Review: Into the Ice

Rebecca Priestley reviews a beautifully illustrated Antarctic miscellany.

What’s your South Polar seadog name? I can’t decide whether mine is Phytoplankton Stinker or Aurora Moondog. Or perhaps it’s Snotsicle Albatross? No, I’ve got it—it’s Iceblink Stormcatcher. 

You can find your seadog name in Into the Ice: Reflections on Antarctica by Australian authors and illustrators Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch. They each travelled from Australia to Antarctica by ship, sailing from Tasmania, through the Southern Ocean to the frozen continent. 

This book is not a narrative about their journeys, and it’s not a book filled with facts about the world’s coldest, highest, driest, windiest continent, rather it’s an Antarctic miscellany. As part of a tradition that dates back more than 100 years to Aurora Australis, the first book written and published in Antarctica, this book contains journal entries, stories, photographs, sketches, paintings—and a fun seadog-name generator. There’s history too. As well as quotes from Antarctic explorers (including Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton) there are true stories—like the one about 22 men who spent an Antarctic winter on remote Elephant Island, eating seals and penguins, their only shelter two upturned lifeboats where ‘they slept packed together like smoked sardines and snored like elephant seals.’

For me, the highlight of the book is Coral Tulloch’s illustrations. The South Polar seadog page is illustrated, in pen, ink and watercolours, with diving Adélie penguins, a googly-eyed octopus, and an abundance of strange looking Antarctic fish. My favourite illustration is a double page pen and ink painting called ‘The Southern Ocean’, showing a red-hulled ship sailing into a deep trough of blue. Later in the book, a scraperboard illustration of the return voyage, ‘Leaving the Ice,’ shows the ship in black seas surrounded by towering icebergs. These illustrations are the kind you can get lost in, drawing you into the cold and tempestuous immensity of the Southern Ocean.

This book didn’t match my own experiences of Antarctica—where I travelled by Hercules, helicopter and Hägglund, and spent much of my time at Scott Base eating scones and interviewing scientists—but Antarctica is a huge continent, almost twice the size of Australia. Everyone’s experience of Antarctica is different, but the thing all us Antarcticans have in common, is an appreciation of its beauty and fragility. As the authors say at the start of the book, ‘Everyone is changed in some way by visiting Antarctica. Some say once you go, you will always have ice in your veins.’ 

Not many people get to visit Antarctica. But we all get to read books. This hardback book is more than 80 pages long and it’s worth spending time with, preferably snug in bed, the wind rattling the windows, losing yourself in the stories and images of Antarctica. This is a book for all ages, but I think a hot chocolate and a soft toy penguin would complete the Antarctic experience.


Into the Ice: Reflections on Antarctica 

By Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch

Published by Allen & Unwin

RRP: $38.00

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Rebecca Priestley
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Rebecca Priestley is professor of Science in Society at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She was science columnist for the NZ Listener for six years and is the author or editor of seven books, including End Times (2023) and Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica (2019). She is the winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (2009) and the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize (2016) and a member of the Melting Ice, Rising Seas team who won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize (2019). In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She has an undergraduate degree in geology, a PhD in the history of science and an MA in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Rebecca has visited Antarctica three times—in 2011, 2014 and 2018.