Land of the Long Day

21 – Home Again!

After eleven incredibly boring and noisy hours, bare brown land appeared below, the unedifying Canterbury Plains in a late summer. The trip was not uneventful, periodically an engine would stop and the feathered propeller would stand stationary instead of doing its work. A few hours later there would be an outburst of clatters and backfires and the engine would start up belching smoke and a different engine would be seen to be stationary. When we landed I asked the pilot about it all.
"Well," said he as if it were the most natural thing, "When you have three sick engines it pays to spell them around a little !" On the ground, the bow doors swung open and, gathering our kitbags we lurched out and shouldered through a large crowd almost entirely of women looking for customers. The ground seemed strangely springy after snow, the air falsely hot, and there were patches of green things, a colour we had not seen in a long time. Brookes and I stood beyond the crowd and looked at each‑other helplessly, but an Airforce Sergeant suddenly appeared,
"Brooke and Gunn? I've been sent to pick you up!" Claydon again! It was extremely thoughtful of John to arrange to have us met as were really in no shape to look after ourselves with any efficiency. The sergeant drove us down the Airport Boulevard at a speed that had me bracing my feet on the dash and I glanced at the speedometer, thirty miles an hour! The RNZAF truck left us at Wigram with Mrs John Claydon and that kindly woman fussed about showing us bathrooms and giving us tea in funny little white cups, and a meal sitting balanced on high unstable chairs (or so they seemed) with table napkins and other oddities.
Brooke was to leave almost immediately for a Combined Services mountaineering expedition to the Karakoram and wished to see Norman Hardy, one of the climbers of Kangchenjunga and Mrs Claydon, who could not possibly have known how disoriented we were, offered us her car. We set off, me at the helm and Richard, as usual navigating.
"Turn hard'a'starboard at next crossroads, now straight for half a mile, right, now thirty degree turn to Port coming up, no, Port I said, Stop and Easy Astern!" We finally got there. Norman Hardy was an old Expedition man and practically One of Us. He made no comment on our strange clothes consisting largely of mukluks and underwear, but ushered us in to a panelled study the walls hung with relics of many expeditions. We perched on quite low easy chairs which still seemed an uncomfortable distance off the ground and talked Porters and Yaks, and pounds of Tsampa a day and other matters.
My brother bore me away next morning to Hornby and soon Tania joined us and firmly took charge but for some days I had to fight down a feeling of panic whenever she left the room. A few days later at Havelock on Pelorus Sound we went for a swim which I found to be "most unpleasant", having not been immersed in water in a long while and even baths being minimal. We boated on the Sounds, stayed at the Bach at Penguin Bay, caught blue cod, rode horses and did all those things that make what was once our country the most wonderful place to live.
A couple of weeks later "Endeavour" arrived in Wellington and we all were supposed to be there to meet her and welcome the Crossing Party led by Bunny Fuchs and David Stratton. They had obviously had clothes brought down for they were all suited and frightfully respectable but among them was Dr John Stephenson, my opposite number among "Bunny's Boys" and we could exchange notes on the rocks on opposite sides of the continent.
On the wharf were coveys of reporters and politicians, both out to make the most of the occasion. We had three receptions that day, one at the wharf, one at Government House and one at some big hotel and British Petroleum put on a cocktail party in the evening. The Government had changed and Labour were now in, and some Minister spoke for the Government and managed to turn it into a gravelly‑voiced denunciation of Tory policies.
"And I say to you, Ladeez 'n gennlemen, what do the Tories care about th' workin' class !" Sir Keith Holyoake replied for the Opposition, he had something of a reputation for pedantry and he outdid himself.
"Now it happened by the nature of these things, we were at the time The Government, and may I say we showed foresight in supporting this wonderful Expedition who have made so many great er , ah, scientific achievements!" The British High Commissioner also spoke. His speech was short, witty, in understandable English and I positively squirmed in embarrassment and could not look George Marsh in his quietly‑amused eyes. Bunny, immaculately attired except for the odd frostbite still showing, replied in upper‑class modest fashion praising the work done by "My great friend, Ed and his men!"
The politicians were not the slightest embarrassed at giving exactly the same speech at the three receptions.
"My God! isn't this awful?" muttered Guy Warren in passing. He had been to a good school! The dinner over, we were later given Polar Medals which were pinned on by the Governor General, Lord Cobham (Richard and George getting theirs later in England from Prince Philip), and I even got a massive Royal Geographical Society bronze medal which weighed a pound or two. The maximum number of dinners and publicity having been extracted by the politicians, who obviously had not the faintest idea what it was all about and often mixed us up with some other group, we were then turned out in the street. Most of our men had jobs and careers to return to, Tania had departed back to her position of Registrar at Waikato Hospital and I had exactly what I stood up in, having left three kitbags of stained and evil‑smelling windproofs and underwear at my parents house in Havelock.
There remained a problem, down at the wharf was about a ton of rocks and minerals, notebooks and survey data for about 20,000 square miles of country and it was obvious that as far as the Ross Sea Committee or the politicians were concerned it could all stay where the results of many an expedition stayed, in the crates in some basement.
I tramped the streets of Wellington, (not having the price of a tram fare) from one office to another of members of the Ross Sea Committee, rather like Apsley Cherry Garrard, trying to find a home for his Emperor penguin egg! It was all noise, dirt, grime, traffic, people who rushed by without a glance, and garish colours. Green looked especialy odd as one may see yellows and brown in rocks in Antarctica but never green. My feet hurt in unaccustomed shoes on hard pavements, and no one knew me or wanted to, it was so similar to being demobbed at the end of the war that at times I smiled ruefully.
Receptionists snapped and made difficulties, I suppose I looked pale and haggard and I had long since given up artifices like social smiles. One after the other, the RSC members were uniformly hostile to my tale.
"Your expedition is over," they would snarl from the safety of behind their desks. "You can't expect us to support you. What do you want anyway?"
"Somebody has to draw the maps and write up the geology," I would reiterate doggedly. "We've got more data than any expedition ever has before, it can't just be lost!"
"We can't help you here," they would say in hostile fashion. "You were sent down to cross Antarctica not do a lot of mapping. Go and see so and so!" (who would say the same thing). One prominent R.S.C. man went further.
"We've had quite enough trouble from your expedition already," he grated. "Your Hillary, deliberately disobeying our orders, going off on all these mad sidetracks, he could have ruined the whole thing !" My ire, never far below the surface in any member of Clan Gunn, rose, the crack about "mad sidetracks" striking a bit close to home!
"Ruined the expedition!" said I. "Why you damned idiot, do you realise that if Hillary had done what you wanted we would have spent two million pounds and not have a single thing to show for it? And you get on the bandwagon and talk to the papers about "Our great scientific discoveries!" Ha!"
He never forgave me and he had some influence. I have never worked professionally in New Zealand, if I applied for any position of course the RSC would be written to for a reference, and Sir Robert Falla would write it!
As I recall not one of the Ross Sea Committee members I spoke to, who had publically said how necessary the expedition was because of the great scientific benefits, even expressed a trace of regret in being unable to help, the universal reaction being either indifference or hostility.
Finally I did what I should have done at the beginning and borrowed the price of a train fare out to Lower Hutt to speak to Dick Willett, Director of the Geological Survey. Willett was a hard‑driving man and affected neat gaberdine suits and bow ties.
"Of course you have to publish the work!" he said, striding up and down his office, "What the devil is a point of an expedition if the results are never seen. You went to the RSC? Turned you down did they? They would! How long do you think it would take?"
"About a year, that is if we can get someone to plot the map. Brookes has gone off to the Himalayas." He stopped pacing.
"I think I can get some money to keep you for a year. Where would you like to be? Guy Warren is in the Survey in Christchurch, would Christchurch suit? Leave it with me for a couple of weeks and I'll let you know." Two weeks later it was confirmed and Tania and I moved to that peaceful and very English Cathedral city of parks and trees on the banks of the Avon. Canterbury Museum offered us space in their new wing, we found a new apartment across the Park and for a year I walked to work along Rolleston Avenue under spreading oak trees and we skiied in the winter weekends at Craigieburn with Willie Huber and the CMC.
Warren taught himself mapping and drew the first detailed 4‑mile‑to‑the‑inch map of Antarctica and finally but not until 1962, a Geological Survey Bulletin was published in which we described in detail, with the aid of both RNZAF and American aerial photographs, the rocks, glaciers, mountains and valleys of twenty thousand square miles of South Victoria Land. It would be nice to be able to look back on how much we accomplished but that was not to be. A year after we had begun writing a senior member of the Survey said:
“Your Bulletin won't be out for years and we should publish a summary before someone else scoops you!" I agreed and he wrote down a summary of our three seasons work which I gave him ..... and published it under his own name! However finally we won some prize for the "Most significant Contribution to Geology for the Year ...." and were presented with "The MacKay Hammer Award" MacKay being an early pioneer geologist. The hammer was suitably engraved and chromed and I still have it, though it has seen much use in many lands.
We had at least shown that geological and topographical mapping could be done on a large scale and the New Zealand Government set up a special division of DSIR to maintain a Field Program. Over the next eight years real progress was made until the whole of the Victoria Mountains from Cape Adare to the Queen Mauds was reconnaissance surveyed, but I was appalled later to find that no more geological maps were published. The result has been that forty years later German and other expeditions are going back into North Victoria land to redo the work (and produce maps).
After 1960 dogs were being replaced by snow‑mobiles and by 1965 our kind of field‑work came to an end but many fine young men had toiled as we had and accomplished much though the lack of formal maps almost negated their work.
Bob Miller returned to lead a field party in North Victoria Land in 1963 with much greater success than his abortive venture to the Queen Alexanders, and, fittingly perhaps, it was to be the last of the great dog‑sledding journeys. I returned several times, even "Bitter and Twisted" Ted Gawn wintered again behind his morse key, Trevor Hatherton joined the interminable seismic traverses of "Bloody Bert" Crary, Sir E and Murray Ellis had another "Pure Adventure" expedition to climb Mount Herschel near Cape Adare.
Our own work did not last long, within five years helicopters had improved to the point where U.S. Geological Survey cartographers were flying out daily to our cairns on the mountain‑tops, reoccupying our Survey stations using telurometers, and they redrew our map, changing most of the names and even the names given by Scott and Shackleton. The politicians wanted to keep a political presence in Antarctica but under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty could only do so under a front of "Scientific Study". Scott Base, meant to last for two years, remained for twenty, thirty‑three years later two of the huts still stand.
Every year for thirty years, "scientific " parties have counted penguins and seals and tie radio transmitters and depth recorders to them and in general bug the hell out of every living thing. The Adelies don't seem to mind but there is some suggestion that the Weddells are packing up and leaving for quieter homes! There is still no permanent air field, every year a new one is scraped on the floating ice, and like the bears at Yellowstone, the Adelies have learned to pose for the tourists. Scott Base was rebuilt, on the same ridiculous site, fifty miles from the mainland, a veritable "Pram Point Hotel" with luau‑skirted house‑maids and electric floorpolishers! I was later to hear a visiting American Presidential candidate Senator Robert Gore absently ask, "Do you have room service here?" Four‑wheel‑drive cars, trucks, and skidoos clatter about and the eye turns in vain to the dog‑lines and the Song of the North is heard no more. Every year parties go down with our published Survey Bulletin in hand, re‑examine an area we mapped years ago, and rewrite it as their own, sometimes with much‑needed improvements, but often with none at all! Not a single one of the dozens of names we gave to formations, orogenies (mountain‑building periods), granite intrusions, belts of marbles and greywackes remains as the usual rules of priority do not apply in an ungoverned land. Greenpeace agitators wave my reports of minor amounts of molybdenum and copper ore, as proof that "Greedy Multinationals" will mine and destroy the continent!
The feminist element had obtained a strong hold by 1985, even the Director of Antarctic Division is of course now female, and field work is limited to whatever is possible to young women. Consequently it is no longer a challenge to young men and interest has died.
I went back three more times for more field work in the late 1950's and almost died there, but that is another tale. What did come of our years of work? In my whole life I have known a bare handful of men who, looking which way you might, Eassel or Wessel, even I would admit were better men than me, and most of them I met in Antarctica and that is not a small thing! The world still remembers however, that The Old Firm took farm tractors to the Pole. It has already forgotten, if indeed it ever knew, those great exponents of travel by dog sled, Sir J. Holmes Miller, Dr George Marsh, Roy Carlyon, Harry Ayres, and Lt. Cmdr F.R. Brooke but I remember them and the days on the long long, trail so the world can go hang! I am minded of the old New Bedford whaling Captain who returned after two years absence, saying,
"We have been round the world, we saw no land, we got no whales, but, we had a damned good sail!"

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