Australia’s coolest place to work
THIS is the moment he hates the most: You’re standing on a beach watching the ship sail away.
On it is virtually everyone you’ve spent the past few months with, all going home. Around you are the few who have been left behind. Maybe just 18 to 20 people and they are the only faces you will see for the next eight months.
You look around and say to yourself: “F--k. We’re it.” Welcome to Antarctica. We have all heard stories about this last great land, the most remote and hostile environment on Earth.
Extraordinary stories of survival and exploration.
But what is it like just being an ordinary bloke, trying to do an ordinary job, in the most extraordinary place on the planet?
Brendan Hopkins should know. He’s a plumber who just happens to work for the Australian Antarctic Division at Casey Station, about 3443 kilometres south of Hobart.
When he gets a call-out it’s just like any other job, except that his takes place in temperatures as low as minus 37 degrees.
Before he goes out he has to put on at least two pairs of socks, a pair of thermal pants, a thermal top, a pair of fleece pants, a fleece top, insulated overalls, an insulated jacket, a pair of liner gloves, a pair of wristlets, a pair of external gloves, a spare pair of gloves, a neck-warmer, a balaclava and goggles.
“That’s probably your starting point,” he says over the phone from Antarctica.
On the day Brendan is speaking it is a relatively balmy minus 17.4 degrees. He is a bit late coming to the phone because he has just had to respond to a fire alarm.
Ironically, fire is an extremely serious problem in the coldest place on Earth because Antarctica is also the driest place on Earth — one area has not seen rain in two million years.
The lack of humidity makes fire a very big danger, and when you’re trying to roll out hoses in subzero temperatures the water freezes very quickly — something a plumber knows all too well.
And of course if your house burns down in Antarctica it’s not the kind of place you want to be caught outside in your underwear.
This is Brendan’s fourth trip to Antarctica and his third “winter” — a period of about eight months which, combined with the more heavily populated summer periods, means expeditioners are often stuck on the continent for more than a year — away from family, friends, loved ones, the whole world as the rest of us know it.
Three times now he has said goodbye to everyone bar the handful who keep the station operating over those long dark months.
“One of the hardest things to get your head around here as one of the winter team is saying goodbye to everybody at the end of summer and watching that ship sail away,’’ Brendan said. “And you turn around and look at the number of people you’ve got for the next eight months and there’s no one else.
“So that first experience for me, where transport back then was all via ship, standing on the beach with 17 other people watching the ship sailing off into the sunset, standing there going ‘Ooh’.
“This is it now for eight months. That’s, um, that’s an interesting feeling.” Even now it still hits him. That first experience for Brendan was at Davis Station, which is even further south than Casey. During the winter there is a period of more than 40 days when the sun doesn’t even rise. And that does strange things to a person.
“One of my routines in the morning at seven o’clock or thereabouts is to walk into the mess and turn the lights on full bright to get my brain remembering that it’s morning time and time to start thinking about work,” says Brendan, who is also deputy station leader.
“I get a few good-hearted grumbles about that most days!”
It is the intensity of the environment and the random challenges of the work that lured him here in the first place and that keeps him coming back for more.
In between building a whole waste water treatment facility from scratch he’s also helping a carpenter fix a roller door, mastering a lamb roast, or trying to avoid cleaning the dreaded grease trap.
Still, it is a hard slog. Expeditioners are carefully screened to make sure they have the right personality and temperament for long periods of isolation with very few people for company.
It is a place where annoying habits get very annoying very quickly. The key is to be immediately upfront and honest about it.
“Open, clear, honest, early communication is the only way you can tackle these things,” Brendan laughs.
The other vital quality is a good sense of humour, as well as a sense of community — “being willing and able to, A ask for help and, B, accept help”.
Indeed, there is a doctor at the station who might be tapped on the shoulder if a crew member notices a colleague is behaving unusually or seems to be struggling. But even in a tiny isolated group the doctor has to maintain patient confidentiality, and so the other residents may never even know if they were right.
“Definitely as we get to the middle of the year and we’ve been down here for a while and we’ve got a bit to go, people can have the odd day that’s not their best day,” Brendan said
There are tricks, too. The expeditioners have shots of liquid vitamin D to compensate for the absence of the sun; they stage their own midwinter plays to keep themselves entertained (this year it’s a stage production of
Star Wars) and have set up their own little bar — a place where everybody really does know your name.
And amid and around all this is the unspeakable power and beauty of Earth’s last great frontier, a place that still defies description and that no camera can truly capture.
“No matter what photos we take down here we know we can’t show those at home just how beautiful the environment is down here,’’ Brendan said.
“The photos we take are excellent but can never truly convey what we see with our eyes. It would be amazing to be able to bring loved ones down here to share this with us.” Applications for the next Antarctic expedition open in December. Visit jobs.antarctica.gov.au to register your interest.
“No matter what photos we take down here we know we can’t show those at home just how beautiful the environment is down here. The photos we take are excellent but can never truly convey what we see with our eyes. It would be amazing to be able to bring loved ones down here to share this with us.”