TO HELL AND BACK AGAIN A POLAR EXPLORER'S TALE OF TRAGEDY AND SURVIVAL

Douglas Mawson is not the most famous hero of Antarctic exploration, but, as Nige Tassell reveals, the Australian overcame the odds in one of the age's most disastrous expeditions...

- NIGE TASSELL

“I had time to say to myself, 'So this is the end', expecting every moment the sledge to crash on my head and both of us to go to the bottom unseen below." Douglas Mawson was in a tight spot. He was in a hole, literally. Less than a month previously, he had been the leader of a three-man team excitedly exploring the uncharted tundra of eastern Antarctica. He was now the only one left, having seen his teammates perish and left the bodies behind.

Then, during his solo effort to return to base camp in time to sail back to Australia - all the while hampered by illness, acute pain and a worsening mental state - Mawson had, much like one of his fallen colleagues a few weeks before, fallen into a crevasse, a deep open crack in the ice. It had been hidden by a thin layer of snowfall, but, fortunately, his sledge had wedged itself over the crack so that he didn't fall. Instead, he was left dangling over the abyss and somehow managed to pull himself up to safety.

This was just one episode of Mawson's Antarctic expedition. Soon afterwards, he fell into another crevasse and was saved only by being tied to a rope ladder. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910-13, titled his chronicle of that ill-fated mission The Worst Journey in the World. Arguably, Mawson's contemporaneous travails were even grimmer. His account of his own expedition deserved a more dramatic title than The Home of the Blizzard.

ANTARCTIC ADVENTURES