Award-winning Australian writer Anthony Eaton has long been fascinated with both the history and the reality of Antarctica. So when in 2005 he was offered the chance to spend six weeks travelling to and from Casey Station in Wilkes Land, Antarctica, he leapt at the opportunity. During that voyage he became both enchanted and cowed by the power and beauty of Antarctica, and the impact it has on the minds and hearts of those who are lucky enough to experience it. Into White Silence is the result of that voyage.
Anthony is the author of eleven novels for various readerships. He has twice won the Western Australian Premier’s Award, holds a PhD in creative writing, and teaches at the University of Canberra in the ACT, where he lives with his wife and son.
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Into White Silence
ePub ISBN 9781742743509
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australian Antarctic Division's Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship.
A Random House book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by Woolshed Press in 2008
This edition published by Random House Australia in 2011
Copyright © Anthony Eaton 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any
person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the
statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording,
scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior
written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Author: Eaton, Anthony, 1972–
Title: Into white silence / Anthony Eaton
Edition: 2nd ed.
ISBN: 978 1 74275 254 9 (pbk)
Subjects: Antarctica – Fiction
Dewey Number: A823.4
Cover images by Getty Images and iStockphoto
To the men and women of the 59th ANARE.
Thanks for a fantastic experience.
Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the ‘lure of little voices’, the mysterious fascination with the unknown …
Sir Ernest Shackleton
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Imprint Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Members of the 1922 Raven Expedition
The Polar Exploration Vessel Raven
Built Norway 1920
Edward Patrick O’Rourke – Lineage
William Downes – Lineage and Descendants
Author’s Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Members of the 1922 Raven Expedition
EXPEDITION PERSONNEL
Expedition Leader
First Officer
Second Officer
Expedition Meteorologist
Expedition Cartographer
Expedition Zoologist
Expedition Geologist
Expedition Photographer
Expedition Surgeon
Carpenter
Carpenter
Ski Instructor
Dog Handler
Dog Handler
Edward Rourke
Capt. (retd) George Smythe-Davis
Lieut. (retd) William Downes
Alexander Holdsworthy
Douglas King
Dr Gregory Shannon-Stacey
Michael Burke
Randolph Lawson
Dr George Dalby
Lawrence Moreton
William Moreton
Per Petersen
Ivan Gregorivich Petrokoff
Piotre Dimitri Petrokoff
SHIP’S STAFF
Captain
Ship’s Bosun
Ship’s Engineer
Cook
Ship’s Steward
Capt. James McLaren
Richard Ryan
Charles Weymouth
Samuel Piper
Stanley O’Hanlon
CREW MEMBERS
James Armitage
Arthur Beale
Daniel Carston
Peter Grace
Henry Griffith
Thomas Irvine
Jimmy James
David Lacey
Jack McDonald
Joseph Smith
Ernest Tockson
Thomas Walsh
Isaac [surname unknown]
The Polar Exploration Vessel Raven
COMPARTMENTS
1 Upper Fo’castle
2 Lower Fo’castle
3 Main Deckhouse
4 ’Tween Deck
5 Main Companionway
6 Wardroom
7 Lower Hold
8 Propeller Tunnel
9 Engine Room
10 Boiler
11 Coal Bunker
12 Water Tank
13 Water Tank
14 Kennels
15 Galley
16 Cook’s Cabin
17 Steward / Bosun
18 Chartroom
19 Biologist / Zoologist
20 Cartographer / Geologist
21 Engineer / Photographer
22 2nd Mate / Meteorologist
23 Surgeon
24 First Officer
25 Captain’s Cabin
26 Expedition Leader’s Cabin
27 Stores
28 Darkroom / Brig
29 Chain Locker
FIXTURES
30 Forward Hatch
31 Funnel
32 Main Hatch
33 Helm
34 Steering Gear
35 Wardroom Skylights
36 Engine
Built Norway 1920
&nbs
p; PORT VIEW
MAIN DECK
DECKHOUSE / ’TWEEN DECK / WARDROOM
LOWER HOLD
Edward Patrick O’Rourke – Lineage
William Downes – Lineage and Descendants
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
For almost two years now, the small leather-bound journal of Lieutenant William Downes has been sitting on a corner of my writing desk, defying me. I must confess that I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat here in the twenty months since the diary came into my possession, leafing through its pages and then staring out my study window at the distant Brindabella Mountains, sometimes for hours, trying to come to terms with the horrors contained within it.
Words are strange things. As a writer, it is something of a perpetual puzzle to me, how a few scrawled glyphs on a piece of paper can contain so much power over the human imagination. That such visceral experiences as love and hate and fear and pride and despair can be so easily bound to the page is a mystery which only deepens the further I explore it. The journal of William Downes is a perfect example of this phenomenon.
To look at, the journal is unremarkable: slightly smaller and thicker than a modern B-format paperback, housed within an unadorned red leather cover, tattered and watermarked from its years of frozen internment. Inside these unassuming wrappings there is page after page of the Lieutenant’s elegant copperplate handwriting, documenting, with a journalistic eye for detail and an air of almost detached nonchalance, the events that occurred aboard the Polar Exploration Vessel Raven during the expedition of 1921–1922.
The handwriting is itself worthy of note: right up to the final entry, wherein he outlines the last enigmatic re-appearance of the Ice Man on the evening of 30th June 1922, Downes’ hand remains steady, graceful and somehow resolute, despite all that was occurring around him. At no point is there the telltale tremor of terror, the shake of a hand nervously fighting both the intense cold and the trepidation of almost certain death. Even his final words; … and so I too shall step out, into white silence are formed with the same confidence as his first.
But all this is beside the point. My purpose in writing this foreword is not to lecture you on the vagaries and power of the written word, however fascinating I find the subject, but rather to allow me the opportunity to outline, explain and apologise for the liberty I took in removing the journal of William Downes from the station library at Casey Antarctic Base during my sojourn there in the summer of 2005–06.
Stealing from libraries is not something I make a habit of – especially from one as remote and important as that at Casey. An account of the mystery of the Raven and the fate of those aboard it, however, was something too enticing to leave behind. I should also confess that my original motive in appropriating the journal was not pure. My intention was to use it to form a work around the basis of Downes’ experience that I could claim as my own fiction. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up; the secrecy that had surrounded the preparations and departure of Edward Rourke and his company, combined with the disaster that followed, meant that the story of the Raven had been lost. What better opportunity could there be for a writer who happened to find himself in possession of the only remaining document detailing the fate of the ship and all those souls aboard it?
Upon my return to Australia, though, an odd thing happened; the more I considered the contents of the journal and the more I wrestled with the ethics of what I had done by removing it, unauthorised, from its custodians at Casey Station, the harder it became to appropriate the story to my own ends. Each time I began to write ‘My Antarctic book’ – as I came to refer to it – I’d find myself a mere thousand or so words into the first chapter and unable to continue, haunted by the feeling I was doing Downes and those who perished with him a disservice that flew in the face of the Almighty.
At about this time the nightmares began; night after night I’d wake, always in the small hours and always filled with this sense of unspeakable dread. Dawn would find my pillow soaked with sweat and my sheets a choking tangle about me. My poor wife had, on occasions, to move to another room just to get a decent evening’s rest. On waking, I could never recall the exact cause of my dread but only a sense of unshakable, all-pervading cold; a chill from the very marrow of my bones which set my teeth on edge and tightened the breath in my lungs.
And so it has continued, for the twenty months since I stepped off the gangplank of the Aurora Australis and back into the real world in late 2005. Over time the nightmares have become fewer, but no less lacking in intensity. And always, every morning when I enter my study and switch on my computer, Downes’ journal is there to greet me. Accusing. Defying.
Which is how you come to hold this book in your hands. For whatever reason – call it luck, or fate, or karma – the gods have chosen to entangle my voice, and indeed my life, with that of the late Lieutenant William Downes and his ill-fated crewmates. Finally, after much self-doubt and internal debate, I have come to realise that the only way I can free myself of this entanglement is to allow this story – his story – to be told.
Ideally, I should like to have been able to present the journal to you in its complete form – unabridged and without comment. It quickly became clear to me, however, that not only would large sections of Downes’ writing make for exceptionally dull reading – bills of lading, detailed plans for the distribution of supplies to inland depots and that sort of thing – but also that there were holes in his narrative which needed to be filled. Perhaps, I told myself, this was the real reason I spent that summer two years ago so far from home, on the ice-sculpted shores of Newcombe Bay, so that when the time came to tell this story I’d have the voice, the experience and the wherewithal to be able to do justice to this extraordinary piece of history and to capture the terrible, tragic beauty of Downes and his fate.
Wherever possible, I have allowed the Lieutenant to speak for himself – his words capture the immensity and futility of his situation far better than mine ever could. From time to time, though, I’ve found it necessary to draw upon my own experiences and research to frame the scenes for you, to fill in the gaps and silences behind Downes’ writings. For this, I beg your indulgence.
Anthony Eaton
Canberra
May, 2008
ONE
LIEUTENANT WILLIAM DOWNES ARRIVES IN HOBART. TIME’S CLOUDED PERSPECTIVE. AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH. THE BATTLE OF BULLECOURT. THE PEV RAVEN. A MYSTERIOUS INVITATION.
October, 1921
Hobart, Tasmania
The SS Loongana steamed slowly up the Derwent River towards its berth at the Salamanca Wharf, and Lieutenant (retired) William Downes, a young man distinguished by his service in France during the Great War, leaned on the portside rail, watching the city of Hobart slip slowly past in the hazy, late-afternoon light. In the distance the monolithic bulk of Mount Wellington, its summit shrouded in cloud, cast a long shadow across the city, rendering the waters of the river to inky blackness.
And me? In my turn, I watch Lieutenant Downes, as I have so many times these last two years. I watch him in my mind’s eye, my perceptions of him filtered through the veil of time and across the vault of many years now past.
In my research, among the documents and effects that I managed to uncover, I came across a photograph of Downes taken somewhere in Europe, sometime during the war. Faded and grainy, it shows a group of seven men all clad in military garb, sitting in comradely repose upon a low stone wall which appears to be the shattered remains of an old farmhouse. Most clutch cigarettes and two sport rakish moustaches of the sort only young men of that era could consider fashionable.
They wear their filthy uniforms with a kind of weary pride. Their slouch hats are, almost to a man, tilted to jaunty angles and their carbine rifles slung carelessly on their shoulders or, in a couple of cases, propped against the stonework beside them. All are smiling, grinning for the camera as if to convey to the viewer the impression that they find this whole debacle something of a joke. But the
smiles don’t touch their eyes. In those there is a kind of terrible distance – similar to what you see in the faces of men who’ve looked into the void of death and then somehow returned.
On the back, in handwriting I’ve come to know well, a brief inscription reads: ‘Me and the lads after B/crt. Terrible affair. L. and B. no longer.’ I know from other photographs that William Downes is the first man on the left but there is no clue to the identities or fates of the other six. It is easy to hope that all made it safely home again and returned from that meat-grinder of a war to farms and families and sweethearts, but of course, given the monstrous capacity of the First World War to devour young men, such a possibility is unlikely.
Downes, though, did return, and attained for himself a modest covering of glory along the way. According to official Army records, on 11th April 1917, during the hellish mauling of the first battle of Bullecourt, Downes was among the handful of infantry in the Australian 4th Brigade who managed, despite the abject failure of the much-vaunted British tanks, to find a path across the wire-laden no-man’s-land and secure a section of the German trench system that made up the famous Hindenburg Line.
As the battle continued to go sour, and as 2300 members of the 4th Brigade fell to the German machine guns, it became clear to Downes and his compatriots occupying the enemy lines that their position was rapidly becoming untenable and so they fell back towards their own forces, fighting a desperate rearguard action the whole way. In the course of this their captain, one George Smythe-Davis, was injured, taking a bullet in the upper part of his left thigh.