Every once in a while a book comes along that defies the Dewey decimal classification system. Would you call it history? Or a biography? Although it was short-listed for the 2003 NSW Premier’s History Awards, I am tempted to categorise Brigid Hains’ The Ice and the Inland as a sociological thriller.
Hains uses the stories of two Australian folk heroes, Douglas Mawson, who explored Antarctica, and John Flynn, whose efforts centred around the outback, as the launching pads for studying the frontier myth and the effects on the psyche of the individual and the imagination of a people.
The Ice and the Inland provides a novel window through which one can glimpse how a young nation might be influenced en masse, and how national opinions or even identities can be forged by significant events, or by the actions and writings of a couple of individuals.
‘The frontier mythology of the early 20th century is epitomised in the stories of these two extraordinary—and very different—men’, says one reviewer. However, The Ice and the Inland is not a biographical account of the lives of Mawson and Flynn. There is not even a descriptive account of the successes of the two men—Mawson’s heroic lone struggle for survival or the crowning glory of the achievements of Flynn, the flying doctor service. Instead, Hains examines a huge amount of primary evidence, the writings, letters and journals of these men and their contemporaries, and comes to a series of conclusions that explain the shaping of the frontier myth in the Australian imagination.
What drove Mawson and his men to the inhospitable landscape of Antarctica? One of the great rationales for confronting harsh environments was that the wilderness brought out the best in men and weeded out the weak and the unfit, the ‘spawn of [the] gutters’. Such adventures were for men who wanted to get away from the domestication imposed by city environments and family life. It was a chance to pit his ingenuity and wits, not to mention physical strength, against the forces of nature.
The landscape which allowed man a trans-cendental experience could also sink him into the depths of depravity as the veneer of civilisation wore off. Herein lay the paradox of wilderness landscapes—attractive because of their wildness, but this very wildness a threat that needed to be tamed, mapped and bounded. It was sublime because it was far from the trappings of ‘progress’, yet it