By Helen Musa

The National Museum is taking a bet that Antarctica looms large in the consciousness of Australians.

It’s a fair bet, too. Even as I’m talking to National Museum of Australia curator Jono Lineen and senior curator Laura Cook, I find myself quoting Capt Lawrence Oates’ famous last words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”, spoken during Capt Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1912 expedition to Antarctica.

I knew that from Douglas Stewart’s play Fire on the Snow, just as I knew about dodgy rumours of cannibalism from Thomas Keneally’s 1969 novel The Survivor, which tells of an Antarctic explorer with striking similarities to Australia’s Douglas Mawson.

I wouldn’t be alone, Lineen suggests, most Australians have an Antarctic story, sometimes of heroism, unfolding at the very beginning of the Australian nation, before Gallipoli and at a time when the country was searching for heroes.

The National Museum’s new winter blockbuster, simply titled Antarctica, promises to take visitors on a journey into a stage set for adventure. Design-wise, the exhibition is awash in cold blues and whites, allowing visitors to “feel a blast”.

The exhibition focuses on 14 personalities associated with Antarctica, from explorer Cecil Madigan to Diana Patterson, the first woman to manage an entire Australian Antarctic research station.

There are videos to help visitors connect with the stories but there are also remarkable artefacts, including embroidered skis, dresses reinforced with whalebone and taxidermy specimens.

A key feature is a huge 10-minute looped video recreation of an Antarctic blizzard projected on to the museum’s enormous curved screen.

“We want it to be overwhelming. We want it to be immersive,” Cook says, adding that the plummeting temperatures in Canberra at this time of year may help with that.

Visitors will discover that Australia and Antarctica were once linked as part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.

Fossils of the Glossopteris tree found across Antarctica, Australia and India provide evidence of that ancient connection, while the skull of an extinct toothless dolphin demonstrates how species adapted to increasingly cold conditions.

Lineen points out that human beings were never intended to live in Antarctica, but he also reminds me that Antarctica was once lush and verdant. As it split from Gondwanaland and drifted south, fewer species were able to survive.

That is a deep-time connection, to be sure, but the exhibition also introduces visitors to more recent sub-Antarctic experiences. Capt James Cook’s second voyage crossed the Antarctic Circle in 1773, while the clipper ships charging through the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties of the 19th century gave many early migrants their first sub-Antarctic experience.

Although Cook, no relation to the exhibition’s curator, never sighted Antarctica itself, his detailed reports of whales helped establish the fledgling whaling industry.

Sydney, Lineen says, was built as much on the whale’s back as on the sheep’s. The related industry of extracting oil from penguins is also explored.

Cook says the exhibition examines the Antarctic experience through more than 250 objects, saying: “There’s a lot going on.” 

The basis of the show, augmented by existing National Museum holdings, is the collection of the Australian Antarctic Division, which in 2023 transferred holdings to the National Museum and the National Archives.

Politically, Australia is one of seven nations that lay claim to parts of Antarctica, but Lineen and Cook stress that under the Antarctic Treaty all activity is restricted to peaceful scientific research, which the show canvases.

Nonetheless, Australia claims sovereignty over roughly 42 per cent of the continent’s land area through the Australian Antarctic Territory, administered by the Australian Antarctic Division.

His exhibition shines a light on Australian explorers such as Mawson and Edgeworth David, both distinguished geologists who made major contributions to scientific knowledge.

David’s granddaughter, the late Anne Godfrey-Smith, also known as Anne Edgeworth, trained as a scientist before becoming a celebrated Canberra poet and theatre identity. Letters written by David during his expeditions have been loaned to the museum by her family.

Artefacts on display help evoke the hardships of the Mawson expedition, which suffered when a sledge carrying most of the party’s food supplies fell into a crevasse. The disaster forced expedition members to eat their dogs, but not, the curators stressed, each other.

“Mawson was bigger than Ben Hur,” Lineen says, but so too was legendary photographer Frank Hurley, whose Antarctic film Home of the Blizzard was screened throughout Australia and helped shape public understanding of Antarctica.

Preparing Antarctica has been an epic journey for Lineen and Cook, who have spent three years working out how best to tell the story.

“Our premise is that Antarctica affects us all,” they say.

Antarctica, National Museum of Australia, July 1 to October 11. Free.