Douglas Mawson is remembered as Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer, the survivor of an epic and terrible journey in 1912 that cost his two companions their lives.
Less well known is that alongside his pioneering polar contribution, Mawson’s lifelong quest became understanding South Australia’s ancient and spectacular Flinders Ranges.
Now a dedicated team of volunteers is nearing the end of a two-decade mission to translate Mawson’s “scribbles” from his Australian adventures, which were interspersed with his three Antarctic expeditions.
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South Australian Museum volunteers have analysed his deteriorating handwriting and old-fashioned wording to be able to digitise the 31 diaries he wrote during 95 field trips from 1906 until the 1950s.
The group includes Mawson’s grandson Alun Thomas – whose mother, Patricia, went on many trips with Mawson – and retired veterinarian Tim Tolley, who describes the writing as having “a lot of scribble”.
Mark Pharaoh, the museum’s Australian Polar Collection senior collection manager, says the early diaries aren’t so bad.
“But the older he got … the more indecipherable it is,” he says.
“But these key volunteers and our geological expert have been going from the earliest one and becoming familiar with his handwriting.”
Thomas says he has “a genetic disposition” to be able to read Mawson’s writing.
Pharoah says: “We always blame Alun. ‘He’s your relative, can’t you tell us what he meant here?’ And he generally comes up with an authoritative answer.”
Mawson also developed his own shorthand, further complicating the project, and used words now considered archaic.
Another volunteer, palaeontologist Jim Jago, adjunct professor at the University of South Australia, says they had to get an old dictionary to work out some of the words “so we know what we’re talking about”.
After two decades, the volunteers are nearly done.
“They’re pretty close,” Pharaoh says. “I would say they’re tweaking things now.”
But he hopes to keep them around for as long as possible.
“They bring life and colour,” he says.
Inspiration from Marie Curie
Mawson was a leading figure in the “heroic era” of Antarctic exploration in the first decades of the 20th century, alongside explorers such as Robert Scott, Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton.
The museum’s collection includes Mawson’s wooden sledge from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
In 1912, Mawson, Swiss explorer Xavier Mertz and British army officer and explorer Belgrave Ninnis trekked for 34 days with three sledges and 16 dogs.
They were 500km from base camp when Ninnis fell in a crevasse and was lost – along with most of the team’s food.
Mawson and Mertz had to eat the dogs to survive as they struggled to reach the camp. But Mertz died, feverish and exhausted, and likely suffering from toxic levels of vitamin A from the dogs’ livers.
Mawson cut his sledge in half to reduce its weight and continued alone.
He fell down several crevasses, narrowly escaping death, was trapped in a cave by a blizzard for five days, and finally made it to the base camp only to find he had just missed the ship that was supposed to take him home, leaving him to spend another year in Antarctica.
He messaged his wife-to-be Paquita: “Deeply regret delay only just managed to reach hut.”
Pharaoh says Mawson was fascinated by the Flinders Ranges, which are hundreds of millions of years old, and contain what the state government describes as “the world’s finest example of the Ediacaran explosion of life, when the earliest forms of complex multicellular animal life evolved”.
The ranges are on Unesco’s tentative world heritage list.
Pharaoh says Mawson’s South Australian work is “definitely the lesser-known”, but that there are crossovers with his Antarctic work such as the equipment used, the extreme temperatures and the nightwear.
“He would take his polar pyjamas and wear them in the outback – you know how cold it can get,” he says.
Mawson took small groups of University of Adelaide geology students on his field trips.
One student, Reg Sprigg visited Arkaroola, 650km north of Adelaide, in 1939. Mawson asked Sprigg to do what he could to protect the area, and in 1967 Sprigg bought what would become the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary, a 610 sq km sanctuary that is still privately owned – now by Sprigg’s children, Margaret and Douglas.
Stephen Hore, a senior geologist with the state government, works there and with the museum’s volunteers.
Using mud maps and photos, he has identified 106 geological locations that Mawson visited that will become part of a three-day walk in Mawson’s footsteps.
Hore describes himself as a “rock detective”.
One place he identified was where Mawson had been looking for uranium, Hore says. “Madame Curie put him on to that.”
Marie Curie, who won two Nobel prizes for her work on radioactivity, is often credited with inspiring the search for uranium in Australia, and Mawson met her in Paris in 1911.
“One of Mawson’s photos was an abstract little cliff face … we knew it was in a particular gully, but that gully was 5km long,” Hore says.
“I had a photo of a fellow geologist standing in that location and I was able to zoom in on that photo and … work out exactly where [Mawson] was.
“You get lucky sometimes.”
