Melt Stream, Masson Range Fred Elliott
Yesterday, over lunch with Fred and Robyn, I asked Fred about his experiences in Antarctica. Earlier he had said that to know any place, you have to be there for at least a year, and that to draw anything, you need to understand it. Then he shared a moment in the ice that reflects his deep connection with the landscape.
Here’s the transcript for some of our conversation:
L. Simon suggested to me that maybe the aesthetic connections that some of the people have to the landscape of Antarctica give dimension somehow to the scientific data that they’re collecting.
R. That’s an interesting one isn’t it.
F. Er…
R. Bring the figures to life.
L. But also brings the landscape to life.
R. Yes but the figures are all measurements of the landscape. But while they’re just figures they’re cold.
L. You mean the data….it brings the cold data to life.
R. Yes.
F. I think that’s probably right. Because you measure things, because you measure, say, the air temperature, and humidity up to 100,000 feet you know something about…it’s not just open space.
L. You felt it.
F. You’d measured it. It’s what you are aware of that you feel about …most. ‘Cause if you’re not aware of it, you don’t feel about it.
L. That makes sense. So if you’re measuring something, then you connect with it…you feel it. You’re not a machine…
F. Quite…
L….putting out a signal, beep, beep, beep.
F. No. That time I think I told you about, sitting behind a rock in West Bay (Mawson) …just levitating…it was because of that…because I …It was (19)58 and I was a bit fed up with the station, things that were going on. It was a big station. Some people you hardly saw, except at meals. We used to work broken shifts. And some people we’d hardly ever see. They’d be complete strangers. I can’t even remember their names…half the time. And there were the usual sort of things and …problems with our wedding, and all this sort of stuff…arrangements. Anyway, I had a favourite spot over in West Bay where I could sit behind a rock and get out of the wind and have a quiet smoke and I’d be right.
And I was just sitting, having a peaceful smoke, and I was looking at what was going on around about me.
And the wind was coming down. I knew because I’d done the measurements. And the wind was coming down and over the top (of the plateau) and blowing out again.
It had come in from the tropics, come right down over – dropped down to the poles – and then flowed out from a high pressure area, down out to get warmed up again in the tropics, in this great cycle, and the speeding up with it cooling down next to the ice, and then the gullies that flowed like rivers – and this was our katabatic.
And the ice was the same – it had been up there for 1000’s and 1000’s of years and it was gradually flowing down and the ice cliffs had once been snow that had been falling for a million years…I don’t know…way back in Gondwanaland time.
And the sea ice stretching right out to the horizon, apparently solid, but you could hear the creaking of the tide, with the effect of the moon rising and lowering this huge expanse of ice as big as the whole Antarctic continent itself.
And I just flipped.
I could see myself sitting behind the rock. I literally could see myself from up there sitting down, and I could see all around about me. And me sitting there. And then bang – back down inside myself again.
I didn’t tell anybody down there because they would have thought I was crazy.
L. So did you feel really connected with the landscape?
F. Oh, yes. It was the same again down at Davis. Playing Beethoven, I felt completely at one with the whole landscape. Music’s so important.
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I wake up this morning and move around the room as if driven by the Antarctic forces of air and ice, like one of Simon Yates’s puppets suspended by balloons. This could be a way to begin the workshop on Saturday, I am thinking, to draw us into the Antarctic landscape, surrendering to it as a way of knowing it, before moving in to shape it through drawing: Drawing through movement.
Be buffeted by the katabatic.
Walk through whale ribs on Norfolk Island as a child.
Hold the image of Fred’s first memory, around five years old, and move with that:
F. …sitting in the kitchen in the old manse. There’s a window high up in the wall, the stove was there. They used to have windows on each side of the stove in those days. And there was a thunder storm (at night) and I was sitting at the kitchen table with Mum and remember seeing a brilliant patch of blue. Electric blue. That window, that square window. I can still see it.
Fred shifts between the past and present tense as he speaks, as though part of him is still there in Antarctica.
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Here’s a photo taken by Ivor Harris at West Bay in October 2006: Courtesy, the Australian Antarctic Division
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A thesaurus groups words that are similar in meaning.
An Antarctic Thesaurus could group animations of its landscape that are similar in motion (gesture).