Book Review - This Accursed Land by Lennard Bickel

 This Accursed Land by Lennard Bickel

Melbourne: Sun Books, 1989 (First published 1977)      ISBN 0725103027

Douglas Mawson, and his fellow Antarctic explorers that formed the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1914, are arguably the most unsung of all the brave explorers of the Earth's uncharted territories. Mawson's face is on the Australian $100 note and several places have been named after him, but I am sure many Australians and most of the world know little of his exploits apart from the fact he went to Antarctica.

It is true that events conspired against his story being more well-known. The Australian expedition travelled to Antarctica at the same time as Amundsen and Scott, and Mawson's exploits were overshadowed by the triumph and tragedy of those two expeditions. The outbreak of World War One then meant that tales of explorers were no longer the news they once were.

Mawson's book Home of the Blizzard was, until the publication of Bickel's book, the only written record of the expedition (in fact the final editing of the Mawson papers wasn't completed until 1975). Mawson's book documented the entire expedition, whereas in This Accursed Land Bickel focusses solely on the extraordinary journey of Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz. Bickel used material from the expedition to flesh out this story: as he writes in an Author's Note "Mawson's account of that journey [in Home of the Blizzard] has been the only writing on the epic during the last sixty years; and typically - and perhaps necessarily - modest, it was a tightly controlled narrative which precluded heroics."

And there were plenty of heroics. Simply to move anywhere in what came to be known as King George V Land was a feat of heroism. Due to the Katabatic winds that build up over the internal ice-sheets, the area in which the Mawson expedition operated is one of the windiest in the World. Even in the summer months the men were often confined to their tents by winds well in excess of 60 kilometres per hour, which often blew continuously for a week at a time. This weather was to have a catastrophic effect on Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz as they attempted to journey from Commonwealth Bay through King George V Land to connect with work done by the previous Nimrod Expedition that Mawson took part in.

As they struggled across the rugged terrain, they were often trapped in their tents for days on end, and when Ninnis died after falling down a crevasse, an accident in which Mertz and Mawson lost nearly all their food and much of their equipment, they had not much time to try and return to base before the departure of the supply ship Aurora. Due to the lack of food, Mawson and Mertz began to eat their sledge dogs, unwittingly poisoning themselves by eating the dog's livers, which contain toxic doses of Vitamin A. Mertz eventually succumbed to this, which left Mawson on his own, with little food and with 160 kilometres of country to traverse before making it back to the expedition hut and safety.

The rest of the expedition did send out a party to search for the missing men - they travelled as far as they could in the time they had before the Aurora had to leave or risk being crushed by the ice, leaving a cairn with food at their furthermost searching point before turning back. It was later on the same day that Mawson found the cairn - the food saved his life, but he was too weak to catch the retreating search party.

Mawson eventually got to "Aladdin's Cave", where he was able to shelter from a storm for several days before the last stretch to the huts. As he crested the rise to head down to Commonwealth Bay, he could see on the horizon the black smudge that was the Aurora leaving the bay. Fortunately a small party had been left behind in case Mawson's party returned, and although the Aurora was contacted by radio, it was unable to make it back into the Bay owing to the weather, so Mawson and his rescuer's were doomed to spend another winter in Antarctica. Bickel explains that this enforced period without activity may have actually been beneficial for Mawson for his recovery.

It was not beneficial for Sidney Jeffryes, who was the radio operator who stayed behind to help find Mawson: he went mad that last winter, and never fully recovered from the experience of being stuck in Antarctica for the winter. Owing to the extra winter, Mawson found he made it back to Australia in debt, which the writing of Home of the Blizzard cleared.

Bickel's telling of Mawson's adventure is well researched, well written and gripping. There is an afterword by the (then) last surviving member of the expedition, which well describes Mawson's qualities, and how his ordeal changed him. As for apparatus, that's about as good as it gets, as there is no index, and the maps are useless (although the photos are not too bad).

If you want to know more about Mawson, the awesome challenges that he faced, and his and his companions bravery in the face of peril, I can highly recommend This Accursed Land.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Lambs to the Slaughter by Graham Yallop

 Lambs to the Slaughter by Graham Yallop

Collingwood, Victoria: Outback Press, 1979              ISBN 0868882275

The 1970s was a tumultuous decade for Australian Cricket - from the disastrous loss to South Africa that cost Bill Lawry the captaincy, through to the season that Graham Yallop dissects in this book, we went through the ups of Lillee and Thomson and the downs of the WSC breakup, the latter of which had a huge impact on the Australian team and the series that Yallop describes in this book.

The 1970s was also the decade in which I grew to love cricket - my first clear memories of the game are the test series against India which was the summer before the events described in this book, and of course the whole WSC circus, which made for great television, and gave a whole new generation a love for the game. As I read this book, the pain of that summer came back to me.

By the end of the book the reader is as shell-shocked as Yallop himself seems to be by the absolute thrashing delivered to Australia by England. The Australian team was young and inexperienced, as practically all the established Australian players had defected to WSC - Yallop was captain at 26 and had only played eight Tests at the start of the summer (the most-capped player was Gary Cosier with 16), while the England team had the experience of Boycott and Willis, along with the youthful talent of Gooch, Gower and Botham; the latter two having stellar seasons.

Despite the apparent difference in ability and skill, Yallop had a reasonable hope that the Ashes would be a hard-fought series. Despite Yallop's insistence in this book that it was poor pitches and poor decisions by players and umpires that made the difference between the teams so stark, hindsight and a disengaged view would suggest that the Australian team picked for that summer, one player aside, was simply not up to scratch, and England outplayed Australia at every opportunity.

This book follows Australian cricket lovers around - there is usually a copy in any second-hand bookshop that has a sports section, and "Lambs to the Slaughter" is a phrase that is now used about the "official" Test teams during the WSC interregnum. So it's strange that it's taken me until now to read it. Perhaps I was unconsciously protecting myself from the re-lived pain of what was a very low point in our cricketing history.

There are several subjects that come out for me in this book, only some of which are raised by Yallop consciously. The first is the explosion of talent that was Rodney Hogg. With a record wicket haul in the series, he was the shining light of a poor summer for Australia. He was a famously abrasive character, and Yallop goes into some detail about how he was a difficult player to manage, which was not helped by the fact that before the series started, Yallop had never met him. The second is how little assistance was given to an Australian captain back in those days - it was only half-way through the series that the Australian Cricket Board thought that appointing a manager to the team to handle logistics, the media and so forth might be a good idea. The thought that the powers-that-be of cricket dropped an inexperienced 26 year old into the "most important job in Australia" with virtually no support is quite mind-boggling.

The final subject is Yallop himself. One very much gets the feeling that he wrote this book in anger: anger at how he was treated by the press, by the Board, and by the "cricket gods". He bemoans the inability of the Australian team to gell and put together a team performance required over the time required to consistently win a test match, but in reading the book I get no sense that he took responsibility to try and build the team in that way. I could of course be selling him short, but for this reader, more insight into the off-field activities and performance would have fleshed out his narrative - I didn't really get a sense of how the players as a unit tackled their poor performance. While the descriptions of play are useful, that is not really why we armchair cricketers read these sorts of books.

Having stated that, if you want to know the story of the 1978-9 season from an Australian viewpoint, you must read this book, which has become a bit of a minor classic.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell