'Southern Frontier': Australia’s cold pursuit of empire and identity

A new book uncovers the overlooked history of Australia’s deep entanglement with Antarctica, a story of ambition, exploration and national self-definition. Jim Kable reviews The Southern Frontier: Australia, Antarctica and Empire in the Southern Ocean World 1815-1947.

IN THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER, author Rohan Howitt uncovers a plethora of visitors and exploration attempts, appeals for exploration funding, public speeches and books written by those engaged in the suggesting of what it could mean for Australia, leading into the competition for making legal claims of parts of the territory – raising flags and so forth – against the claims of others, especially of Norway and France.

Recent updating to international conventions seems settled that Antarctica be a place for peaceful research and protection, which may itself be more a hope than a permanent situation, given some of the explosive pronouncements from the current U.S. President concerning Canada, Greenland, Gaza and so on.

Howitt writes:

This is a book about Australia’s deep entanglements with Antarctica and the islands and seas of the Southern Ocean. From the earliest years of European colonisation in Australia, institutions and governments have looked to the world beyond the continent’s southern frontier.

Some looked for answers to major scientific questions; others looked for an opportunity to enact fantasies of heroism and exploration. Some saw vast, untapped resources ripe for exploitation; others saw a space for strategic manoeuvring and territorial expansion.

This book traces these ways of thinking about and engaging with the Southern Ocean world over time, from early bursts of scientific and commercial activity in the 1800s to assertions of sovereignty in the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, it reconstructs a way of thinking about Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as a natural extension of Australian territory that has been largely forgotten.

Antarctica’s surprise rebound: Why we shouldn’t breathe easy yet

Scientists have detected a mass gain in Antarctica's ice sheet, but it's not quite the climate victory we've been hoping for.

Setting some personal parameters

When I was a lad growing up in the 1950s in the rural New England district of NSW, I was fortunate to have what we nowadays call a mentor – my mother’s employer – who fortuitously for me shared my birthday, 29 May.

While I handed over a pair of socks or a handkerchief, Mr E Higginbotham responded with a birthday letter on letterhead paper, accompanied by books or by a fountain pen or by stamps. He was a supporter in those long-ago days of the United Nations and would give me United Nations stamps. Apart from that, stamps of Australian possessions and territories – Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, PNG, Nauru, Norfolk Island – and stamps of the Australian Antarctic Territory.

Higginbotham wanted me to understand the land in which I had been born. He himself was a young man, an immigrant to Australia from London.

In the 1980s, Doug Thost, one of my first cousins, a UNSW PhD with an expertise in geology and glaciology, gained a position with the Australian Antarctic Division and has spent some 20 visits/research periods within the Antarctic, including on Heard Island. He is also a noted photographer and has some experience in natural history filmmaking.

During my many years in Japan, I purchased some of Thost's spectacular glacier photographs from the Antarctic. They hung on my walls there and do so again here, back in Australia. To continue my stamp collecting, I should mention that his photographic work has been used twice (that I know of) in commemorative stamps for the Australian Antarctic Territory in 2003 and again in 2018.

Thost has also led a number of summer visits to AAT waters by tourists on ice-breakers — a vision of tourism first suggested almost a century ago, as I discovered in The Southern Frontier.

During my matriculation Leaving Certificate year (NSW, 1965), one of the texts we had for study was by New Zealand-born poet Douglas Stewart (1913-1985). His verse play was The Fire on the Snow and first aired on the ABC on 6 June 1941 to great critical acclaim, according to reports. This was about Robert F Scott’s doomed attempt to be the first to the South Pole in 1911-1912 and the tragic loss of his entire party on their return.

My teacher, Brian G Neill, was the local regional newsreader for the ABC. He took our group to the Tamworth ABC studio to make a recording of the play, which was then played back at school to all the English classes because, in those days, everybody sat the same exam for English.

Polar regions in peril without government action

What will it take to get any government to recognise and take substantive action on climate change and biodiversity loss?

As it was a radio play, we all listened to it as part of our preparation. We were listening to and studying it almost as long after it was first aired as the number of years before it that the tragedy had occurred. In the radio version, Ida Osbourne (co-founder of the ABC children’s radio program, The Argonauts Club) played the narrator (a Chorus-like device) and in our version, our classmate, Patricia Tandy, did likewise.

When I was a student at Sydney University in the latter 1960s I recall the old Edgeworth David Building, named to honour the Professor of Geology who in 1909 led the first expedition to reach the South Magnetic Pole, beyond Fisher Library towards City Road, but demolished nearly 20 years ago. The name was then bestowed on another building near the Macleay Building, close to Parramatta Road.

About the book

From these apparently random matters, I was intrigued when I first read a note about the publication of Rohan Howitt’s recent book. I was further cheered early in the introduction when the writer pointed out other attempts at reorienting the map of Australia, a south-east part of the Indian Ocean. Or of those historians looking to the north, the Indonesian archipelago to PNG and their southeast Asian spread further to the north. Or east into the South Pacific/Aotearoa, or even inwards (think Mark McKenna), but examining Australia towards the south and the Antarctic has generally not been a focus.

This study of our colonial and post-Federation national engagement with those Souther Ocean waters and islands and with the Antarctic continent itself is full of the names of those who visited those places, of those who attached themselves as visionaries and/or boosters to the possibilities of economic exploitation (whaling in the 19th even early 20th Centuries) or for mining (coal, gold, molybdenum) or research.

Australia’s geographical proximity made the Antarctic seem a space of boundless opportunity. And invoked in the early calls for Australia to lay official claim to that vast land, there were even invocations of an imperialist “doctrine" already being set in place from the U.S. over its more southern neighbours in South America and in the Caribbean — the Monroe Doctrine.

I recall visiting the GW Bush Library in Dallas some years ago and noting the so-called Bush Doctrine. As dangerous and puerile as the Monroe “Doctrine”. Fortunately, such overt posturing has largely disappeared from our public positioning (apart from a hegemonic want for control over the South Pacific, some might argue). But back earlier last century, positing that Australia had a natural right to control it and to acquire it as a national territory.

Let me outline the eight chapters:

The Australian colonies and early Antarctic exploration;
Debating the Value of the Southern Frontier;
Destiny — Antarctica and Visions of Australia’s Future in the 1880s;
Another Klondyke — a renewal of Antarctic exploration in the 1890s;
Antarctic Fever in the early Commonwealth era;
The Golden El Dorado — and the Race for the Pole;
Rights and Responsibilities in the Australian Antarctic; and
The Equator to the Pole — performing sovereignty in the Australian Antarctic.

The introduction re-orients the map of Australia to the southern outlook, while the conclusion brings concerns to the present day.

Rohan Howitt has performed an important survey of Australia and the Antarctic. He has resurrected the stories and names of early contact with and theories about the possibilities lying within that continent and of its seas. He moves into the thrills of the early territory exploration, including of disasters, and of gradually moving from private fundraising for exploration attempts into total government control — the Australian Antarctic Division.

The Southern Frontier: Australia, Antarctica and Empire in the Southern Ocean World 1815-1947 by Rohan Howitt is published by Melbourne University Publishing.

This book was reviewed by an IA Book Club member. If you would like to receive free high-quality books and have your review published on IA, subscribe to receive your complimentary IA Book Club membership.

Jim Kable is a retired teacher who has taught in rural and metropolitan NSW, in Europe, and later, long-term in Japan.