By Emily Verdouw

From the quiet confines of his conservation lab to the icy wilderness of Antarctica, a young conservator is about to head off on the expedition of a lifetime. 

As the sole Australian selected for New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust’s Inspiring Explorers Expedition, 32-year-old Daniel Bornstein will walk in the footsteps of legendary adventurers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

The team will set off from NZ on Tuesday on a month-long journey to Scott’s Discovery Hut and back.

Mr Bornstein’s mission includes returning a treasured artefact to the historic hut that once sheltered the famous explorers.

“Just to think that I might be kind of walking … in the steps of these kind of heroic age explorers … it really is the trip of a lifetime,” he told AAP.

His expertise as a conservator at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra – spanning a vast array of objects from historic paddle steamers to delicate musical instruments – makes Mr Bornstein uniquely suited to the challenges of this expedition.

It is his role to restore and return a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, a soot-stained, battered book found outside Scott’s Discovery Hut in the early 1960s.

“You can see just how much that object was loved or needed by the people who were on this expedition,” he said.

“There are grimy, sooty fingerprints on every page. It’s an amazing insight into how they survived those conditions and what they valued.”

Mr Bornstein’s work involves more than preserving physical objects – it’s about ensuring their stories endure.

“The job really is thinking about what makes an object culturally meaningful or significant and how you preserve that moving forward,” he said.

“Sometimes it means sacrificing functionality for aesthetics, or the opposite.”

Preparing for the journey, Mr Bornstein crafted a wax canvas anorak, inspired by the attire of heroic age explorers, whose canvas garments famously struggled in the wet and icy conditions.

“I figure I’ve got the luxury of the heritage trust – they probably won’t let me die over there – so I’m testing just how bad it really is,” he said with a laugh.

The Antarctic Heritage Trust, based in NZ, is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Its efforts include conserving historic expedition huts and 20,000 artefacts left behind by early explorers, sharing these stories to inspire future generations.

“These huts represent so many interesting questions around the conservation of objects in extreme and isolated conditions,” Mr Bornstein said.

“They force a pragmatic philosophy to our trade and the way that we do things.”

He said the journey was a rare opportunity to connect with history, test conservation techniques and learn from an international team of inspiring explorers.

“It’s about understanding the complexities of history and ensuring future generations can learn from them.”