South of Sorento

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.

As time goes by and Antarctica, like outer space, becomes one more tourist destination, there is legitimate concern about the damage being caused to the world’s most fragile yet painstakingly constructed biological environment. Even so, accounts of the exploration of Antarctica can be read these days without the emotional complexity that comes with looking back over the journals and diaries of the early European explorers of Australia. The reason is that no one lived in Antarctica. It’s one place where you can skate a long way on the myth of terra nullius. Those who went there in the early years of the twentieth century discovered relatively little. Their stories are all about encounters with their own personalities, with the baggage they brought with them, with their craving, with their inner void, with their ego. They all met the Other. It’s just that the Other was looking back at them from the mirror.