Fixing Antarctica

Book excerpt: 1956, the height of the cold war. Fourteen scientists will spend fifteen months on an isolated rock outcrop at the edge of the Antarctic plateau. Mawson station is Australia's first continental station and will become the longest continuously operating settlement inside the Antarctic Circle. The surveyor is Sydney Lorrimar Kirkby.He will go on to clock up extraordinary achievements but already he has achieved the impossible. He had polio as a child so how could he hope to pass the Commonwealth medical test? It took a bit of cunning but he got through. The age requirement for any member of an Australian Antarctic team was twenty-six years old. Syd is twenty-one. He's not a fully qualified surveyor but he will be when the ship leaves for Mawson with him on board. Over the next twenty years Syd Kirkby will explore and map more unknown regions in the world than any other person in history.Fixing Antarctica is the first full biography of this important twentieth century explorer. Told through interviews with his contemporaries, personal diaries and the diaries of other Antarctic explorers, this account establishes Kirkby in his rightful place as one of the great polar explorers.Cover Illustration: The cover of Fixing Antarctica is drawn from a portrait by Tom Macbeth, a finalist in the Archibald Prize and its associated Salon Des Refuses.