Sir Ed Hillary’s historic Antarctic flag retrieved
It hung defiantly for over a decade, fading and speckled with bird feathers and lime dust but still identifiable as a symbol of courage.
After years of being hidden away in the dank, musty air of the wreckage of Christchurch’s onceproud cathedral, a large New Zealand flag that was flown at Scott Base after Sir Edmund Hillary reached the South Pole was finally removed yesterday, to the joy of conservators.
The flag, measuring 2.5 metres by seven metres, has been at the cathedral since 1958, in recent times hanging forlornly above chunks of broken mortar and pews strewn across the floor.
But the flag has a glittering past. It was last flown victoriously at Scott Base after Hillary and his party became only the third expedition to reach the South Pole.
Dubbed ‘‘the dash to the pole’’, Hillary’s expedition became famous for being the first to use motor vehicles after he modified Massey Ferguson tractors.
Initially Hillary was only supposed to drop off supplies 800 kilometres from the pole for a British-led expedition, but he defied orders and went to the pole himself. Yesterday, six floors up a jigsaw of scaffolding, Jenny May began the task of carefully extracting the flag. In a white suit and dusk mask, May, consultant heritage adviser to Christchurch City Council, was tasked with wrapping the material in plastic before rolling it into a tube. The flag was then lowered by crane and taken off site to be inspected, cleaned, repaired and stored for safekeeping until it can once again take its place in a restored cathedral.
The extraction marks an important point in reinstating the cathedral, with more artefacts set be taken out from the building in coming months. Until now, more than a decade after the quakes, retrieving the flag had not been possible due to its positioning and the cathedral’s instability.