the Drygalski glacier, which furnished a temporary home until each animal was hunted and shot in turn as the desire for mutton grew stronger. There was meat in abundance, but the Daily Telegraph report of 1947 saying that ‘the men will live on fish, tinned eggs, and meat’ exaggerated the grimness of the island diet. Life on a small base on a subantarctic island is isolated but far from private. Béchervaise recorded daily happenings with care and in detail. There is surprisingly little record in his diaries of any lack of harmony between the men—perhaps another reflection of his eye to a future audience. Still, what we see includes some personal moments which are almost too frank:
Give me communal feeding any day. BERNADETTE HINCE is doing her PhD on subantarctic islands at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU, Canberra |
||||||||||||||||||
| Back to NLA News Index | Back to September Issue | Back to NLA Home Page |
To order a particular issue of
the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National
Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.