I first met David Carter in 1968, when he was a student staying at my grandmother Nora’s house in Melbourne. He spent 15 months at Wilkes station, Antarctica, researching ice dynamics. Six months of that time was spent out in the field, in a ‘caravan’.
“That’s when the magic of the place comes alive”, he tells me today, “at the different times of the day and different times of the year, as it does in the desert.”
I ask him if living with Nora, surrounded by Tom Roberts paintings, influenced how he saw the Antarctic landscape.
“Oh yes. When I went down, I had prints of Australian landscapes by artists like Drysdale, Streeton and Roberts on my walls. Now, when I go into western NSW, I can see the connection between that desert and the Antarctic.”
I know how Tom loved the Australian light at dusk, and imagined David gazing at the long Antarctic twilights.
I remember my father scoffing at Tom’s flowery title for one of his pictures, ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look,’ and my secret pleasure hearing those words.
David knows about the studies made of the air trapped in ice cores, and how they tell us about the cycles of climate warming and cooling over thousands of years.
He suggests where I might find images to animate these changes.
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I have a book that was given to my father by its authors years ago:
Donaldson, I & Donaldson T, Seeing the first Australians, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, London, Boston, 1985.
There are essays by various people on the first visual representations of Aboriginal Australians.
Chapter 8 (p. 110) is “Tom Roberts’ Aboriginal portraits”, by Helen Topliss, which I have written about this here.
Dear Lisa
I just lost my comment before completing it… this second attempt may be a repeat but it’s more complete.
I was referring you to an extraordinary book, ‘When the Sky Fell Down’ by Keith Willey. It is about the first 2 years of settlement in Sydney. It explores how what you believe literally influences what you see.
In those early years in Sydney there were two ideas held concurrently about Aborigines. One was that they were not human, and the other was that they were untainted pure beings ‘noble savages’. Willey looks at accounts from different perspectives to demonstrate how people saw the same things through quite different lenses.
Is there someone else examining the influence of art on perception in Antarctica?
Best wishes
Simon
William Fox and Paul Simpson Housely have both written about perceptions of Antarctic landscape:
Fox, W. 2007, Terra Antarctica: Looking into the emptiest continent, Shoemaker & Hoard, San Antonio, Texas
Simpson-Housley, P. 1992, Antarctica: exploration, perception, metaphor, Routledge, Taylor & Francis group
I discovered Simpson-Housely when I was at the Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge, in January this year. One of the librarians told me he used to travel from Canada to research there. He died early, in his 50’s. ‘Extending the landman’s view’ is a chapter heading of this book. He discusses how the skills and training of expeditioners influenced their perceptions of the Antarctic landscape.
Fox talks about the biological hard wiring of our brains, which expect to see a landscape with a foreground, middle ground and background.