"Antarctica," the prophesising veteran had told me, "is a place of vivid mateships." And so it was that I stumbled across Martin, a historical archeologist sent down south to assess the heritage value of the buildings at Australia's Mawson Station (established 1954) and Davis (1957).
The man's expression was hard to read and I could not tell if his prophecy would be a good thing or a bad thing. All I knew was that he had a lot of living in his eyes and he never wanted to go back to the place. He would not say why.
Penguins, thousands of them, clucking and calling in a frenzy of hormones as the breeding season began. A strangely lunar landscape of rock and ice in the hills surrounding Davis.
There was a lot of camping by scientists in the field when the light pushed out darkness for much of the time. There was so much to see. Coastal icebergs shining like white plastic in the sharp sunlight. A baby seal a day or two old, its umbilical cord still attached, snap frozen to its belly.
Just before the ship arrived at Davis, the women were gathered together for a talk by the female ship's doctor. We were told that in the constrained social world of an Antarctic station, touching was often misconstrued. A veteran of several trips, she said she was a constant focus of attention for the simple fact that she was female.
"It's the last great sea voyage in the world," the captain told me with something akin to awe. "It's to the wild side of Antarctica, the bit where no one can fly and land. And it's across the Great Southern Ocean, the roughest ocean in the world."
I had nothing of him now but a bundle of emails and a battered old paperback with his name written in it and the words of wisdom at his memorial service, which I held on to tight - to always live life vividly and with passion.
I realigned my priorities. Martin's death taught me to grab at life with his enthusiasm and passion and the importance of following your heart before it was too late.
He was constantly dragging me up on deck to seize the light, the sky, the ocean. One day I forgot my special-issue sunglasses, but didn't care because I wanted to see unfiltered all the different shades of white around us, but then I got snow blindness like a thick film of milk over my eyes. It took me three days to recover and from then on I always wore my sunglasses; Martin made sure of it. He made sure of many things.
"Some of them haven't seen daylight since we left Hobart. They live in a world of virtual darkness. Maybe they're acclimatising themselves to 24-hour darkness in winter, but no one has told them that they're going down in summer."
But it wasn't him, it was the station leader. It was about Martin. He had been killed in a fall. He was climbing a bluff beyond the station boundary to read his book, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and watch a spectacular sunset and listen to the silence.
The Legoland buildings were scattered because one of the biggest dangers was fire. You couldn't afford to have everything in one complex because if it burned down in May and everything was wiped out, there couldn't be a rescue until October.
Davis Station was a scattered collection of brightly coloured buildings that looked like large shipping containers. "Legoland", it was dubbed.
The ship parked by a line of drums on the frozen surface by a two-lane highway bulldozed freshly in the ice for the cargo operations to start.
That our lives would change after this voyage, they must. That they would veer from their prescribed course like an ocean liner heading off to unknown climes.
There were 300 videos on the ship, it took five weeks to sail from Hobart to Davis, and by the end of the fourth week, the video-heads were so bored they weren't fast-forwarding through the previews any more.
The hull of the Aurora Australis was flattened so it could ride up on top of slabs of floating ice as big as Olympic pools and crack them with its hefty weight. "She's great in the ice but she bobs like a cork in the open water," said a seasoned expeditioner just before departure. This was not good because I'd been spectacularly seasick in the past, so within half an hour of sailing, a seasickness patch was behind my ear.
The Aurora sailed up an avenue of icebergs and cracked the sea's skin to within 3km of the coastal station, but could crack it no further.
The gangplank was lowered and we walked or skied the last leg, across the surface of the Great Southern Ocean, to the continent.
* Better Than Fiction is a new travel literature anthology from Lonely Planet featuring true travel tales from 32 great fiction writers, including Nikki Gemmell
Yet Legoland's decor was almost disappointingly plush. There were carpets and tubs of Tim Tam biscuits, Apple Macs, an electronic board with up-to-the-minute temperature and wind-speed readings and a daily newspaper of stories culled from the net. Walking into the Legoland living quarters reminded me of a small airport lounge.
One morning there were frozen pancakes of ice with their edges kicked up, an ocean of severed ears. Over the days the ears changed to huge waterlilies of ice, then oblong chunks 20m across, then vast sheets,Chanel Wallets, ice-rink sized.
The Australians were rigorous about keeping their chunk of the world's last wilderness as pristine as they could. There were many rules.
The oddnesses slowly dawned. There was no money; it wasn't needed - the Government provided everything from alcohol to condoms. The milk was powdered; the eggs were up to a year old. They were oiled to preserve them, but the chef had to "crack and smell" before he put them in an omelet. The rules were ferocious. No one was allowed to go beyond the station boundaries by themselves.
My world fell apart. I foundered. Just wanted to go back down south and wrap myself in the solace of the silence and not emerge for a very long time. The real world was too hard. Too complicated, back home, where Martin had a different life, a different world that I'd never been a part of.
It took a while but slowly, gradually, I began to feel weirdly euphoric at times, as if I was scrubbing my life, starting afresh. Martin's wish, for both of us. At the age of 28 I grew up - it was like I was being hauled into adulthood. Grief gave me clarity, it stopped the silliness.
There were too many people, too much noise. The only things I wanted from home were the sun on my skin and the dirt on my hands and the taste of bananas in my mouth. Apart from that I wanted to be back in Antarctica, achingly.
There were few women. There were a lot of beards. I set about my task of ferreting out narratives with the zeal of a forensic scientist..
-- This is an extract from Better Than Fiction, edited by Don George, Lonely Planet 2012. Published this month, RRP: $24.99, lonelyplanet.com
Martin was contemptuous of the voyagers who spent most of their time in the video room in the bowels of the ship.
Our ship was the first to reach the continent after the long, dark winter hibernation, the only one out of all the Antarctic nations so far south at that time. Most of the people on board, apart from the crew, were scientists and tradespeople being dropped off at Australia's bases for the summer.
There was a surgery and an operating theatre and a doctor but no nurses. If an operation was required the diesel mechanic and the chef would help out; they had gone through a two-week course on the mainland.
I smelt Tasmania before I saw it, smelt trees and soil on the breeze. Then I saw green, in all its exotic vibrancy. It had been so long since I'd seen that colour in nature after my strict Antarctic palette of white and blue and grey and black.
We both wore seasick patches, were both vaguely dissatisfied with our jobs, wanted to write books. We would stand on deck in the early hours of the morning and watch auroras like giant scribbles of moving light in the sky, and talk endlessly of lives we didn't lead and most likely never would, of what we would do when we got back. How we'd finally have the courage to do what we really wanted to. It all seemed possible down there.
The Australian Government fully kitted us out army-style the day before sailing. Almost everything we were given, from thermal underwear to padded jumpsuit to steel-capped boots, was bloke-sized. I had little idea what I'd be getting myself into but these early signs weren't promising.
To not let people fool you into giving up. I lost the hunger for journalism, the observer's life. Learnt to live closer to the earth, to be still with it and to listen to it. I wrote a book about the experience, a novel called Shiver, which balmed me through the whole process of grieving.
I was not wanting my life changed. A radio journalist too fond of wearing black, I was just doing my job on this trip, nothing else. And with all the righteous zeal of youth, I believed the journalist's blazing function was to make trouble - with other people's lives, not my own. I was the outsider, the observer, and when on a job I was never meant to get my hands mucky in the mess of life.
No souveniring rocks from the continent. No taking polystyrene balls from packaging and bean bags to the continent, because they didn't degrade and they got stuck in the throats of animals and choked them. No leaving anything behind in the field but footprints and urine (and if possible, urinate down a crack in the ice).
-- Meet the author
And always in Legoland there was the hum of the generator. Martin told me to walk Antarctica, to move beyond that hum, any way I could, to listen to the thick silence of the land. It's a silence that thuds in your ears.
A "winterer", helicoptered on board from another station, bit into an apple. "That's better than sex," he declared. It'd been a long time between apples. We, the "summerers", were delivering the first supply of fresh fruit and vegetables Davis had seen in seven months. Another newly arrived winterer ate five apples in a row.
My gift to Martin and his gift to me. Because finally, in my late 20s, I was doing what I really wanted to do with my life.
"People are always wanting a piece of you. I had to go for 10-minute walks outside just to get away from it all."
One day the strap of my camera froze into a stiff scribble. The flesh of my cheek stuck to the cold metal of the camera back and, panicking, I pulled my skin away. I had been trying to take a photo of a woman's eyelashes dusted with ice. It looked like white mascara.
"I feel so alive in this place," Martin laughed in vivid contrast, exhausting me with the ferocity of his enthusiasm. He was 37, the age of reckoning as we career into middle age, and he was gulping this world like a gleeful boy. He said that we must live differently after this trip, do all the things we really wanted to do.
Everything else in terms of human waste was to be removed because it would never rot. Plastic bags were handed out for defecating during field trips and women got an extra device, a FUD (Female Urinary Device), plastic and pink and shaped like a funnel. It meant we could go standing up like a man.
On the ice chunks were seals and their blood - it was the pupping season and there were many births. There were penguins that scurried in a panic. In the channels between floes were minke whales, their backs breaking the surface in a stately arc. And circling around the Aurora were snow petrels soaring and dipping like hundreds of angels watching over us.
I didn't want to leave this place. Didn't want to go back to my cluttered, inner-city life. Didn't want to leave Martin. He had entered my heart, was riveted to it, the relationship sanctified by the shared wonder of this land. But he was staying behind, his work wasn't finished. As we said goodbye our cheeks felt like plastic.
Tears pricked my eyes with the sheer monumental emotion of it all.
The Australian mainland was "the real world". I wanted to leave the real world far behind, drown myself in this brave new existence, so vulnerable and lonely and exhilarating and replenishing, in the vastness of this unsullied continent.
In the daytime there were icebergs that looked like pool tables or Cambodian temples or Walt Disney castles or Uluru, some so blue it was as if the ice had trapped a piece of the sky. We stood on the bow as the ocean changed around us from open sea to water like heaving marble with long veins of white through it.
Outside were utes and bulldozers and a small cement-mixing truck. Tank-like vehicles called Hagglunds were so noisy you had to wear headphones when you were in them, assaulting the silence that felt thousands of years old, untouched. And at night, the vehicles in the open were lined up and plugged into heaters to keep the oil in their engines warm.
Nikki Gemmell has written six novels, Shiver, Cleave, Lovesong, The Bride Stripped Bare, The Book of Rapture and With My Body, as well as several non-fiction books. Her work has been critically acclaimed internationally and translated into many languages. In France she's been described as a female Jack Kerouac, in Australia as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation, and in the US as one of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time.
Three weeks after I returned, I got a phone call from down south. I recognised the crackle on the line and instantly felt the tug in my belly I always got when I spoke to Martin.
And always, the stretched sky.
When the Aurora docked, I stepped on to a pavement that was too hard and after two days I'd jarred my shins.
We were told that if an attachment was formed,Handbags, then the absolute rule was discretion. Later the chef, an old Antarctic hand, told me that if there were two single people on a station then invariably they paired up, but it was not the done thing to openly fraternise. I was single when I began this voyage. I was intrigued, by all of it.
