[gary]

Whilst working at Phillips in Sydney, Chapman received a fortuitous
phone call that at short notice would send him on an incredible
journey. It would be amazing to be given this opportunity even today, but at age 22 in 1958, what an adventure!

Originally Posted by Emily Carney | Jun 13, 2020 | First Aussie: Dr. Philip Chapman

One morning just before Christmas, I received a phone call in my lab at Philips from Fred Jacka, the chief scientist at ANARE in Melbourne, He said that one of their physicists for 1958 had broken his leg. Could I fill in? Damn right.

Chapman had roughly ten minutes to break the news to his boss at Dutch Philips, and also had to break the news to a girlfriend:

The ship would sail in a week, and I would need some orientation, issue of gear, etc. – so could I possibly be in Melbourne that evening? A plane ticket would be waiting at the airport. So I gave ten minutes notice to my boss and went to see my girlfriend (who also worked at Philips) to tell her I would be back in 15 months. She was not pleased. Ten days later I was on iceberg watch on the bridge of the MV Thala Dan, in the monstrous seas of the Southern Ocean. I was 22, and I had never been out of sight of land.

There were 29 of us at Mawson, all male. My job was to study the aurora australis. To that end, a two-man camp had been established the previous year at Taylor Glacier, 50 miles west of Mawson. The idea was to take stereo photos of the aurora (which is at an altitude of about 60 miles), using a camera mounted on a theodolite. I spent most of the winter there.

My companion was replaced about every two weeks, using one of two DH Beavers at Mawson. They landed on the sea-ice, usually about a mile from shore.

A principal attraction was that most of the nameless nunataks (rocky hills) nearby had never been climbed, and a first ascent got your name on it (mine is called Chapman Ridge).

Chapman also was able to interact with some of the region’s natural habitats in ways that could not be done at present time:

Another tourist attraction was that the camp was in a gully adjacent to an Emperor penguin rookery with about 5,000 birds. Like almost every animal in Antarctica they were very tame. I have a photo somewhere of Henry Fischer, our cook from Mawson, standing on an actual soapbox, giving a political rant to the penguins, in German (Henry was Swiss). They were not impressed.

Access to the rookery is now restricted to biologists, but we had no such constraints. I don’t believe socializing with the Emperors ever did them any harm.

The original hut at Taylor was blown away in a blizzard, so we lived in a packing crate, about seven by seven by nine feet. It was guyed down to anchors in the rocks, but it bounced around a lot when the wind got up. There was no daylight near midwinter, the temperature was about 40 degrees Celsius below zero, and the wind was often over 100 knots. It was a formative experience.

The aurora was a mystery when I went to Antarctica, but the first US satellite, Explorer 1, discovered the Van Allen Belts while I was there. Physicists everywhere understood the lights in the sky – except for those of us who had been observing them, out of touch in Antarctica.