John Bechervaise referred to Antarctic landscape as womanly.
One of the great men of ANARE history, John Bechervaise, wrote lyrically of the patterns of the external and internal forms of drift snow in his book Blizzard and Fire, A Year at Mawson, Antarctica (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963).
The book described the highs and lows of an eventful year for the 1959 Mawson team, which included the Thala Dan running aground near Davis, the destruction through fire of both the new station powerhouse and the field hut near Taylor Glacier, and the loss during a blizzard of their two Beaver aircraft.
Despite these travails, Bechervaise was a keen and literate observer of the beauty of Antarctica. Drift snow in a hut was enough to excite the following observations:
“The internal drift, where fine snow has been deposited by a draft through a small hole or chink in a building or vehicle, is often as inconvenient as it is beautiful.
I sometimes find myself thinking of inside drifts as female. Their curves are voluptuous, like those of breasts and thighs; those of the open drifts are taut, of chiseled stone rather than of moulded flesh…..I have seen a strange white genie materialize through a nail-hole and, finally, lie recumbent large as life……it increases by inner nourishment, thrusting out gentle cumuli and flocculous tresses.”
Australian Antarctic Division website