From the Editor
IUSED TO HAVE a tattered old copy of AG’s Adventurers and Dreamers map of Australia pinned to my office wall marked up with coloured dots for all the places we’d published stories about. The island of Tasmania was entirely obscured by sticky dots, and I understood why a region of such wild, untrammelled beauty might have been the focus of so much storytelling in our pages over the decades. More mysterious to me at the time was just how many dots were placed at the bottom of the map, with an arrow indicating that these clustered stories were set way down south in Antarctica, beyond the scope of AG cartographer Will Pringle’s famous map. So what drove Australian Geographic’s obsession with a place so far, so inaccessible and so inhospitable?
It was only sometime later, when I found myself exploring Hobart’s Salamanca Wharf as the Australian Antarctic Division’s venerable old orange-hulled research ship the
Aurora Australis prepared to sail south to deliver a fresh cohort of scientists to the frozen continent, that I first felt that frisson of excitement at the prospect of their potentially risky, unpredictable and breathtaking imminent adventure. Those same Hobart wharves were the scene of numerous Heroic Era expedition departures, and they were so often the first place to receive news of epic successes and tragic failures. That old spirit of adventure still seems to linger there among the modern jetties and old stone buildings of Hobart’s docks, and Antarctica, quite literally the next stop south, still casts its spell over many a would-be explorer as it did over me that day.
At Australian Geographic we’ve continued a tradition of Australian Antarctic exploration and storytelling since first publishing the tale of Project Blizzard in our launch issue, and we’ve supported polar research and adventure through the AG Society ever since. We’ve actively encouraged travel to this unique destination, and in this issue we mark 200 years of Antarctic exploration with a raft of stories and a new foldout map. Carolyn Beasley (page 96) sailed to the Antarctic Peninsula just as COVID-19 became an official pandemic, and she crafted her story for us while stuck aboard the Roald Amundsen as it sailed the ocean in search of a port willing to allow it to disembark its passengers.
Who knows when visitors will once again tread in the footsteps of Mawson and Shackleton, but, while the world waits anxiously to go exploring Earth once more, efforts to return humans to the Moon, and ultimately to Mars, continue apace. Australia played a pivotal role in the first Apollo Moon landing in 1969 (see AG 151) but has been slow to the party in the emerging era of commercial space exploration. Wilson da Silva visits our new national space agency in Adelaide (page 78) that aims to harness the innovations of numerous smart Australian start-ups and our mining expertise to transform Australia into a leader in this exciting field of endeavour.
And look out for a brand-new Australian Geographic retail opportunity as we embark on an exciting new partnership with QBD Books. By mid-August QBD Books stores across Australia will include a dedicated Australian Geographic shop or kiosk featuring a range of AG books, calendars and diaries, educational toys and other AG-branded products.
Stay safe,