Antarctic Anticipations

ON A DAY when the thermometer under the lemon tree topped 31degrees I threw the windows open to chill in the lounge with a stack of Antarctica-type library books and the anthropomorphic box-office hit "March of the Penguins".

The promise of this adventure, and a relatively newfound fixation for all things Antarctic have drawn my attention of others' life-long attachment - academic, artistic or otherwise - to the region. My casual research - and I'll count Marcus Lush's Ice tv series as research - is being supplemented with a flood of information and perspectives from all corners. It's there for the taking, and as obvious as an iceberg now that I'm going to Antarctica and I'm tuned to news of the big freeze.

There are Slices of Ice everywhere!

Daily news stories, features, films, exhibitions and artworks.

Whaling, political posturing, global warming and floundering cruise ships.

Ice-bergs, the Aurora Australis and Patagonian toothfish (delicious, endangered and served up as Chilean sea-bass).

On a mid-week morning - tea steaming, yawning - I open the latest issue of Sport (a Victoria University Press anthology) to find a poem by Wellington-based writer David Beach that reads...

Kiwi 1

That currently almost as many New
Zealanders pursue inspiration in
Antarctica as wealth in Australia
may partly be because the frozen
continent was, what the baked was declared,
terra nullius. Lastfoundland, it offers
a Desert of Eden charm, a clean slate
or at least one which has a considerably
less problematic treaty written on
it. For those blocked for ideas by doubts
about New Zealand's (or should that be
'Aotearoa's'?) post-colonial identity,
voila the shore which has like a moon
with a secret orbit lain outside history.