Award winning playwright, Julia Jarel, took one look at Syd Kirkby's biography Fixing Antarctica and was inspired to take the epic tale to the stage. Dancing with a Dream - The Story of Syd Kirkby is the result. This full length play will be performed at Hale School...
The Biography is definitely reaching completion. Shelly reworked the cover after I received a much higher definition version of the portrait and found a mistake - yes, really, a grammatical error in the back cover blurb. Here is a low-resolution version of the...
In the last post, Syd Kirkby, the surveyor, having been appointed as fire warden, found himself the butt of quite a deal of nervous laughter once the team were successful in extinguishing the early morning blaze in one of their dongers. But fire is no laughing matter...
The Victorian government formed the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 1891, Their headquarters building, completed in 1892, was designed by Smith & Johnson in association with Lloyd Tayler & Fitts. The Tall tower once commanded panoramic views over Melbourne,...
Phil Law stoked the fires of celebrity to keep the Antarctic project in the public gaze although he was ordered by senior bureaucrats inside the Department of Foreign Affairs to stop it. He was able to keep the men of ANARE inside daily and weekly papers with his own...
April 1956. Previously at Mawson Station. The field party returned from their first plateau expedition with the surveyor disappointed that visibility prevented him getting an astrofix from the top of the mountain. When he tried to develop the round of photographs...
March - April 4, 1956. Previously at Mawson Station. Syd Kirkby, Peter Crohn, Bill Bewsher and Toby Cooper went out on their first expedition on the plateau. Syd and Peter climbed a mountain and spent a chilly day taking observations and trying to get an astrofix....
April 1956 Still out in the field, this first trip over the plateau lasted from Tuesday 27 March 1956 to Wednesday 4th April. Syd and Bill Bewsher (who was a much more experienced climber) climbed a mountain to get another astrofix. An astrofix is The Fix referred to...
Previously at Mawson Station 1956: During March, most of the work in Horseshoe Harbour was domestic. The office dongas took shape with painted walls and shelving, and the metal plane hangar was completed. Small parties took the dogs out on one- or two-day training...