In his thematic chapters, Griffiths, appropriately enough, covers a great deal of ground, touching upon the history of science, exploration, and geopolitics in Antarctica. There are chapters on ‘The Brave West Winds’, ‘Life at Sea’, ‘Reading the Rocks’, and ‘Space Weather’, wherein we trip through ice ages, feel the shift of tectonic plates, experience the brutality of nineteenth-century whaling, and are blown towards maps to understand the relationship between prevailing winds and the discovery and development of trade in Australia. We are also introduced to the erotic possibilities of geology; ‘getting your rocks off’ is startlingly illuminated by the following: ‘John McPhee has celebrated the sensual quality of the geological lexicon: “There was almost enough resonance in some terms to stir the adolescent groin”, he reflected. Australia hadn’t had an orogeny for quite a while.’

Though I confess that geology has never quite had this effect on me, it is a testimony to the engaging nature of Griffiths’s prose that I read these chapters with interest and enthusiasm. I was only occasionally made uneasy by a tendency towards statements that reach towards large, even grand, conclusions which to my ear sounded slick rather than impressive. Perhaps this is a risk when synthesising so much material. Nevertheless, when told in the chapter on wind that, ‘Gold, tall ships, and the mastery of wind together revolutionized Australia’s economic growth, and also secured Melbourne’s commercial dominance in the nineteenth century’, I wanted more evidence and analysis beyond the footnoted references that doubtless provide some bolstering material. And when the discussion of tectonic plates and Gondwanaland ends with the following flourish, I suspected Griffiths of having been seduced by geological romanticism: ‘Thus Australians came to realize quite late that their land came from higher latitudes and was not an appendix of the north but a broken heart of the South. Antarctica was not only Australia’s destiny, but also its ancient past.’

When dealing with the human footprints in Antarctica, Griffiths also sometimes tends towards a romantic view. This is particularly true of his dealings with the explorers of the ‘heroic age’. Though he delivers a very useful summary of recent biographical controversies about Scott of the Antarctic, despite all the evidence adduced this iconic figure is allowed to remain a figure of inspirational rectitude: ‘Our flawed hero carved a moral universe out of the amoral, inorganic ice. The fire on the snow.’ As Charles Sorley wrote of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 war sonnets, I think ‘he has taken the sentimental attitude’.

More compelling, from my point of view, are the chapters devoted to less well-trodden ground, where the more recent history of the Antarctic and Australians in Antarctica is broached. The undignified scramble for territory is nicely dissected in a chapter entitled ‘Planting Flags’, and ‘Cold Peace’ gives us a riveting account of the Russians in Antarctica in the 1950s and 1960s. The history of human psychology in the Antarctic is analysed in chapters devoted to ‘Wintering’, ‘Solitude’ and ‘Love’ (almost inevitably ‘in a cold climate’).

Harrowing experiences of depression, polar madness and community dysfunction, from Frederick Cook’s account of the Belgica expedition in 1897−98 to the difficult winter at Casey in 1985−86, make fascinating reading for the armchair explorer, while the investigation of the ‘chief paradox of Antarctic life’, that ‘Antarctica draws people who seek solitude, only to condemn them to an intense human intimacy’, made me glad that I had stayed at home.

The story of Douglas Mawson and Paquita Delprat is interestingly compared and contrasted with the first married couples to winter in Antarctica in 1947–48; the impact of women and feminism on a space heavily associated with masculine romance is anatomised. It is a pity that Griffiths didn’t allow himself here a small diversion to think about recent novels such as Nikki Gemmell’s Shiver (1997) and Laurence Furnley’s Degrees of Separation (2005), which not only deal with heterosexual relationships in contemporary Antarctica but also emphasise the massive difference between Edwardian experiences and those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This omission is all the more regrettable since, in these and other chapters, Griffiths is interested in historiography and in the power of ‘stories’. Here, I would have enjoyed some grappling with the contested area between history, fiction and cultural myth, but it is perhaps understandable that a professional scholar might want to make large claims for his own discipline. There is a tendency for ‘stories’ to be conflated with ‘histories’, and for history to be lauded as a, if not the, primary epistemological resource. We need history, we are told, because ‘stories are privileged carriers of truth’. Elsewhere, history is described as a ‘survival manual’ and likened to science: ‘“Science” is the word that we use to describe disciplined enquiry, a way of turning wonder into shared insight and understanding. “History” is a good word for that, too.’

As if to demonstrate his own contention, the history in this book is far more interesting than the forty-two pages of diary entries, which seem both light and slight by comparison. Griffiths says he felt ‘both sensitized and empowered’ by being in Antarctica, and we must take his word that this is true. But I thought there was surprisingly little evidence to convince us. Much space in the diary entries is given over to what Griffiths is reading, which serves to emphasise the intertextual nature of the experience; his firsthand reactions to the landscape (wherein icebergs are likened to ‘meringue’, the red ship ‘a tiny embellishment on the wedding cake’) are disappointing. I couldn’t help wondering if this was because when Griffiths arrived he realised that he had been there before, by way of the imagination.

But it would be unfair to end with this cavil. Griffiths has written a highly readable, stimulating, wide-ranging, perspicacious book, which opens up territory for following explorers to investigate further.