“If Antarctica were music, it would be Mozart,” the Australian broadcaster Andrew Denton once wrote, after one of his many (at least seven) trips to the continent. “Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on Earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.”
And yet it is not as it should be: last year, Antarctic sea ice cover dropped for six months straight.
Antarctica is understandably a bucket list destination for many, but herein lies the conundrum. The more people visit it, the more people feel a passion to protect it from human impact. And yet every person who goes there inevitably contributes to its destruction: the BBC estimates that the average carbon emissions for an Antarctic tourist are 3.76 tonnes – roughly what a person typically generates in an entire year.
But tourism has boomed in Antarctica since the 1990s. In 2019-20, 75,000 tourists went; by 2022-23, that number was 104,897. If each traveller was, in effect, melting 75 tonnes of snow just by visiting, then that adds up to almost 8m tonnes turned to slush.
Hobart is Australia’s gateway to Antarctica, and is home to the vast majority of our Antarctic and Southern Ocean scientists. Many of those scientists are roving the Hobart waterfront this week as part of Hobartica, a new element of the annual science and art festival Beaker Street.
Like many of us, Beaker Street founder Dr Margo Adler has never been to Antarctica – but she has made the deliberate choice not to go.
“I’ve always been really fascinated, but I don’t really have a good justification for going,” she says. Through Hobartica, she hopes we can get there vicariously – by immersing in the experiences of those who have been.
For many Antarctic scientists – including Adler’s partner – a big part of their work is sharing their experience.
“We want people to think of Antarctica as an incredible place that we need to protect and appreciate, but not necessarily as somewhere that we need to visit,” she says. “I don’t think it should be a bucket list place for people. I think it should be something that we feel really proud to be protecting together.
“Not everyone needs to go there. The people who do go there can say, ‘This place is pristine. We need to keep it that way. But let me tell you about it. Let me show you.’”
Hobartica features visual and sound art inspired by the continent, talks by artists and scientists, Finnish sauna tents and a unique Antarctic icy plunge experience: participants will enter water that matches the temperature of Antarctic water that day, then move to water matched to the predicted temperature in 2050.
“It feels like the sort of thing that you can experience without actually being there,” Adler says. “I’m sure some people who have been there would say, ‘No, you can’t.’ You can’t go to space in a planetarium. But I think there are elements of that experience, and what makes it so special, that we can bring here.”
Antarctica has long inspired artists: there are dozens of residencies offered around the world, increasingly aimed at artists willing to go there to raise awareness. Trips to Antarctica have led to novels by Kim Stanley Robinson, Thomas Keneally and Favel Parrett; documentaries by Werner Herzog; art by Sidney Nolan and Ken Done. Lawrence English and David Bridie both composed music there.
And there’s Helen Garner, who wrote Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice about a trip she took to Antarctica on a tourist ship. “I can say now, 26 years later, that it was one of the most head-clearing and heart-healing experiences of my life,” she told the Guardian. “And I’ll never stop feeling grateful for it.”
The beloved children’s author Alison Lester has been to Antarctica five times, so far, “which feels a bit rude!” she laughs.
On her first trip, as an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow in 2005, she sent emails each evening to children and teachers all over the world sharing her daily experiences. Her journeys have continued to feature in her work, with a new book, Into the Ice: Reflections on Antarctica, out in October.
She says Antarctica is like nowhere else: “It’s so remote. It’s almost like going to outer space in that when you’re down there, you’re so insignificant and part of such a huge, pristine world. And I guess, because it’s so inaccessible, there’s always that thing: if you can’t do something, you want to do it more!”
Lester believes that the arts have the best chance of getting the message of conservation across to the public: there is value in not going yourself. “The more people know about it, the more they will grow to love it and they will want to protect it, and I think that’s what the arts can do, in a way that science often can’t do. You can fall in love with the place.”
Elizabeth Leane holds the title of professor of Antarctic studies within the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. With a background across science and the arts, she has been to Antarctica six times and is leading Creative Antarctica, an epic survey of Australian art and literature examining the continent with an exhibition planned for 2026.
“I got the bug, as people do,” she says. “It’s astonishingly beautiful, and it’s a real dilemma, in the sense that I want everyone to be able to see what I’ve seen, because it’s spectacular. It’s difficult to put into words.
“It’s one of those ironies that if too many people go it loses what makes it special, but I wouldn’t like for no one to be able to see it, or for only scientists to be able to see it, because I think it’s a part of our world that we all need to know about. Some of us through secondhand sources, and some of us directly.”
Philip Samartzis, a sound artist whose work is featured in Hobartica, has been to Antarctica twice to document the industrial sounds of station life and, separately, the famous wind. He’s seen a real shift in the focus of artists over the past decade and a half, away from the historic ideal of humans conquering a wild landscape.
“More recently there have been questions around gender equality, the ethics of being there, the impact that we have on essentially the last pristine wilderness environment in the world,” he says. “Artists are pushing the impact of climate change, which has been part of my focus as the conditions there are becoming much more volatile and less predictable.”
Do these accounts and works created by artists truly help us understand Antarctica without going ourselves? Leane thinks so: “I’ve come to the conclusion that you can write an excellent novel about Antarctica without going there, and you can write a terrible one when you have,” she says.
“I think we have to get past the idea that only by going there, only by being on the ice, can you be genuinely an Antarctican.”
Hobartica runs until 11 August as part of Beaker Street festival in Hobart, Australia
