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1. Surprise, surprise!

   Posted 1 day ago

   It happens to us all – we’re just about to complete a task, the stars align, and the project takes a new turn. Such ‘twists of fate’ often result in more work, but can also provide you with a fun ‘Oh wow, how cool is that?!’ moment.

   

   Pepper shaker before treatment © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   This little object is a tin-plated pepper shaker from Cape Royds. As treatments go, it seemed pretty straightforward – deal with the corrosion and apply an inhibitor to affected areas, to stop the corrosion from spreading. I recall looking warily at the lid – after almost 100 years, it would probably be immovable. After a few gentle nudges, my theory was confirmed …or so I thought. As I turned it over to apply the last few brushes of corrosion inhibitor, the lid moved – and came off. Guess what was inside?

   

   Open pepper shaker with textile inside © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   A cloth! I bet you thought I’d say pepper, right? Well, it definitely smelled like pepper. The brownish-grey cloth was a crumpled, dirty ball of coarse-woven material, probably wool. I carefully removed it from the container, and then guess what was inside?

   

   Pepper shaker, textile and pepper sample © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   This time you’d be right! There was indeed a small amount of pepper at the bottom. It makes perfect sense - why wouldn’t there be pepper in a pepper shaker? It just wasn’t expected, and really pretty interesting. In even the briefest exercise of imagination you can picture Shackleton and his men passing this little item around the dinner table on a cold Antarctic night. Purely speculative for sure, but can’t you just see it? And, we do have a tin of Griffiths McAlister & Co. Black Pepper listed in our
   database…

   So there was a little extra work, but what a great experience. I treated the inside of the tin as per my original game plan, and a quick email to Jana (I am not a textile conservator) confirmed the best course of action for handling the cloth. The pepper (about 6 grams) was packaged in a polyethylene baggy, and placed back inside next to the cloth.

   While the lid is now back on the pepper shaker, its secrets are thoroughly documented … and although it may seem like a simple ‘everyday’ object, what a great process of discovery!

   

   Contents returned to pepper shaker © Antarctic Heritage Trust

2. Museum connections

   Posted 4 days ago

   Having spent most of my time as an archaeological conservator it has been a real pleasure to get the opportunity to work on complete objects, particularly those that can be traced to a specific point in history. I had the good fortune to stumble across just such an example with a blowtorch.

   

   Blowtorch before treatment © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   

   Blowtorch after treatment © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   Although the object was described as a blowtorch I was not certain what its use would have been, or how it would work. I decided to make use of my museum contacts and asked Natalie Cadenhead, the Antarctic Curator of the Canterbury Museum. I asked if there was a similar object in the Museum’s collection, and was told that there was not – but there was a lantern slide showing a similar object sitting on top of one of Scott’s tractors.

   

   Bernard Day on Dayton tractor October 1911 © Canterbury Museum

   We can’t say for certain whether the torch in the slide is the same as that in our collection, but it certainly shows us that the object was for use with the vehicles. Just what you need on those chilly mornings when the engine won’t start and you can’t exactly call out the AA or RAC!

3. Contact with the outside world

   Posted 8 days ago

   With Jana and Anna out in the field for the next five weeks along with the rest of the conservation team it’s really important they keep up communication with the outside world – both with the guys back at Scott Base and with the Trust offices here in Christchurch. It’s important from both a health and safety view and from a morale boosting view point. With 24 hour daylight in Antarctica our team will be making the most of every minute and often work twelve hour days in some pretty cold temperatures.

   

   Field camp accommodation in Antarctica © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   So how do we communicate? Scott Base and our team have what we call regular ‘radio scheds’. That means at 0730 every day our team radios in to Scott Base to confirm everyone is safe and happy and to message through any requests they may have (which will then be transported out to them by helicopter or hagglund next time someone is going out their way).

   Back here in Christchurch we also keep in touch on a regular basis via satellite phone – we call in once a week to pick up any messages, make sure everyone is safe and well and just have a general catch-up and let them know what’s happening in the rest of the world (such as Obama making US history!)

   And because we don’t have a photo of us speaking by satellite phone I’ve put in a photo of my accommodation when I was out in the field earlier in the year. Our team are currently putting together their camp at Cape Royds and we will post photos of their camp as they come through.

4. Blogging from the field

   Posted 11 days ago

   Jana and Anna have now moved from Scott Base out into the field for five weeks. They will be camping firstly at Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition base at Cape Royds (from his 1907-09 expedition) and then at Captain Scott’s base at Cape Evans (the base associated with his 1910-13 expedition and the race for the pole). They’ll spend the next month or so conserving artefacts on site and helping the rest of the specialist conservation team.

   So the big question is, with Jana and Anna now living out in the field for the next five weeks (rather than at Scott Base where they can send a blog at the push of an internet button) how will they continue to submit their blogs when they have no access to the internet or cellphones?

   Although Anna is from Australia and Jana is from Canada they are part of a team of New Zealanders and we have a great reputation for making the impossible happen. So how will we do it?

   

   Hagglund used to transport artefacts back to Scott Base © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   Anna and Jana will write their blogs and then load them on a memory stick. Then the next time a hagglund (all terrain vehicle) calls by or a helicopter drops in for a visit they’ll hand over the memory stick and it will travel back to Scott Base where someone will download the blogs and send them on via the internet to me here in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the Trust’s offices are based. I’ll then send them on to the Natural History Museum in London.

   Don’t say we aren’t dedicated!

5. Midden Move

   Posted 15 days ago

   While our goal in Antarctica is to stabilize and conserve as many of the artefacts from the historic huts as possible, we are unfortunately faced with a number of objects in such a bad state of decay that there is little we can do to save them. Often, all we can do with such artefacts is remove them from the outside environment and preserve whatever information is available from them before they deteriorate even further.

   This is true of a large number of food tins which were originally stored in wooden packing cases along the exterior walls of the hut at Cape Royds. Many of these boxes, having been exposed to 100 years of drifting snow, hurricane-force winds and excessive amounts of UV, have fallen apart, exposing the tins stored inside to these harsh conditions as well. Often all that survives of these cases is a pile of bits of packing cases mixed with frozen, rusted, broken tins leaking their contents, all of which are decaying at an increasingly rapid rate.

   

   Stained and broken fragment of a case of minced collops © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   Previous conservation teams have already inventoried and recorded the original locations and contents of this ‘midden’ material, as we call it, and they also moved much of it back to Scott Base. This left for us the task of transferring it from its temporary storage containers into a series of newly constructed versions of the original historic wooden cases, where it will be stored from now on. While this may sound simple, imagine moving dozens of crates of heavy midden from one end of base to the other, after which you get to shift dozens of the new wooden cases from one container to the one next door.

   

   Halfway there … Jana closes up a case of midden material © Antarctic Heritage Trust

   Then try unscrewing hundreds of screws from the lids of these boxes with drills whose batteries keep dying because of the cold, after which you move, piece by piece, hundreds of pounds of sharp, rusty, leaky bits of metal from one box to another, all the while labelling, photographing and inventorying each box. And this all takes place, of course, in an unheated container on the fringes of Scott Base (on a Saturday, no less!) Ah, the life of an Antarctic conservator!

   

   Finally! Anna inventories the completed boxes of midden © Antarctic Heritage Trust

6. Heading for the Wild West

   Posted 18 days ago

   Over the last week we have been trying to wrap things up here at base in preparation for heading out into the field, where we will be spending the next 5 weeks camping at Cape Evans and Cape Royds working on site at the huts.

   We have finished the artefacts we had been treating, packed all of them away for transport back to the huts, and are now in the process of trying to pack up all the supplies that we are going to need whilst in the ‘wild west’.

   Al and Lizzie, the Programme Managers, are on their way, and for the next week we will gather up all the materials we could possibly need while we are out there.

   And so the madness begins!

   Over the past few weeks we have already had a huge amount of supplies flown down - there has been lengths of rebar, vacuums, generators, stainless steel wire, even a wok and ladle!!

   All of this has to be packed up in our shipping containers, and dragged out by Hagglund to our field camps.

   

   Just a glimpse of the tip of our supply iceberg

   Then there is the food! There is a limited array of foods from the store that we can take, and so we have had to compile a list of foods that we wanted brought down for us to cook with. All have agreed that chillies are a must.

   As for Jana and I, we have been going through all the conservation supplies in our lab, figuring out what we will and won’t need for in-situ treatments.

   

   Deciding where to move some of our larger acquisitions

   Here’s to hoping that the weather stays fine when we are finally ready to roll!

7. A Day in the Life (Part 1)

   Posted 23 days ago

   For today’s blog, we thought we’d give you a snapshot look at a typical work day for the conservators here at Scott Base:

   7.30 a.m. Roll out of bed and head to the kitchen to join the rest of the bleary-eyed base staff for coffee and breakfast.

   8:02 a.m. An energetic start to the day’s work- shovelling snow to get into our lab before we can start the days’ conservation treatment and documentation.

   9:45 a.m. We cart our empty containers of reverse osmosis water and full container of ‘grey water’ back to base, empty the ‘grey water’, fill up the fresh containers, then trudge back down to the lab.

   

   10:21 a.m. Anna opens a crate of tins to find one has corroded through and is leaking its hundred year old contents: ‘Vitrol-A Preparation of Bone Marrow’. The tin is kept frozen and set aside until it is to be emptied and conserved.

   

   12:00 p.m. Kit up in our ECW jackets and gloves and head back to the main building for lunch.
   1:30 p.m. Back in the lab, Jana is writing a condition report on a mitten and discovers a tag sewn inside with the original owner’s name handwritten onto it- “F. J. Hooper”.

   3:14 p.m. Bundled up in all our ECW’s (again!), we head out to one of our storage areas (a modified shipping container). Here, we put back a crate of finished artefacts, and grab another to take back to the lab. Pot luck will decide what sort of artefacts will be inside the new crate!

   

   6:00 p.m. We all herd into the dining room for dinner.
   7.09 p.m. Someone picks out a movie from the gargantuan movie collection to watch on the ‘big screen’.

   

   9.18 p.m. Settle down by the fire in the lounge and catch up on the next few chapters of a book.

   10.45 p.m. Tuck in, and get ready to start all over again.

   (Due to technical difficulties this post should have been published before the A Day in the Life Part 2 that was published on 21 October)

8. Skua

   Posted 24 days ago

   As Anna mentioned in a previous blog, a beloved activity of many of us here at Scott Base is a trip over to Skua, the local version of your neighbourhood op shop or thrift store.

   Named after the scavenging sea birds that tend to steal anything that isn’t nailed down, Skua is a portable building over at McMurdo filled with pretty much anything you could imagine being left behind by people leaving Antarctica, just waiting to be rediscovered and reused by those of us still living here.
   

   Anna and Sandy search for their next treasure

   There are shelves and shelves filled with sensible and practical things like sweaters and work boots, books and decks of cards, unopened bottles of shampoo and various craft supplies, but there are always a few more bizarre finds as well, just waiting to be discovered and taken home.

   Who thought it necessary to bring the dance-along, light-up American Idol game to Antarctica, for example? Possibly the same person who thought they would need 2kg of powdered hummous, or pink foam bunny ears.

   You will always find loads of ceramic dishes made by people testing their luck at the pottery studio at McMurdo, and of course there’s never a shortage of trashy sci-fi novels.

   

   You know it’s a good day at Skua when the loot doesn’t even fit inside the building!

   The pancake griddle confused me somewhat, as did the massive pile of country and western 8-track tapes, but one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and we have certainly skua-ed lots of (what we consider) great stuff in the past few months (yes, skua works as a verb as well as a noun, which would make us skua-ers, I suppose?).

   How could you bypass an unopened box of Trivial Pursuit (Lord of the Rings edition, no less), for example, a stack of sudoku booklets, a rocking chair, or any of the numerous good books we have scored to add to the growing collection we are building for when we head out into the field?

   

   Our ever-expanding skua-ed library

   Yes, any day with a trip to Skua is a good day, and I can only image what we’ll have to add to the collection by the time it’s our turn to leave…

9. Cleaning artefacts

   Posted 28 days ago

   Usually, conservators have trouble keeping dirt off of artefacts, but we are having trouble keeping ‘dirt’ on! Well, not exactly dirt, but soot.

   When the men of the Ross Sea party were sent to lay caches of supplies on this half of the continent for Shackleton’s cross-Antarctic ‘Endurance’ expedition, their ship blew out to sea and they lost all of their supplies. They were able to live off rations left one year previously by Scott at Cape Evans. However the fuel supplies were non-existent.

   To overcome this, frozen planks of seal blubber 6 inches square were cut and fed into the range. In the words of R.W. Richards, an ‘oily black smoke would permeate every nook and cranny in the hut. As the months passed everything became covered with this black deposit’.

   

   An example of the soot residues on a rubber artefact

   The men spent 2 winters at the hut, burning seal blubber for fuel, before rescue in January 1917. The soot stands tribute to the way these men struggled to survive down here, and so we are trying to retain this historically significant ‘dirt’ on our artefacts.

   

   Soot residues are particularly obvious on glass artefacts, such as these test tubes.

   This poses a particular problem when trying to conserve the artefacts. In attempting to retain the soot, we must assess whether the artefact will be stable if the soot remains.

   On artefacts such as glass, this does not pose the same problems as it does on artefacts made of metal.

   In some cases, we are able to give the artefacts a light brush vacuum and retain all soot residues. In others, it must be removed. Owing to the friable nature of the soot, it is delicate work indeed!

   

   Tray before treatment

   

   Tray after treatment. An example of how soot residues have been retained on a treated artefact.

10. It’s all in the nametag

    Posted 1 month ago

    While many of the artefacts that remain in and around the historic huts are leftover provisions and general expedition gear and supplies, a number of personal items were left behind as well, and in some cases we are lucky enough to be able to associate a particular object with its original owner or user.

    As luck would have it, this has happened several times in the past few weeks, as I have worked my way through a number of textiles recovered from the stables at Cape Evans. Many of these items, including an oil-cloth hood, a pair of handmade trousers and numerous pairs of socks and mittens, can be linked to their original owners in the simplest of ways: by the nametags sewn inside them.

    

    Nametag on a Wolsey brand sock

    Because many of the men had quite similar or identical clothing, it is easy to imagine them, frustrated after losing yet another sock to an unknowing thief, using the long days of winter to stitch these tags into their socks, shirts and mittens.

    Most of the tags are quite simple, with a name scrawled across a piece of cotton tape and stitched in place, while others, like the tag on a remnant of clothing belonging to Teddy Evans, were clearly prepared before the beginning of expedition.

    

    Textile fragment belonging to G.R. (’Teddy’) Evans

    Often, dirt and grime makes the name tags illegible, though some, like the ‘F.J. Hooper’ written neatly on a tag on the cuff of a woolen mitten, can be deciphered after the textile has been washed and treated.

    

    Mitten belonging to Frederick Hooper

    It’s interesting to note that this practice continues to this day at Scott Base: because we all wear the same Antarctic New Zealand-issued coats, they are all marked with our names so that we are able to tell whose is whose. Similarly, many of us tag our boots and gloves with bits of tape or fabric so that it’s easier to find them on the vast racks of boots and shelves of hats and gloves that crowd the inside of each door at Scott Base.

    

    Which of these things is not like the other?

    Now if only a nametag could keep my socks from disappearing in the wash!

11. A Day in the Life (Part 2)

    Posted 1 month ago

    So now that you know what an average work day is like for us down here, we thought we’d tell you what we do on Sundays, our day off.

    9.08am Slowly wake up from our well deserved sleep-in - a precious commodity when you work 6 days of the week!

    10.32am Unplug the truck from the ‘hitching rail’, where the batteries are kept charged while the truck isn’t being used.

    Let the truck warm up for 15 minutes before driving over the hill to McMurdo to have Sunday brunch with our American Antarcticans.

    

    Hitching rail

    11.45am Buy some chocolate and pick up some postcards from the shop at McMurdo.

    12.07pm Continue our ‘shopping’ at Skua - our free local ‘op shop’ full of anything from clothes to kettles to Christmas decorations. Jana picks up a t-shirt and some books, and I find some paint and shampoo. We ponder on who would have brought down a rocking chair, and why someone found a popcorn maker necessary in Antarctica.

    1.36pm Gear up in our ECW’s, sign out of the base, radio in our destination, and head out the front for a stroll around the pressure ridges. Take photographs until our camera batteries die in the cold.

    

    Pressure ridges walk

    4.03pm Clock-up some kilometres on the treadmill in the gym, then ease the aches and pains by having a steaming sauna.

    

    Gym

    

    Sauna

    6.00pm We all congregate in the kitchen for our Sunday roast.

    7.16pm Jump on the internet for a bit of surfing to find out what is happening back in the ‘real world’.

    8.39pm Settle down in the lounge for a cut throat game of Scrabble. Jana wins by 32 points. Again.

    10.02pm Tuck in and get ready for another week!

12. Voting day

    Posted 1 month ago

    Every now and then, something a little bit out of the ordinary happens down here at Scott Base (not that you can consider much that goes on in Antarctica as ordinary). While today may have been just a normal day for most people around here, it was notable for me because I got to cast my vote, from this great distance, in the current Canadian federal election!

    

    Posting my ballot paper © Antarctic Heritage Trust

    Knowing that the election was upcoming, I requested my absentee ballot before I left New Zealand, and it arrived as planned on the first flight down to the ice at the beginning of the season. After following the instructions and ticking all the right boxes, I sealed up my ballot, paid for a Ross Dependency stamp, slipped the envelope into the mail slot, and waited for a plane to come so it could begin its long journey back to Canada. The tricky bit turned out to be waiting for the plane…

    After three flights in a row were cancelled or turned around mid-flight due to the bad storms we were having down on the ice, I started to worry that my poor little ballot wouldn’t make the deadline. One morning, visibility would be less than 50 metres, and the next the wind would be gusting to 60 knots. Then the weather would ease, but by the time the runway had been cleared of all the snow from the previous storm, the next one would be barrelling in! After seven agonizing days of no flights in or out, the skies cleared enough for a plane to land, the mail bag with my ballot in it made the trip back to the outside world, and I was relieved of my looming sense of civic guilt!

    Now all I have to do is wait and hear who won….

13. Icon or eyesore?

    Posted 1 month ago

    Here at Christchurch Museum we have a pretty unique opportunity to work on material from all of the explorers’ huts mixed together. In one day we might be working on four different objects from four different huts. These are Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, the Discovery Hut where Scott was based on his first Antarctic expedition, Scott’s hut at Cape Evans, and the hut used by Carsten Borchgrevink at Cape Adare. The objects we are conserving have been selected by many different visitors over the years and presumably they were all considered to be of interest at the time. Sometimes one cannot help but wonder WHY???

    A quick run through our collection with Nigel Watson and Al Fastier showed us the importance of knowing something of the history of the objects. When you see a tin of biscuits or a primus stove, the immediate thought is ‘that’s an iconic Antarctic object’, but what about some of the more mundane or visually unimpressive objects? It is easy to discount objects as a bit of junk when actually they were originally picked up as a souvenir. Knowing the history behind the object can change your view dramatically.

    One example is this pile of rusty wires. On their own they are not particularly inspiring, you might think. However the records tell us that these are the spokes from a bicycle wheel from Cape Royds. Could they be from the first bicycle in Antarctica?

    

    Bicycle spokes from Cape Royds © Antarctic Heritage Trust

    This looks like a bit of wood with graffiti on it, which is exactly what it is.

    

    A piece of wood graffitied with Dick Richards’ initials © Antarctic Heritage Trust

    What makes it special is finding out that RWR was Dick Richards, one of the The Ross Sea Party. This was part of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1917) led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. In fact Dick Richards was the last surviving member of the party, dying in 1985.

    Working here at the Canterbury Museum we have access to amazing resources not available to those on the ice. These include bug experts to help when we come across insect damage, and in particular the Museum’s Antarctic curator Natalie Cadenhead, who is a fount of information about what mysterious items may be. It is a fabulous opportunity for us to get familiar with the objects we will be working on over the winter, without the crippling cold!

14. Open Sesame

    Posted 1 month ago
    AHT’s “Reserve Collection” (artefacts retrieved over the years from Cape Evans, Adare, Royds and Hut Point) is tucked away in the Canterbury Museum. On our second visit to the Museum, we have our first chance to get a look at the objects. Natalie Cadenhead (Curator of Antarctic and Canterbury Social History) takes us to the [...]

15. Walking on (frozen) water

    Posted 1 month ago
    During the heroic era, tramping across the thick, semi-permanent sea ice that forms around the shores of Antarctica was the only way for the early explorers to cross from their huts on Ross Island to the mainland (and thus the South Pole). This sea ice was also the easiest place to travel around Ross [...]

16. Experimenting ‘on ice’

    Posted 1 month ago
    Our work down here is not just limited to treating artefacts, but also evolving preventative conservation treatments appropriate for the harsh environment that is Antarctica. Many procedures which are standard in museum environments are just not applicable. Conditions in the huts mean that we need to prevent moisture and pollutants migrating from the shelves and [...]

17. A container to call home

    Posted 2 months ago
    As Anna mentioned in her first blog, our morning commute for our next two months consists of a well-bundled dash from the main buildings of Scott Base out to our humble lab space – which is probably not what you would expect a typical conservation laboratory to look like! The summer conservation [...]

18. Not just a stroll in the park

    Posted 2 months ago
    We have finally arrived here in Antarctica to start our 6 month adventure, and what a start! After flying here in a C17, touching down on the ice shelf, and stepping out, gobsmacked at the Transantarctic mountains behind us, reality hit - literally! A blast of cold air!! We have arrived at the coldest part [...]

19. Welcome to the summer team!

    Posted 2 months ago
    With the Antarctic winter coming to an end we say goodbye to Therese, Carla, Susanne and Lizzie who have spent the last six months surviving the Antarctic winter of 24 hour darkness. With the return of the light comes a change of guard and we welcome Jana and Anna. They’ll continue the work of [...]

20. A fond farewell from Therese

    Posted 2 months ago
    Jana and Anna have arrived – and tomorrow, weather permitting, we get on that big C-17 and say goodbye to Antarctica and our life on the ice. Even spending just a short time with the new conservators, it is obvious that the AHT project here is being left in capable hands. We [...]

21. An awakening - a note from Susanne

    Posted 2 months ago
    It’s the moment that we have all be awaiting and dreading, saying goodbye to everyone and to Antarctica. These last seven months have changed my life and I hope that I have showed you some of the wonderful people and events that have made my experience here so special. Antarctica was an awakening for me [...]

22. Goodbye from Lizzie

    Posted 2 months ago
    Two more sleeps to go! I have this sense of the minute hand on the clock whizzing around at second speed. There’s a list of things to do which I’m sort of getting through, and I’ve resorted to writing the really important stuff on my hand. Today our Summer team arrive – as I write [...]

23. Memories in multi-media

    Posted 2 months ago
    With our time here coming to a close I’ve taken Lizzie’s suggestion and written a blog about a few past events, times which made my stay here so fun. Scott Base Winter 2008 crew by the fire © Antarctic Heritage Trust Firstly, taking our winter base photo proved to be a memorable task. As [...]

24. Before and after

    Posted 2 months ago
    The open house that Lizzie described in her blog last week was a lot of fun for me personally because I was able to talk about how I treated the objects and why I used certain techniques. As people were looking at the conserved objects, I began to realise that it was hard to explain [...]

25. A few more favourite things …

    Posted 2 months ago
    Scraps of Paper Scraps of paper found in Cape Evans stove - before treatment © Antarctic Heritage Trust Scraps of paper found in Cape Evans stove - after treatment © Antarctic Heritage Trust The scraps of paper in the photos above became some of my favourite items due to the surprise they held in [...]