'I am just going outside and may be some time'

-Captain "Titus" Oates, March 1912

'I may be some time' is possibly one of the most cliched lines to have come out of the frozen continent. Luckily for me, I know exactly how long I will be. This summer I am a student at Canterbury University's 14 week 'Postgraduate Certificate in Antarctic Studies' programme. This blog will be my scrapbook, cataloguing frozen snippets from each week and building up to our very own trip to the ice.

So far away and so different to any place I have ever experienced, the ‘Wide White Page’ of Antarctica has long captured my imagination. My initial interest in the continent was sparked after listening to several NZ artists and authors who had been to Antarctica on Creative NZ Scholarships. Writers such as Bill Manhire and Bernadette Hall spoke of the inspiring discoveries they had made whilst down there and their subsequent works (Manhire’s ‘The Wide White Page’ and Hall’s ‘The Ponies’) convinced me that one day I wanted to do the same.

My specific interest is in Antarctica as a literary landscape and I hope to look at the ways the continent was depicted in fictional works around the Heroic Age of Exploration (1895 - 1917). I intend to focus on the importance of imagined space, examining the views expressed not by travelers to the continent but by those far away in Europe who had never set eyes on the ice. By examining these imagined landscapes in various texts I hope to see what values and cultural ideas the authors associated with Antarctica, be they positive ideas about adventure and conquering challenges or more pessimistic portrayals where the landscape is a metaphor for inner emptiness in the face of the industrial revolution and modernization.

You are welcome to follow me on this journey as I learn about the history of the continent, the present political situation, current scientific projects on the ice and embark on my own research project. I look forward to the weeks ahead and beginning to share my own words on the ‘Wide White Page’.