1997/98 Expedition Members

Rob Easther is deputy station and field operations manager with the Australian Antarctic Division with extensive experience in Antarctica. He was Officer in Charge of Davis Station from August 1985 to December 1986 and voyage leader on five voyages to Antarctica since 1988. He has “been south” each summer but one since 1985. From October 1996 to January 1997, he was sent to Casey Station as mediator and manager in a dispute between the Station Leader and the wintering expeditioners. Easther was project manager for the relocation of the Mawson huskies to the USA and liaison officer for the production of the film, “The Last Husky.” He was voyage leader during the filming on MV Icebird and liaison officer for the IMAX film Antarctica. Easther was field leader of the Prince Charles Mountains expedition inland from Mawson Station in 1990-91 and a member of the private Heard Island expedition on the maxi yacht Anaconda II as a mountaineer and photographer.

Before joining the Antarctic Division, Easther was course team leader and principal lecturer in outdoor education at the South Australian College of Advanced Education for five years. He has a BA from the University of Adelaide and MSc from the University of Oregon.

Alan Grant, 50, who will head the expedition at Cape Denison. He is a Director of Gillespies Asia Pacific with responsibility for masterplanning projects in Queensland, the Northern Territory, Indonesia and China. He is a senior landscape architect and land surveyor with Antarctic experience as Station Leader at Mawson over the 1993 winter and summer seasons.

Alan’s Antarctic season was one of the largest and busiest in recent years with 32 winterers, a busy rebuilding and scientific program, tourist ship visits and extensive ship to shore operations including the return of years of accumulated tip rubbish to Australia – the 1993 season was the last year of living and working in the old Mawson Station.

Through his earlier experience in a surf club and living for 20 years in Albury close to the Victorian Alps, Alan has been an active skier, bushwalker, sailor and canoeist.

Gerard (Ted) Bugg, 42, is a Parks and Wildlife Ranger at the Cradle Mountain/Lake St Claire National Park in Tasmania. A qualified carpenter and joiner, with wide experience in cottage, construction and joinery work, Ted and his wife Cindy built their own home in the foothills of Cradle Mountain at a time when there was no road, water, power, telephone or other services.

With other Parks and Wildlife staff, he has built a plethora of walking tracks, bushwalkers’ huts and maintained a host of other historic structures associated with a large national park.

He has completed courses in winter mountaincraft and First Aid and radio communications systems and taken part in several search and rescue operations. Mr Bugg was an integral part of the 1997/98 expedition, personally removing much of the ice from the living section of the Main Hut.

Conservation team leader Geoff Ashley, 43, is a built heritage specialist with Godden Mackay, a Sydney-based consulting firm which specialises in cultural resource management and planning for historic and industrial sites. Geoff has qualifications in architecture backed by 12 years experience in the field of historic heritage conservation. Before joining Godden Mackay, he held positions with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the Heritage and Conservation Branch of the former Department of Planning (now DUAP) and the NSW Department of Public Works.

His consulting experience includes Heritage Impact Statements for the Newcastle Civic Site, the Moore Park Showgrounds/Fox Studios Australia development and preparation of a heritage study review for Mosman Council.

Geoff undertook an inspection visit to Mawson’s Huts in January, 1997, and has prepared the schedule of works for the 1997-98 expedition.

Artist Alasdair McGregor, 43, who trained as an architect, is also a writer and photographer.

He has increasingly turned towards his love of landscape painting, and for the last dozen years has made his living and reputation as one of Australia’s foremost landscape artists. Alasdair is the official artist and photographer of the AAP Mawson’s Huts Foundation, established to conserve the historic huts built by Sir Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. He is produced one major painting depicting the huts and the Cape Denison landscape, which is the first prize in a raffle to raise funds for the Foundation, and is currently working on others.

Alasdair is the author of “The Kimberley: Horizons of Stone” and is currently working on his second book on Australian islands, to be published late 1997.

Dr Estelle Lazer, 42, lectures in archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her PhD was based on the human skeletal remains excavated at Pompeii, where her work extended over seven field seasons. She has also worked on several historical sites in New South Wales and spent two summers in Antarctica. The first, in 1984-85, was to Commonwealth Bay to provide a heritage and conservation assessment as well as a preliminary archaeological survey of the site associated with Mawson’s Huts. The second, in 1986-87, was spent at Heard Island recording evidence of the 19th century elephant sealing industry. She is currently part of a multidisciplinary National Estate Grant Program with the Department of Architectural and Design Science at the University of Sydney to study the rates of deterioration of Mawson’s Huts and the impact of tourism on the site.

Estelle’s role on the AAP expedition will be to excavate any ice and snow that has to be removed from the main hut or the workshop for the restoration program. She will also deal with the removal or relocation of artefacts that are deemed to pose a hazard to wildlife and will continue to map and catalogue the artefacts that are inside the huts and scattered across the historic site.

Dr Rod Givney was medical officer at Casey Station in Antarctica from December 1989 to December 1990, when reconstruction of the base was in progress, giving him rare experience of industrial injuries in a very cold climate. He has had wide hospital clinical and country general practice experience.

Dr Givney has medical degrees from the University of Sydney and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia. He is currently a Consultant with the Communicable Disease Control Branch of the South Australian Health Commission and part time medical officer in Emergency. For five years previously he held the position of Lecturer in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney and worked part-time in Emergency at the Prince of Wales Hospital. In 1988-89 he was Clinical Microbiology Registrar at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Camperdown, and worked in Emergency at the Balmain Hospital.

Joan Russell, 51, the cook and camp manager, has extensive Antarctic experience. She was Station Leader at Macquarie Island from December 1993 to December 1994, and Station Leader at Casey from December 1989, to December 1990. Joan has a BA (Hons) from Flinders University and an MA from the University of Kent, Canterbury.

She is Presiding Officer of the Promotion and Grievance Appeals Tribunal, South Australia, and has served as Executive Consultant to a range of other SA government departments, heading review panels, programs and boards.

Joan says her ability to use even very basic rations to turn out attractive, nutritious and good-tasting meals was developed over many years, including those spent at small outstations in Papua New Guinea and in the field on Macquarie Island.

David Gillott, a building contractor from North Tamborine, Qld, has worked in Antarctica on two expeditions – winter 1986-87 and summer 1993-94. Through working on the rebuilding and maintenance programs at Casey and Davis bases, he is familiar with and competent in the full range of building skills necessary to operate in the Antarctic environment. He is proficient in First Aid techniques and as a member of an Antarctic Search and Rescue team he has trekked for several days in small parties and survived blizzard conditions. He spent 15 years in the Army Reserve, for most of that time as a non-commissioned officer.

Paul Delaney, 48, a general builder, carpenter and joiner from Adelaide, is highly experienced in working in Antarctic conditions, having just returned from his fourth tour of duty there. Paul was winter maintenance foreman at Mawson station from August, 1995 to April, 1997.

He had previously served three tours at Mawson and Davis stations, the first of these in 1978.

In his last position, he was responsible for overseeing the work of carpenters, plumbers and electricians as well as helping renovate the living quarters for the summer team. Paul also worked closely with a range of scientific teams on all four trips and ran the tide gauge program over his last winter in Antarctica. He has completed theatre nursing and anaesthetist training courses with the Antarctic Division and has been awarded the Antarctic Medal for his services.

Allen Rooke, 46, has the most field experience in Antarctica of any member of the team, having spent six winters and nine summers on the polar continent. Allen is an expert radio operator handling the range of equipment from HF radio to satellite communications.

He was Deputy Station Leader at Macquarie Island in 1994 and managed the transfer of the last dog teams used in Antarctica to North America at the end of 1992, when he was senior communications officer at Mawson base. His average length of stay in Antarctica has been 15 months. He was heavily involved in the rebuilding programs at all four Australian bases and provided voluntary field assistance to scientific expeditions studying Emperor penguins and the winter fur seal program.

He is a self-taught builder, constructing his own home at Pillar Valley, near Grafton, and renovating his mother’s house there as well as building his own yacht tender on Macquarie Island. Allen was awarded the Antarctic Medal last year for his outstanding service in Antarctica.

David Killick, 29, the AAP journalist accompanying the team, made his living as a chef with the ParkRoyal hotel chain from 1986 to 1991, obtaining a certificate in commercial cookery from Ryde TAFE before switching to an Arts Degree at Sydney University.

He started his journalistic carreer as an editor of the Sydney University student publication Honi Soit and worked at the Sun Herald and Sydney Morning Herald before moving to AAP.

David covered the Atlanta Olympics and is currently AAP’s crime reporter.

During the AAP Mawson’s Huts expedition he will file news stories and pictures via satellite and act as backup cook.

Multi-award winning Cinematographer Malcolm Ludgate ACS is a freelance Director of Photography with the team to film a documentary of the expedition. For Malcolm, 46, this will be his sixth trip to Antarctica, having first traveled south in 1985/86 to film the ABC wildlife series “The nature of Australia”.

In the 89/90 summer Malcolm was back shooting science stories before returning again the following year on his most ambitious project, the internationally acclaimed IMAX feature film, “Antarctica”. Filming over two years, Malcolm travelled extensively to capture never before seen images from the south pole to deep inside crevasses. In 1992 he returned to shoot the documentary “The Last Husky”, following the Mawson dog teams on their final journey to a new home in America.

Malcolm has been part of numerous filming expeditions and has a wide range of international experience working in difficult locations.

Mike Piper, 50, began his 34 year career in broadcasting and film at Radio 5DN in Adelaide. After 10 years with the ABC Film Department, where he worked in current affairs, news and education prgramming he moved on to pursue an interest in producing and directing his own films as an independent producer.

Since then he has produced a number of one-hour and half-hour documentary films and television specials which have been sold to the ABC and SBS in Australia and distributed throughout the world including ECHIDNA THE SURVIVOR and THE BIG QUESTIONS. He is currently producing and directing a half-hour natural history film entitled ROSENBERG’S GOANNA, and a second series of BIG QUESTIONS with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams and story research and production management for the Australian segments of WILD THINGS, a new television series distributed by Paramount Television-US. He has recently completed filming the olive sea snake for Survival Anglia-UK with Malcolm Ludgate.