Papers by Elizabeth Leane
The Polar Journal, 2011
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This article focuses on the experiences of early 20 th century expeditions trapped over winter on... more This article focuses on the experiences of early 20 th century expeditions trapped over winter on Antarctic islands. These explorers were in a paradoxical position, completely isolated from the world they knew but in uncomfortably close quarters with their companions. Prominent amongst the available resources that they could use to maintain sanity in these doubly trying circumstances were texts. Like the Antarctic ice, which effectively turns islands into part of the mainland, but can just as easily make an iceberg out of a seemingly stable “peece of the continent”, texts were a means towards both connection and insularity for these men.
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The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, 2020
While the Arctic is frequently considered a highly charged location within Cold War geopolitics, ... more While the Arctic is frequently considered a highly charged location within Cold War geopolitics, the Antarctic is more often framed as a remote wilderness impervious to world events. The Antarctica that we now label a ‘continent for peace and science’ is, however, very much a product of the Cold War. With the USSR and the US refusing to recognise national claims to the continent, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty emerged as a truce that put all claims into a kind of indefinite suspension. Geopolitical tensions nonetheless permeate imaginative texts that engaged with the region throughout the later twentieth century. Ranging from lightweight romantic comedies through post-apocalyptic dystopias to adventure thrillers, Antarctic fiction provides an illuminating inverted perspective on the Cold War.
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Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 2002
Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marke... more Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red-good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce lot of blue, a little green .... Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, the hefty volumes making up Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy, are only three of numerous recent publications, including novels, popularizations, and occasionally combinations of both, dealing with the planet Mars.' The following excerpts are taken from two such publications:
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John King Davis captained S.Y. Aurora on three voyages to Antarctica and on other sub-Antarctic c... more John King Davis captained S.Y. Aurora on three voyages to Antarctica and on other sub-Antarctic cruises for Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) 1911–1914. Between the first and second Antarctic trips, he made a short return cruise in 1912 from Melbourne to Eden in southeastern Australia with the Director of Commonwealth Fisheries, on the fisheries investigation steamship, F.I.S. Endeavour. This cruise was a milestone in his continuing training for the AAE's oceanographic work. Davis went not as captain, but as an observer. His aim was to gain greater knowledge of operating techniques when using oceanographic research equipment and to apply that knowledge to observations on forthcoming voyages with Aurora. He kept abbreviated notes of the research conducted on Endeavour, and of his visit to Eden, in a small pocket notebook. These informal observations, apparently made just for his own future reference, give us a glimpse of the 28 year old Davis. He has of...
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The Antarctic is a region that traditionally occupied the remote reaches of the geographical imag... more The Antarctic is a region that traditionally occupied the remote reaches of the geographical imagination. In the Anthropocene, however, the ‘frozen continent’ has become central to the planet’s present and future. Even as ice cores taken from its interior reveal the deep environmental history of the planet, warming ocean currents are ominously destabilising the glaciers around its edges. The continent contains over ninety per cent of the world’s ice, with the potential to raise sea levels by nearly sixty metres, if it were all to melt. While such a wholesale melt of the Antarctic ice sheet is not imminent, estimates (based on a business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions scenario) indicate the continent’s ice could contribute over a metre of sea-level rise by the end of this century and over fifteen metres by 2500 (DeConto & Pollard 2016). And warming global average temperature – along with associated effects, such as ocean acidification and species migration – are only some the hall...
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The Geographic South Pole is a place of paradox. It is a point around which the earth quite liter... more The Geographic South Pole is a place of paradox. It is a point around which the earth quite literally pivots; yet it has a habit of falling off the edge of our maps. An invisible spot on a high, featureless ice plateau, the Pole has no obvious material value, but is nonetheless a much sought-after location. The endpoint of exploration’s most famous ‘race’, between teams led by Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen, the Pole has more recently become a favoured destination of ‘extreme’ tourists. Like the whole of Antarctica, ‘90˚ South’ does not belong to any nation, but six national claims meet there, and for nearly sixty years the u.s. has occupied the site with a series of scientific stations. The Pole is a deeply political place. In South Pole Elizabeth Leane explores the important challenges that this strange place poses to humanity. What is its lure? How and why should people live there? How can artists respond to its apparent blankness? What can it teach us about our planet and our...
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The ‘age of humans’ is significantly changing Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Through differen... more The ‘age of humans’ is significantly changing Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Through different issues and disciplinary lenses, the contributions to this volume have explored the causes, effects and meanings of human interaction with the region. In this concluding chapter, we draw out some insights from these contributions as a group, suggesting four interrelated themes that capture the various ways in which the relationship between humans and the Antarctic continent is currently being perceived.
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Brings together essays from international scholars in a range of Humanities disciplines, to offer... more Brings together essays from international scholars in a range of Humanities disciplines, to offer fresh cultural perspectives on the way we perceive and represent the southern continent. The book draws on papers presented at the Imagining Antarctica conference in Christchurch, NZ in 2008 and the Antarctic Visions conference in Hobart, Australia in 2010.
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A pesar de que a la Antartica se la ha etiquetado como el "continente de la ciencia", u... more A pesar de que a la Antartica se la ha etiquetado como el "continente de la ciencia", un lugar para ser esudiado a traves de los lenguajes de la geologia, la glaciologia y la zoologia, hay otros modos de relacionarse con la region que complementan y desafian esa categorizacion. En los dos ultimos siglos, numerosos novelisas, dramaturgos y poetas han producido representaciones creativas de la region antartica. Ese ensayo examina brevemente aquellos textos literarios antarticos mas prominentes escritos en ingles, con un enfoque en la ficcion, identificando el vocabulario literario -generos, temas y motivos- que los escritores han desarrollado como una forma de conocer el Continente Ausral.
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Antarctic exploration in the ‘Heroic Era’ (the early twentieth century) is often represented as t... more Antarctic exploration in the ‘Heroic Era’ (the early twentieth century) is often represented as the last gasp of British imperialism — an attempt to occupy empty, uninhabited and more-or-less useless territory at a time when the rest of the empire was beginning to crumble.1 Of British Heroic-Era exploits, three stories in particular preoccupy the present popular imagination2: Robert F. Scott’s ill-fated journey to the Pole with his four companions, as famously related in his posthumously published journal; a slightly earlier journey to Cape Crozier by three of Scott’s expedition members in search of Emperor penguins’ eggs, as told by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in a chapter of his 1922 travel memoir The Worst Journey in the World; and the story of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition, in which his ship, The Endurance, was imprisoned and later crushed by ice, leaving the men to survive on ice-floes and a subantarctic
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In 2010 the Australian Antarctic Names and Medals Committee announced that it had named a glacier... more In 2010 the Australian Antarctic Names and Medals Committee announced that it had named a glacier near Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica in honour of Sidney Jeffryes. Jeffryes was a member of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), 1911-14, and the decision to attach his name to an Antarctic feature, coming just before the centenary of the AAE’s departure, reflected a gradual historical revisionism around the expedition occurring at this time. Seeking to ‘honour … historically significant figures … whose contributions [to the AAE] have not yet been recognised’, the Committee also attached the names of two other previously ignored members of the expedition to glaciers (AG, ‘Australian Antarctic Glaciers Named’). In 2017 this approach was extended to include the non-human, when 26 islands, rocks and reefs around the site of the AAE headquarters were named in honour of the ‘beloved dogs, which played a critical role in Australia’s heroic era of exploration’ (AG, ‘Ma...
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ICEBERGS HAVE TAKEN ON DRAMATIC NEW MEANINGS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. THEY HAVE long been used as met... more ICEBERGS HAVE TAKEN ON DRAMATIC NEW MEANINGS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. THEY HAVE long been used as metaphors for an immensity present but unseen, but in the age of anthropogenic warming they also metonymically suggest unstable icesheets, shrinking glaciers and rising seas. Outside of scientific discourse, however, icebergs tend to be considered as a collective, interesting both in their symbolism and materiality, but rarely treated as individual objects with their own histories and futures.
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Performing Ice
Since the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, the southern continent has often been lauded as the last “uno... more Since the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, the southern continent has often been lauded as the last “unowned” space—an exemplary instance of international cooperation. However, the seven national claims made prior to this time still exist and, while legally nothing may be done to reinforce these claims as long as the Treaty is in place, both claimant and non-claimant states continue to assert their presence on the continent. With the extreme conditions preventing anything resembling normal settlement, and the Treaty forbidding explicit acts of sovereignty, this assertion of national presence is channelled into a variety of forms, many of them highly performative. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from naming rituals to the Japanese whaling controversy, a literary critic and a legal scholar together examine the distinct and evolving nature of the performance of sovereignty over the Antarctic ice.
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Nature, 2017
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Imaginative Narratives of the Far South, 2012
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Imaginative Narratives of the Far South, 2012
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Imaginative Narratives of the Far South, 2012
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Papers by Elizabeth Leane
In South Pole Elizabeth Leane explores the important challenges that this strange place poses to humanity. What is its lure? How and why should people live there? How can creative artists respond to its apparent blankness? What can it teach us about our planet and ourselves? Along the way, she considers the absurdities and banalities of human engagement with the Pole.
Ranging from the ancient Greeks to the present, and featuring spectacular images of the South Pole, this book offers a fascinating history of the symbolic 'heart' of the Antarctic.
This article considers Eight Below in relation to both the Japanese original and a very different film centred on a dog in the Antarctic context, John Carpenter’s iconic The Thing (1982). “Things from Another World” examines the relationship all three features construct between humans, dogs and the Antarctic environment, especially native Antarctic species. Considering both narrative and the semiotics of the moving image, the authors focus on the degree to which the dogs in these films are anthropomorphised, and how this affects the way in which they positioned in relation to the nature/culture boundary each film constructs. In its anthropomorphism, Eight Below suggests a melancholy at the imminent removal of dogs from Antarctica, yet simultaneously implies a degree of indifference to native non-human species on the only continent where there is no indigenous human population. In comparison, Antarctica permits its dogs to “go native,” becoming integrated into, rather than conquerors over, their ecological context. In The Thing, the dog remains uncanny in both the human and the nonhuman context in a disturbingly emptied-out Antarctica where potentially nothing but the truly alien can survive.
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