MAWSON’S HUTS AN ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION JOURNAL

By Alasdair McGregor, Foreword by Sir Edmund Hillary

Nearly 86 years after the legendary AAE, another party landed on the still remote and wild Cape Denison, the site of Mawson’s winter quarters. Their aim was to rescue the huts that Mawson’s men sheltered and worked in from the unrelenting assaults of wind, ice and time. In so doing the party ensured that these rare and priceless relics from the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, the age of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, would survive to their centenary and beyond.

For nearly two months over the summer of 1997-8, 13 members of the AAP Mawson’s Huts Foundation work party battled what Mawson dubbed the ‘home of the blizzard’ to complete urgent repairs to the Cape Denison huts. Mawson’s Huts: An Antarctic Expedition Journal is artist and photographer Alasdair McGregor’s personal account of the trials and triumphs of living and working in the windiest place on earth. Vivid descriptions of landscape and wildlife are intertwined with reflections on the history and significance of a great Australian and his vision in this rare glimpse of Antarctica, past and present.