Antarctic Oasis- A haunting Journey

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Dialogue – Antarctic Oasis – a haunting journey

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Narration:

Situated on the edge of the Antarctic lies the spectacular island oasis of South Georgia. It's known as the jewel of the Antarctic. A place of extraordinary natural beauty and wildlife. It's also a place where man once had a devastating presence.

Recently four artists’ adventurers sailed to South Georgia to explore this remarkable island and draw inspiration for their group art exhibition.

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(Martin King)

V/O: I did have apprehensions about a trip to South Georgia.

Interview: The main ones were actually being in a confined space on a yacht for a month with people I didn't know very well.

V/O: So I did have apprehensions about that and that was the thing that almost put me off, I thought how am I going to manage that being in the middle of know where and got people you bump up against and there is nothing you can do about it and in the end I decided that

Interview: it wasn't about a love boat experience, where not going there to air the laundry.

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Narration:

South Georgia is a lone alpine island situated in the sub-Antarctic, over a thousand kilometres from the Falkland Islands.

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(Jay Watson)

Interview: Once you’re on the boat its always hard living anyway because you’re in a confined space and your a little boat on a big ocean.

V/O: You can never truly relax or switch off because you’re always rolling around. If you’re in your bunk your rolling around, if you’re on deck you’re getting tossed around as well. So when your traveling across the southern ocean your always prepared for the worst because it's one of those oceans that tend to throw up some quiet wild seas and your always going to get hit by

Interview: a weather system that’s going to throw you around a bit and serve up

V/O: some of the wave action and wet weather sailing you get to expect in this part of the world.

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(Mike Nicholls)

Interview: The trip on the sea was a trip in itself, four and half days

V/O: and in confined conditions with people, so I was a bit worried that I was going to have conflict with people and go a bit stir-crazy.

Interview: But once we were there on the boat it was fine. I was probably more worried about being sea sick

V/O: more than anything else or falling off the boat into the water and dropping dead of exposure.

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(Mitch McAuley)

Interview: It's tough, even in a boat like that you’re rocking around and just trying to get out of your bunk is an awkward thing.

V/O: The seasickness is always a problem for me but thankfully I didn't get too seasick. We had one really bad weather system come through and it was at night and the waves were pretty big. But it's part of the experience and without that it doesn't make the trip I don’t think real.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: I remember when we first came across land at South Georgia and just the feeling thank god there’s land and just to

Interview: see it was just a monumental feeling inside.

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(Mike Nicholls)

Interview: My first impressions of the island, well you sort of excited to be coming into such a foreign place and after being at sea for four days and just to see land

V/O: is an exhilarating experience and a relief.

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(Martin King)

V/O: My first view of South Georgia was this mist ridden line of mountains, snow clad and not unlike peaks you would find in Europe but the fact your approaching them

Interview: after four days at sea was just this line stretching as far as you could see of this island

V/O: it was just magical, absolutely magical.

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(Jay Watson)

Interview: First impressions of South Georgia is this incredible expansive mountain range that bursts up out of the water with glaciers streaming down to the waters edge. The island itself is only 170 kilometres long

V/O: and about 40 kilometres at it's widest. So it's quiet a small island right in the middle of the southern ocean.

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(Martin King)

V/O: Once we were at South Georgia

Interview: the idea was that we'd explore the length of the island on the north west side.

V/O: We'd track pretty close to the coast and find appropriate anchorages. Each way we entered a sheltered cove was different, some through very narrow passes and passages. Those sorts of things became pretty exciting at the time because everyone would be up on deck at that stage about to find a new place to stay for the day or night.

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Martin King

V/O: Once you get out into the wilds of South Georgia it's a remote location.

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(Jay Watson)

V/O: Many of the landings we had we couldn't anchor at so we would often travel from the anchorage to the beaches and then spend the day ashore and then the boat would come back to pick us up.

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(Mike Nicholls)

Interview: And even just walking up the mountains and that was always fantastic because you'd always be walking into different environments.

V/O: You would be walking through tussock grass, dodging seals and then come up into snow-covered country with rocks and mosses. The mosses were always amazing because they were three or four hundred year old these moss beds and were a metre thick.

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(Jay Watson)

Interview: Amazing variance of wildlife from the King penguins

V/O: right through to the seals that bread on the island and also the birdlife that actually flies above that. It's an incredibly rich environment in that regard. Some of these penguin rookeries themselves are twenty to thirty thousand penguins in one particular rookery, so these are incredible numbers of wildlife.

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(Mitch McAuley)

Interview: It was fascinating watching penguins work with each other

V/O: in a sort of comical manner and then you had the skua's coming down and ripping apart a dead seal and just how they did that and guarded their little area. The fur seals guarding their own plot of sand on the beaches or rocks on the beaches.

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(Martin King)

Interview: The number of seal colonies we saw, the number of bird colonies we saw at breeding time, there was just an amazing proliferation of wildlife.

V/O: It's like the drama of there existence in a harsh environment and then there is also the drama of the landscape itself which was essentially black and white as I saw it or came away thinking about it. Where you've got areas of snow drifts against this very stark landscape.

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(Jay Watson)

V/O: The South Georgia environment is extremes. One minute your in a nice sunny day and half an hour later it will turn on you and you'll get blasted with katabatic winds that come out of the mountains. You just sit back and really experience these wild extremes of a place like this and you get to

Interview: really respect and admire what nature can actually serve up to you.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: We were walking along and looking at glaciers and penguins and various things and you could feel the weather starting to pick up a little bit, the wind started to pick up and that can happen with the katabatic winds coming down which are very strong. But it seemed within ten or fifteen minutes the world had just caved in on us. We sort of got to the beach and you could see the boat bouncing out on the water and once we radioed 'Australis' it was made clear that they couldn't get the zodiacs to the beach so just wait and it will change. I remember huddling in this little bunch because

Interview: we were really getting cold, our feet and hands were getting cold because you couldn't move around, your just getting hit by the wind and your trying to nestle in the tussock grasses thinking this is terrible but boy it’s good too.

V/O: This is what it should be like in a way and you look around and see all these penguins just standing there as if it was a sunny day to them being sand blasted. It was quiet an event and I remember getting on the boat and telling

Interview: Roger the skipper, thanks for organising that for us.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: Then suddenly you’re in a bay and your sheltered and everything is fine again.

Interview: It was again part of the trip; it was what made South Georgia so interesting.

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(Mitch McAuley)

Interview: I was impressed by the fact that man had some how got all this stuff down there. All this wood, metal, generators, motors and everything.

V/O: I just kept looking around thinking how did all this get here.

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(Jay Watson)

V/O: This industry they literally built small towns on the island, there was cinemas there were churches

Interview: and all of this to make life a little bit easier for the workers who had to work continually all season twenty-four hours a day.

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(Mike Nicholls)

V/O: The whole place sort of permeated with this old echo and you could imagine

Interview: the noise and the vibration of humanity there

V/O: and it still had the feel of that but it was more like a ghost town. The sole of the place had the feel of what it was like yet it was completely empty. It echoed of mans industry.

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(Jay Watson)

V/O: Man's impact on the environment was during the early 1900's. They literally set up South Georgia as the central whaling area. There was not only one of these but there was like four or five along the island.

V/O: Emotionally it is quiet haunting to be amongst all this whaling industry and the blood that must have been throughout all these harbours and bays.

V/O: The amount of whales taken in one particular season, up to five thousand and the visualising how these harpoons and things which still lie on the shoreline.

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(Martin King)

V/O: I think whales have long memories and there know where to be seen in South Georgia which once upon a time I would expect would of been a haven for them. We didn't see one whale and I don't blame them. The whaling stations over the life of them took hundreds of thousands of whales out of the water just to light the street lamps of Europe and London.

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(Martin King)

V/O: The whaling stations meant destruction and death and that is the sadness of South Georgia.

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(Mike Nicholls)

V/O: Even when the whaling stations had finished they thought the whales would come back so they left the whale stations fully equipped with boats, machinery and everything was left for when the whales did come back and they could start harvesting again. But as yet after fifty years the whales have never come back, there still completely depleted.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: Man's impact that these buildings and whale tanks

Interview: has morphed again back into the landscape so it's not such a horrible site as you might expect it to be.

V/O: I think because the buildings were an older style building there's romanticism about them.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: My art was inspired by

Interview: a few things and it went through stages. Initially I thought I am going to get onto the birdlife here,

V/O: this is something I’ve noticed. Then the amount of waterfall streams that were coming down from the higher peaks I found visually fascinating and started going and doing most of my drawings when I was down there was on these streams. But towards the end I think what really got me going was all these man made structures that were in this hostile environment and in some cases become very much part of the landscape because they had decade or rotted away.

Interview: And so I quiet enjoyed this idea of the building. The building was also the church at Grytviken,

V/O: the whale tanks and I just found the idea of the refuge hut or the red hut interesting in that there was this one little minute building that represented man in a sense with the colossal landscape behind it and it gave scale to what you were seeing.

Interview: It also in a sense represented man in that what the hell was this little red building doing there and what was man doing there.

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(Mitch McAuley)

V/O: What was nice is you'd be sitting there on the boat looking at this landscape one day then that night it would snow and the next day it was covered in white.

Interview: What was handy often is that I’d painted it that day and got that shape

V/O: of the landscape with the tussock grasses and creeks and then when it snowed I had an understanding of what was underneath it.

Interview: What I have done since then is come back to the studio and developed those drawings and photographs

V/O: into oil on canvas paintings.

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(Jay Watson)

V/O: The effect of South Georgia on me was the wildlife and the landscape.

Interview: The incredible experience of being with the wildlife, being in amongst it and

V/O: experiencing their movements and character. To be with them for hours on end was an incredible experience and is what I really strongly came away with was the love of nature and hopefully this comes through in my photography.

V/O: With my photography

Interview: I tend to start often with the broad landscape and I try to

V/O: compose that in a way that is pleasing I guess to myself visually to start with. Then I usually come into a point where I find myself in these incredible details within that landscape. They might be mosses or lichen or rock formations or simple snow effect on grass in the landscape.

Interview: So I am trying to record in a low impact way of how spectacular and beautiful these parts of the world are

V/O: and that they are a magic part of the world.

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(Martin King)

V/O: I think it was the glaciers that probably had the biggest impact.

Interview: I had never stood in front of a glacier before or been that close to one

V/O: and they are truly oarsome. I mean they would be eight to ten stories high some of them and just the idea that thousands years of snow slowly

Interview: carving their way down through the valleys between the mountains

V/O: somehow had a prehistoric feel and there was a sense about them that they were still living. You could hear them cracking deep within side them. The range of colours you could find in the compressed snow and just the oarsome quality of the glaciers is something that really struck me.

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(Martin King)

Interview: What inspired the work that I produced about South Georgia was

V/O: the drama of the landscape. The drama within the environment, that proliferation of wildlife.

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(Martin King)

Interview: Usually when I’m out in the environment I am photographing and drawing directly into a pad.

V/O: Trying in a sense to observe the environment as much as I can, the point being that the more observations I can make the more sits within me for things that might

Interview: filter through the work when I’m making it back in the studio.

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(Martin King)

Interview: The thing about birds that fascinate me is something I can't really put my finger on, it's just been an abiding interest since I was a child.

V/O: In many ways I don't really want to try and define that too much. It's just a fascination that has a kind of child like quality about it, has a mystery about it. It's difficult because it can become illustrative but it also can for me signify a location really quiet powerfully and no matter where I travel I try and observe the birds of that particular region.

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(Mike Nicholls)

V/O: The nature of being on a boat and producing art

Interview: you are fairly limited and in a cold climate you have to think of things that will dry or that wont freeze up.

V/O: So I was basically using pastels and a bit of oil stick. You'd just sort of go out with a pencil, sketch on, add some colour, fill in to a certain extent so you don't over work the picture. Then giving it a rest

Interview: I would come back and re work on it on the boat

V/O: and then just sort of build up the atmosphere to create that feeling I won’t to get and the ambience I won't to get.

V/O: I was sort of interested in the contrast of the rust and the industrial against this snow-white pristine natural environment covered in birdlife and animal life.

Interview: And it is all those aspects that then are recreated into my work further down the track.

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(Martin King)

V/O: Regardless of what those whaling station stood for, what they were engaged with, there is no end of

Interview: interest and aesthetic beauty in something that is so decaying as a whaling station.

V/O: What’s actually happening now is that nature is slowly overtaking and some how redeeming the pristine environment.

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(Mike Nicholls)

V/O: With the whaling stations it was quiet interesting that nature had actually started to reclaim them. So there is a great experience there

Interview: of a whole evolution of things that have gone on.

V/O: Many sad things, a lot of hopeful things. That was the one good thing about the trip in a funny sort of way. It reaffirmed that nature can make a comeback, reclaim itself and repair itself if given the time to do so.

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(Martin King)

V/O: The exhibition that we had gave the whole expedition a kind of significance that I don't think would of happened if we had just done the trip, made the work down there and gone our separate ways. It became an important part of the whole trip so it wasn't just finished when we got off the boat at the end of our trip to South Georgia.

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Title/Subtitles/Name Supers/Credits:

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Title: (aligned center of screen over iceberg vision)

ANTARCTIC OASIS

a haunting journey

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over gallery vision, text aligned left)

Dickerson Art Gallery

sydney australia

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over interview vision, text aligned left)

Martin King

painter printmaker

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over yacht vision)

Falkland Islands

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(no fade out)

Subtitle: (just left of island as zoom into island location on map)

South Georgia Island

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Subtitle: (lower right of screen over interview vision, text aligned right)

Jay Watson

photographer videographer

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Subtitle: (lower right of screen over interview vision, text aligned right)

Mike Nicholls

painter sculptor

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over interview vision, text aligned left)

Mitch McAuley

Painter

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Subtitle: (text centered bottom of screen over B/W image)

South Georgia Island

1930

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over interview vision, text aligned left)

Mitch McAuley

painter

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Subtitle: (lower right of screen over interview vision, text aligned right)

Jay Watson

photographer videographer

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Subtitle: (lower left of screen over interview vision, text aligned left)

Martin King

painter printmaker

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Subtitle: (lower right of screen over interview vision, text aligned right)

Mike Nicholls

painter sculptor

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End Credits: (text all centered)

the producers gratefully acknowledge

the assistance of

Roger Wallis & Crew of 'Australis'

Sandefjord Whaling Museum

Oyvind Thuresson & Sidsel Hansen

Norwegian Film Institute

Tim & Pauline Carr

Dickerson Gallery Sydney

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Production Credits: (production credit text aligned left, names aligned right)

Additional Photography Ivan Hexter

Camera Assistant Simon Lamb

3D Animation Alf Kuhlmann

Graphics Andrew Watson

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