Beside Mawson’s ‘bedroom’ is a small section of the main living area in the hut, which he shared with seventeen other men on the AAE. There is a replica of the table where everything happened, from bottling biological specimens and mending clothes to reading and dining. Through the blizzard I can hear the distant barking of the dogs. I hear the scraping of spoons as I look at a pile of white tin bowls with blue rims. They remind me of the zigzagging stack of bowls in the Frank Hurley photograph Washing up after dinner, Winter Quarters, Cape Denison. I recall Robert Bage, the magnetician and astronomer, to the right of the picture, a pipe hanging out of his mouth and a tea towel in hand, as I bend to look at a tin of Dutch cocoa. There is another of Ceylon tea, some Horlicks malted milk, and a box of Symington’s soups. In a cabinet there is a tin of pemmican with a note warning that it is ‘well-past its expiry date’. They are all samples drawn from a staggering total of 100 tons of food supplies taken by Mawson to the Antarctic in 1911.

Most of the food in and around the hut was removed at the end of the AAE, primarily because it was needed on the month-long oceanographic cruise before the return to Hobart. Some ended up in museums. Some was left behind in the hut: a tin of Colman’s mustard, golden syrup, Heinz India relish. They are probably still edible in their frozen state, so too the pemmican and flour in the blue kerosene tin that were found at Madigan’s Nunatak on my voyage to the Antarctic in 2008. Foodstuffs, ordinarily perishable, have survived as relics of polar history, preserved by the ice and cold.

My grandmother, Jessica, Mawson’s younger daughter, told us, more than once, the story of the Christmas puddings. It was Midwinter’s Day, 1912, and the men opened a box of plum puddings donated to the expedition by a Yorkshire firm. ‘Daddy was able to recommend the puddings, having tried one in England the year before,’ explained my grandmother:

Everybody licked their spoons clean after the first course as cutlery was short and then they started eagerly on the puddings. However, no one enthused about them. No one asked for a second helping. Daddy kept quiet because he had to admit they certainly weren’t as good as he’d remembered. Then someone commented that they tasted a bit peculiar and soon they all agreed. One man slipped off and examined a piece under the microscope and found it was riddled with mites and their excreta. The Aurora had sailed through the tropics from England.

My grandmother continued: ‘The men concluded the puddings were not properly sealed. They thought the heat probably only affected the top layer but no one was keen to try the rest so they buried the case somewhere near the hut as no one ever throws anything away in the Antarctic.’ At this point my grandmother would pause for effect before delivering the punchline. Forty years later, a French expedition visited the hut and spent a few nights there. The snow had blown away and uncovered the buried case and the Frenchmen dug it up. Not long afterwards, Mawson received a radio message from the Antarctic thanking him for the delicious plum puddings.

Midwinter dinner in the hut, 1912. Mawson is in the back row centre in a dark coat. Ninnis is second from his right. Mertz is centre front row with a dark moustache. (The Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum)

 That was in 1950. A hundred years have now passed since the ‘Heroic Age’ of exploration (c.1901–17), and boxes of food items continue to be unearthed. In 2011 five cases of whisky and brandy, which are thought to be still perfectly drinkable, were found buried under Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, where Mawson spent his first Antarctic winter. Some food artefacts sell for high prices. In 2011 a perfectly preserved 104-year-old Plasmon biscuit from Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition (1907–09) sold for £1250 at Christie’s. In 2006, the remaining crumbs from a biscuit taken on his Endurance Expedition (1914–17) fetched £7637.

I wonder how much the tin of cocoa or box of Symington’s soups would fetch today. Valuable relics now, they were worth much more at Commonwealth Bay a hundred years ago. In The Home of the Blizzard (1915), Mawson said that ‘the food-stuffs were selected with at least as much consideration as was given to any other of the requisites’, because, he argued, ‘the successful work of an expedition depends on the health of the men, and good and suitable food reduces to a minimum the danger of scurvy’. On sledging journeys, rations were calculated very carefully in terms of their weight, as well as of their ‘chemical composition’, the latter being to ensure that each man had an adequate intake of energy foods and nutrients. Since this left virtually no room for error, insufficient supplies due to loss or bad organisation often determined the failure of expeditions. (Of the seventeen deaths during the Heroic Age, a third were due to lack of food or associated dietary complications.) 

Variation was important, too. To relieve the monotony, ‘ever the bugbear of winter life in the polar zones’, along with the staples of flour, sugar, canned fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit, Mawson advocated the benefits of ‘luxury foods’, albeit ‘in moderation’. He included in the provisions ‘fancy biscuits’, and ‘sweets’ such as assorted nuts, chocolate, and crystallised fruit. For dessert in the hut (preceded by pudding), it was nougat on Sundays, ‘lollies’ on Mondays and Fridays, figs on Tuesdays, and toffee on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Along with their monthly ration of candles, matches, and tobacco, the men were also given chocolate, squares of which were often used as bartering chips when estimating the average velocity of the wind for the month or for predicting the day the first penguins would return after winter. Reg Sprigg, Mawson’s student and friend, claimed in Geology Is Fun (1989) that the chocolate rations were a way for Mawson to assess the characters of his men. There were those who gambled with them, some couldn’t resist ‘gorging on them right away’, and some hoarded them; ‘the hoarders’, in Mawson’s view, ‘proved best in subsequent field operations’, because the ability to conserve rations could end up saving lives.

The usual custom on Antarctic expeditions was to hire a cook, but Mawson didn’t do this. Instead, he drew up a roster for kitchen duties so that the men all took their turn as cook or messman. This way they had an opportunity to gain experience in preparing meals, a necessary skill once they were out on sledging trips. It was also another opportunity for Mawson to observe character as well as a way of democratising life in the hut. Although always the leader, Mawson was known to get involved in any job that was going. Once, on the British Australian New Zealand Antarctic Expedition (1929–31), he shamed the senior biologist, Harold Fletcher, into peeling potatoes by picking up a peeler himself and setting to work when Fletcher complained that the job was beneath him.

Cooking for eighteen men was no small feat. John Hunter, biologist on the AAE, remembered that his first day as messman ‘was a pretty formidable task’. His duties started after breakfast, as assistant to the chief storeman, Herbert Murphy, who was cook. It took them until eleven a.m. to wash the dishes, which was ‘no light task’, wrote Hunter in his diary of the AAE (which was published as Rise and Shine in 2012), ‘especially as we had fried seal’s liver and bacon – a most greasy and gory spectacle’. Dishes done, he was kept busy until 12.30 p.m. cleaning the stove, washing down the table, and sweeping out the hut. Lunch, which consisted of ‘tinned fish & corned beef’, was not difficult to prepare, but the washing up took him until three p.m. to complete. Murphy then had half an hour’s break before starting on preparing the customary three-course dinner for 6.30 p.m. – on this occasion, ‘soup, curried seal, & sweets – stewed plums & tapioca pudding, vegetables – cabbages & carrots, tea and ginger bread’. Washing up for the third time, (‘a nightmare of dirty dishes’), took until 9.30 p.m., after which he spent a further hour filling up all the ‘melting tanks’ with ice, emptying the ashes and dirty scrap buckets, bringing in a supply of coal, and sweeping out the hut again.

Washing up after dinner in the hut, Commonwealth Bay, 1912. From left: John Hunter, Alfred Hodgeman, Robert Bage. (The Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum)

 Keeping the men occupied was undoubtedly a further reason for making them do these domestic chores. Hunter, though exhausted, admitted that he had enjoyed his day as messman. Meals were ‘great events in the day’ and ‘contriving meals gives a fellow diversion occasionally’, wrote Archie McLean, the AAE doctor, in his unpublished diary.

Taxidermist and biological collector Charles Laseron remembered, in his book South with Mawson (1947), that Mawson ‘made a great feature of the cooking’ and took his turn as cook along with everyone else. Because he had some previous experience he had a habit of ‘butting in’ which ‘made him somewhat unpopular with the cook of the day’, particularly, wrote Laseron, ‘as we gained in skill and began to fancy ourselves’. Initially, though, everyone made mistakes, which were referred to as ‘championships’. The few things we know about Belgrave Ninnis include the mess he made of Mrs Beeton’s salmon kedgeree when he misread the recipe and added more than 200 grams of salt and an equal amount of pepper. (In December 1912, Ninnis, surveyor and dog-handler on the AAE, fell to his death down a crevasse while on a sledging trip with Mawson and Xavier Mertz, who also lost his life on this journey. Ninnis disappeared with a sledge, most of the food, and the six strongest dogs.)

Sometimes the cook served up roast penguin or mutton that was frozen solid in the middle, or forgot cans of fish he had put in the oven to thaw, only to remember them when they exploded. No one was allowed to forget their mistakes: at lunch time on Midwinter’s Day, 1912, Mawson presented Archie McLean with ‘a special medal (of a penguin) with 17 clasps ... as a record of his famous 17 championships’.

Those in the secondary category of chefs belonged to ‘The Crook Cooks Association’. In his book Argonauts of the South (1925), Frank Hurley wrote that, in order to qualify as an ‘Unconventional Cook’ (which he defined as ‘a chef with imagination who scorns reference to the pages of “Mrs Beeton”’), ‘[chefs] must have qualified for initiation by producing six approved original dishes and as many topical songs’. A cook could ‘dodge criticism’ if he were a good entertainer – “‘An Unconventional” must not only be a master of his art but a minstrel as well.’

Most of the men became adept at cooking something. Mawson was known for his excellent scones; Charles Laseron and the meteorologist Cecil Madigan for their puff pastry; Alfred Hodgeman, the cartographer, for his tapioca pudding; Hurley for his ‘elaborate menus’ and fancy presentation; Mertz for his penguin omelettes. ‘The meals we are having are really first class,’ wrote Hunter in his diary, noting that their kitchen equipment was fit for a restaurant. As early as April 1912, he claimed they could ‘beat any cooks at home’ at tapioca pudding and felt experienced enough to say: ‘I am afraid that when I come back home again, I (like the rest of us) will be criticising the cooking.’

Midwinter’s Day was the most important occasion, but almost anything warranted a celebratory dinner: birthdays, Easter, Empire Day, the anniversary of the Aurora leaving England for Tasmania, American Independence Day; even the anniversary of gaslighting in London. Among the exhibits in the museum is the 1912 midwinter menu, designed by Hurley. To bind it, he used wood from packing cases and ‘fur-covered leather’ (sealskin, I suspect). The front-cover photograph is the well-known one of the silhouettes of surgeon Leslie Whetter and Assistant Collector, John Close, collecting ice in a blizzard. This picture encapsulates the difficulty they had carrying out the daily chore of collecting water for cooking and washing, virtually crawling around in near darkness, which they labelled ‘hurricane walking’, with ice picks and a box. Written in French, the menu includes ‘Pingouin à la Terre Adélie’ and ‘Champignons en sauce Antarctique’ with accompanying wines: burgundy, port, claret. Conscious of the continuous sound of the howling wind here in the exhibition, I notice a footnote at the bottom of the menu: ‘During dinner the Blizzard will render the usual accompaniments – “The Tempest”, for Ever and Ever etc.’

I wander on to a glass cabinet containing a Nansen cooker, inside which there are apparently ‘seal blubber remains’. Although Mawson took a small quantity of preserved meats to the Antarctic, his intention, from the outset, was to ‘rely chiefly upon seal and penguin flesh’, both on sledging journeys and at the hut. The weekly menu at Commonwealth Bay suggests that he and his men ate a lot of these animals. It was penguin on Mondays and Thursdays, seal on Tuesdays and Fridays. The only days they didn’t eat penguins and seals were Sundays, when they had mutton (from sheep killed en route to the Antarctic), and Wednesdays, which was ‘canned meats’, Saturday being ‘variable’.

The Adélie penguin nests were regularly raided in summer. More than a thousand eggs were collected in the days leading up to the return of the Aurora in 1914. I shudder at the thought of so many penguins being killed – more than 300 in early 1913, in preparation for the second winter at the hut. Some were ‘secured’ after a chase (‘What sport we had catching it,’ wrote Archie McLean of an Emperor), ‘demolished’ or ‘despatched’ on the ice and dragged back to the hut on a sledge. For museum specimens, the seals were skinned on the kitchen table in the hut, the Emperors pinned to the ground and ‘pithed’ with long needles, and their brains chiselled out. (There is a little tin here containing stones that were extracted ‘from the gizzard of a penguin’.) At other times, they were cut up and fed to the dogs and, inadvertently, the scavenging skua gulls, their livers and tastier parts saved for the men. Even the skuas were occasionally eaten but were more often challenging targets in shooting excursions with the Winchester rifle.

‘It was penguin on Mondays and Thursdays, seal on Tuesdays and Fridays’

 When I think of how strict protective regulations are now in the Antarctic (according to the ‘General guidelines for visitors to the Antarctic’, visitors should ‘not use guns or explosives’, and should never be closer than five metres to wildlife), I am horrified by the men’s treatment of animals. They would toboggan down slopes on the backs of penguins; creep up behind them, grab them by their wings, and toss them into the sea; turn them into pâté, black pudding, sausages, even ‘penguin in the hole’. In an attempt to jazz them up, they often gave the dishes elaborate names in a mixture of French and English with an Antarctic twist. For instance, roasted penguin was ‘Roast fillet of dux à L’Adélie’.

Collecting penguins for the winter store, Commonwealth Bay, 1912. (The Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum)

‘Penguins on horseback’ (penguin breasts wrapped in bacon) were given to the passengers and crew of the Aurora when the ship returned to collect the party at Commonwealth Bay in 1913. (Mawson was meanwhile still on his way back from the sledging journey and, on that day, dining on one biscuit and dog flesh.) Conrad Eitel, secretary of the AAE, claimed that penguin ‘surpassed the Christmas turkey’ (Sydney Morning Herald). The expedition shore party had mutton instead, after which McLean concluded: ‘Mutton is splendid for a change but give me penguin breast every time.’ While penguin meat was considered as good, if not better than chicken or turkey, and ‘quite equal to grouse’, and penguin broth, according to Archie McLean, ‘just like beef tea’, spices and sauces were used to mask the flavour of seal. It was most often curried to disguise its ‘objectionable tang’.

In the cabinet in front of me a silently roaring leopard seal espies me with its carnivorous blue glass eye. I think of how he, but more often his hapless relatives, were killed for food, clubbed to death with ice axes, and of how the trusting Weddell seals made no attempt to escape their captors. Then my attention turns to a neighbouring cabinet enclosing two stuffed husky dogs, ‘Ross’ and ‘Serai’. Dogs were never on the menu, at least not at the hut, but when Ninnis disappeared down the crevasse Mertz and Mawson had no choice but to eat them.

The story of how Mawson was forced to eat his huskies is one of my strongest childhood memories, the story that repulsed and fascinated me the most (apart from the one about the soles of his feet coming away.) That the dogs had names was particularly disturbing: he ate Pavlova, George, Mary, Ginger, Johnson, and Haldane. (Inevitably, I thought of having to eat Bonnie, our black Labrador). Back in the cabinet housing the stones from the gizzard of a penguin is the little black doll the ballerina Anna Pavlova gave to Mawson’s expedition ‘for good luck’. In return a dog was named after her. This was probably quite spontaneous. I can picture Pavlova standing on the deck of the Aurora ‘christening’ it by smashing a bottle of champagne against its side, while a husky puppy darted around her legs, its horrible fate unimaginable then.

Australasian Antarctic Expedition members who spent a second winter in the Antarctic and the Macquarie Island party returning on the Aurora, 1914. Mawson is in knee-high boots with his hands behind his back. (The Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum)

I distinctly remember my grandmother telling us about ‘paw soup’, which brought with it an image of paws and claws floating in an evil-looking broth, superimposed with an image of Hurley’s photograph of Blizzard the pup with her head cocked to one side. I later looked this up to see if it were true and found that it was: ‘The paws took longest to cook,’ wrote Mawson, ‘but treated to a lengthy stewing, even they became quite digestible.’

Equally disgusting was the account of how Mawson and Mertz boiled Ginger’s skull whole, drew a line down the middle of it dividing the left and right halves, and scooped out the thyroid and brain. Since most of their cutlery was lost in the crevasse with Ninnis, they probably did this with the wooden spoon they carved out of timber from a discarded sledge they retrieved soon after Ninnis died. This spoon is on display in another glass case here in the museum beside the half-sledge and Bonsa tool kit containing the very knife that was probably used to kill Pavlova. The second-to-last dog to die, she was slain in this gruesome way because by then the gun had been thrown away to lighten their load. Later she was made into ‘a delicious soup’, her bones ‘cracked open’ with the mended spade propped up here beside the sledge.

I can’t help wondering if, after the Far Eastern Sledging journey, on encountering a dog and perhaps bending to pat it, Mawson saw flashes of George’s liver ‘frizzling’ on the lid of his cooker. ‘Ross’, the darker of the two dogs in front of me, is described as ‘a Mawson family pet’, but my great-aunt Pat, Mawson’s elder daughter, said this wasn’t true, that her father never wanted a dog as a pet because of what had happened in the Antarctic. Incidentally, Pavlova, a favourite of Mawson’s, was dark like Ross.

It is no wonder that Paquita Mawson and her daughters were not overly fond of dogs. My grandmother tried to like our Jack Russell, Millie, but she never forgave the dog for biting her. Despite her dislike of dogs, Paquita became attached to her friend Isabel’s dog during holidays in Scotland when she was taking a break from her book Mawson of the Antarctic (1964). On her return to Australia she acquired a Chihuahua; a big dog would have been quite another thing.

‘They would toboggan down slopes on the backs of penguins’

My grandmother said she never asked her father about the sledging journey, about Ninnis and Mertz, or about his having to kill and eat the huskies. (I think she must have read about the paw soup in The Home of the Blizzard.) How much of an emotional impact it later had on him is difficult to discern. Eric Webb, chief magnetician on the AAE, described Mawson as ‘a marvellous innovator and improviser’ who was ‘always extremely resourceful in the most practical way’. Webb wondered if ‘perhaps these qualities led to the saving of his life’. This resourcefulness can be seen in the museum in the sledge that he cut in half with his pocket saw when Mertz died, in the home-made wooden spoon, and especially in the crampons he fashioned out of old nails and screws and wood from boxes. On his journey to the South Magnetic Pole on Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1907–09 with geologist Professor Edgeworth David and Dr Alistair Mackay, he constructed a frying pan out of empty paraffin tins. To save paraffin, he used seal-blubber oil as fuel for cooking. ‘It was seal cooked with seal,’ Mawson commented on his return.

In his account of their return journey from this Pole, when their rations were so low they were having to raid old camps to reboil used tea leaves, Edgeworth David described Mawson as ‘a bold culinary experimenter’ whose ‘cooking experiments’ were ‘highly successful and entirely satisfactory to the party’. It was on this journey that Mawson first tried seal meat in the field. He came up with a variety of ways of cooking seal. He would boil down their blubber in his improvised frying pan and then drop slices of meat or liver (which he sometimes crumbed) into the oil. After further trials he added their blood, which he poured rapidly into the oil to form ‘a kind of gravy pancake’, improved with the addition of some biscuit crushed with a geological hammer.

Hunger, which Mawson admitted developed into ‘the most alarming mania’, drove him to be experimental. ‘We twisted our menu into as many possible shapes we could think in terms of seal,’ he explained in an interview after the expedition. Similarly, on the AAE, after the death of Ninnis and the resulting loss of weeks of rations, he wrote: ‘We racked our brains thinking how to make the most of the meagre quantity of food available.’

Mawson’s obsession with eating is reflected in his diaries, which are filled with lists of food, recipes, and whole menus. As he, Mackay, and Edgeworth David grew hungrier, they began to dream of food and this happened again on the AAE with Mertz. Interestingly, their dreams were similar in that the food or feasts they imagined were seldom realised. ‘We would scarcely ever have a chance to satisfy ourselves,’ said Mawson, who dreamt most often of giant cakes ‘as big as washing coppers’, which he had to reach via long winding staircases. ‘Just as we would be about to tackle a delicacy, away it would slide into nothingness, and another beautiful course would be spread before us.’ Suet pudding was something they especially craved (something Shackleton admitted to also having ‘a wild longing for’ on his Pole journey), so much so that, as their hunger intensified, trifles and fruit salads were struck off their lists of most desirable dishes in favour of it.

Mawson perhaps always had a sweet tooth, but his Antarctic experiences must have intensified his love of cakes and desserts. As a result, Paquita became very good at them, in particular milk-based desserts like baked custard, crème caramel, and rice cream, which Mawson claimed he could live on. Those times of extreme hunger also had a lasting impact on his relationship with food; it accentuated his natural abhorrence of waste and informed his approach to cooking forever afterwards.

Interestingly, it seems that cooking was something he enjoyed, not something that was just a necessary skill in the Antarctic and on geological field trips. Paquita mentions in Mawson of the Antarctic that as a child he was ‘full of interest in everything’ and that, unlike his brother, Will, this included an interest in the house. With his mother’s encouragement he was allowed to buy household goods in bulk and sell them to her singly, which ‘gave him quite a good idea of finance and household management’. He was also ‘allowed to help make cakes and to try his hand at other cooking’.

Recently, when sifting through some family archives, I came across an old book with ‘Recipes’ inscribed in gold lettering across its battered green cover. There are some recipes by Paquita towards the back, but a loose page with ‘D Mawson’ on it and recipes written in his hand in the front pages suggest it was at least initially his. Not surprisingly, almost all are cake and biscuit recipes. There are also several for jam: orange, lemon and melon, pineapple and melon, as well as lemon, and orange marmalade, indicating that it was possible this book dated back to his childhood. For a short while, his father ran a jam-making business before starting a fruit cannery.

On geology excursions into the Flinders Ranges or to the Adelaide Hills, ‘eating was always an event ... with Mawson usually in charge of the cooking pot’. Apparently Mawson’s students would be told to ‘up plates and lick them’ at the end of meals, an Antarctic tradition that preceded a ‘more thorough washing up’. In the mornings he served a ‘generous helping’ of porridge for breakfast, followed by eggs and bacon. He would go around taking orders for eggs in his Jaeger wool pyjamas. My grandmother, who sometimes went on scientific excursions with him, as did Pat and Paquita, as chaperones for women students, remembered that all the students had to learn how to cook over an open fire under her father’s supervision.

Mawson’s cooking extended into the home. My grandmother told me that he used to cook for Paquita when she was ill, and that he had taught her how to make a roast and how to make gravy early in their marriage; at that time he was more experienced in the kitchen. I have always liked the story of him showing my grandmother and my great-aunt how to toss pancakes, one that had even greater appeal after I discovered a reference to Mawson and Mertz ‘experimenting’ with pancakes in the hut. Had he taught Mertz how to toss them? Or had Mertz taught him?

The idea of Mawson the modern father and modern husband began to take shape in my mind. I was intrigued by the story my father, the eldest grandchild, told me of how Mawson enjoyed shopping at the Adelaide Central market on his way to ‘Harewood’, the family farm in the Adelaide Hills, and that he tended to buy too much. Perhaps he had an underlying fear of running short of food. But this story is contrary to perceptions of him as a frugal, resourceful man whose digestive powers were legendary. I suspect Mawson ‘the extravagant shopper’ and ‘big spender’ was not often seen and was very much outweighed by his otherwise natural frugality, a trait he passed down to his daughters. My grandmother would scrape the fat from the frying pan and store it for another day or leave it lying in the frying pan on the stovetop until the next meal. Early in their marriage my grandfather made her fried eggs for breakfast. She was horrified when he tipped the fat down the sink afterwards. Waste was torture to her.

Paquita was quite different. Where the rest of the Mawson family was practical and prudent, she was inclined to be extravagant, perhaps partly because she had not had the same spartan childhood or suffered the same privations Mawson had. Although she became a good cook, she never grew to like everyday cooking, preferring instead to cook for dinner parties and other special occasions. Whenever she was away, Mawson, my grandmother, and my great-aunt would keep to a fairly tight budget and exist on cheap dishes. One of their favourite meals was tripe and onions. During such times, Pat was appointed ‘chief housekeeper’ and would have to present her father with a list of foodstuffs and their prices. These lists are among their letters, neatly written out in columns, and from my observations of both my great-aunt and my grandmother, budgeting to them was a challenge, sometimes even a thrill.

I wasn’t thinking of any of this when, a few days after my visit to the museum, I decided to try Mawson’s legendary Irish stew. As I was going camping and had offered to provide dinner, I thought it best to prepare something in advance that could be easily reheated in a pot over an open fire. Swept away with notions of bonding with my great-grandfather, intrepid explorer turned chef extraordinaire, it seemed the perfect occasion to try his stew, which dates back to his Antarctic days. To celebrate the hut’s completion, the first meal inside it was Irish stew. ‘The way we can put away the irish (sic) stew is ... simply astonishing ...’ wrote John Hunter.

Reading this should have been warning enough. The expeditioners had been working hard for days in the cold. As I later realised, it was an advantage to be very hungry to appreciate this stew, but at the time I was wooed by Edgeworth David’s description of Mawson and impressed by accounts of his turning out such dishes as whisky omelettes, strawberry tarts, and blancmange with creamy port-wine sauce.

Irish stew was always a feature on field trips to the Flinders Ranges. My grandmother recalled that ‘every camp had its Irish stew day’. The students had to learn to cook over an open fire; the stew had to be cooked to her father’s ‘satisfaction’ and ‘woe betide the student who proudly served chops in a puree of potatoes and onion’. Here is a glimpse of his nurturing side, but also his tendency to be interfering. It calls to mind Laseron’s comment that, in matters of cooking, he had a habit of ‘butting in’. I was relieved I wouldn’t be cooking under my great-grandfather’s instruction.

After further reading, the idea of cooking Mawson’s Irish stew began to lose its charm. He was ‘an awful cook’, according to Reg Sprigg. ‘His idea of a culinary delight’, said Sprigg, was ‘a witch’s cauldron of stew’ and ‘the pot was never emptied, just refilled with potatoes, onions, meats, anything that would come along’. His habit of adding ‘masses of fat’ was more suitable for Antarctic climes than the Australian bush in summer. Leftover porridge from breakfast usually ended up in the pot as well. Images of a pot bubbling over the fire continuously for several days in the height of summer surrounded by swarms of flies further discouraged me.

Leisure time in the hut, Commonwealth Bay, 1912. (The Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum)

 In the end, I had to be honest. A kilogram of neck-mutton chops simply boiled in water did nothing to inspire me and, whichever way I looked at it, was not representative of Douglas Mawson the ‘bold culinary experimenter’. Perhaps his cooking only worked in extraordinary circumstances or on a low university budget. Ultimately, the key to appreciating his culinary genius was that you had to be on the edge of starvation. ‘I will always remember the wonderful taste that the food had in those days,’ wrote Mawson in The Home of the Blizzard: ‘Acute hunger enhances the taste and smell of food beyond all ordinary conception. The flavour of food under such conditions is a miracle altogether unsuspected by the millions of mortals who daily eat their fill.’ I realised that I was not only one of those average mortals but that I had not inherited the ‘Mawson grit’, the legendary iron gut.

Eventually I reneged on making the Irish stew. Instead I settled on beef bourguignon for our camp dinner: rump in red wine, mushrooms, and herbs seemed far preferable. I thought, as I cut the meat, of how much my grandmother (and Mawson) would have disapproved of my buying rump and cutting off every scrap of fat. How glad I was that she (and he) couldn’t see me. I was also pleased to escape any potential disapproval when later, around the campfire, refilling my wine glass for the third time, I recalled reading John Hunter’s account of how the men in the hut had spent one evening engaged in ‘violent discussions’ on morality and drunkenness, ‘the Doctor [Mawson] in the lead’.