Photographers Roger Francey, Mark Forecast, Jim Kitchenside, Graham Dyke, Robert Merrick and Bill Kellas
This story is the result of two events that were separated by 53 years. The first was when, as a 22-year-old, I was preparing to spend a year in Antarctica running a telescope to study the Aurora Australis. Unable to sell my 350cc Velocette motorcycle for a reasonable price, I rode it the Melbourne docks in January 1960 where the Danish ice-breaker Thala Dan was berthed, and asked the ship’s Danish coxswain if he could load it on board for me. “No worries,” he said, “just drain the petrol out of it.” And so the motorbike went to Mawson station, where it gave many of us a lot of enjoyment when we rode it on the sea ice.
The second event was in 2013 when the Velocette Owners Club of Australia asked me if I would give a talk to members at their annual get-together. That prompted me to track down old expeditioners to assemble yarns and photos of other motorbikes that might have been taken south as part of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE).
I initially thought that there may have been three or four motorbikes, but, to my great surprise, I found that more than 30 were taken down between 1960 and 1980. In most cases this was done unofficially, with 17 going to Mawson, six to Davis, nine to Wilkes/Casey, and one to Macquarie Island. In most cases the bikes were passed on from one year to the next, sometimes for money and sometimes for a slab or two. One bike, a Matchless, appears to have survived the abuse of countless riders at Mawson from 1968-77. In some instances engines from the bikes were used in the many bizarre vehicles that were built down south on the long winter nights.
In 1960, usually on Sunday afternoons when work pressures and weather permitted, we used the Velocette to explore beyond Mawson station and to tow skiers and dog sleds with two or three passengers across the sea ice. The speed across the beautiful and mainly flat sea ice, while not super fast, was exhilarating, as was escaping the confines of the station. However, “tide cracks” in the sea ice were a major danger.
It wasn’t all play with these bikes. In December 1960 my Velocette played a key role in finding a DC3 Dakota aircraft which had broken its tie-down cables in a blizzard and had been blown 20km from its inland airfield into crevasses high above the sea ice. It was beyond recovery, but the motorbike and dog teams retrieved navigational and photographic equipment.
I sold the Velocette in 1961 to the new chef for Mawson, Ted Giddings, and he made a sidecar using a wheelbarrow wheel. It was a great success, with sidecars being common thereafter. In the company of a light tracked vehicle Ted covered about 100km across the sea ice from Taylor Glacier to Mawson in just a few hours. He towed a sled with tent, radio and food in case of problems.
. . .
As one reads through the yarns sent by ANARE motorcyclists, one behavioural trait seems to recur: a belief that the sea ice in late spring and early summer will support the rider and his machine, as it did all winter, even when it’s obviously thin and even looking black. I had the experience of having to change direction when an Adélie penquin popped up through a hole in thin ice 50 metres in front of me.
Others had similar stories. In 1970, Dave Parer, on foot, broke through black sea ice when he and Malcolm Robertson rode a 500cc Matchless from Mawson to one of the outlying islands. As Malcolm told it, reaching to get Dave back onto ice sturdy enough to hold him was touch and go, and the ride back to the station in shared clothing was anything but pleasant. They slunk off to their bunkrooms and didn’t tell anyone about it for 40 years.
Two riders lost their motorbikes through the sea ice. The first was Don Seedsman in 1964 when his 150cc BSA Bantam broke through a frozen-over tide crack near Mawson.
“The 50km/h forward inertia of my body deposited me on the far side of the hole, and I only got one wet leg,” Don said. “Luckily the cuffs on my trousers didn't snag on the footpegs of the bike. I just had time to look around and see the tail-light disappearing into the water.
“Phil Jacquemin came past on his locally-made ice yacht and offered me a lift back to base, which I readily accepted.”
The second loss was in 1965 when weather observer Mark Forecast was riding a BSA Bantam to deliver fresh bread across the bay from Wilkes station to REPSTAT (replacement station), which later became Casey station.
“The bike lurched into a tide crack and I went over the handlebars. I was hanging onto them to prevent the Bantam from sinking and I could see blokes on the roof of a new building looking at me, but they couldn’t do much to help. I hung on as long as I could, but eventually I could hang on no longer.”
His fellow expeditioner, John McKenzie, added “Mark was wearing non-porous American thermal boots that he had left undone to reduce the perspiration effect and they flew off as the bike went in. He watched them fill up and sink and then he ran two kilometres across the sea ice in his socks to Wilkes station,” where he arrived “looking like a drowned rat”, according to Ken Shennan and Tony Warriner, the owners, incidentally, of the Bantam. Needless to say, it was Mark’s shout when next they drank.
But for Mark the adventures didn’t stop there: He took a VW Beetle to Mawson in 1967 and lost that through a tide crack. He and his companion, Ian Thomas, both clad in voluminous layers of cold weather clothing, managed to scramble onto the sea ice as the VW sank beside them. And from that posting he went onto another at Macquarie Island in 1969, taking with him a Yamaha 100cc Trailmaster.
“After trial runs near the coast, three of us manhandled the bike, with the back wheel being powered, up Gadget Gully to the plateau where it was garaged in a biohut and used for exploration and for delivering items to biologists in remote huts along the length of the island.” Mark took the Trailmaster back to Australia at the end of the posting. Sadly, Mark lost his fight with leukaemia in August 2015.
A property of sea ice that many of us discovered (independently) was that when it is thin, say 10 cm, it is rubbery and will bend under a weight and even make a wave as a motorbike moves across it. The account that I like most is when Bill Burch, who wintered at Wilkes in 1961, was riding a BSA Bantam on thin ice and saw a wave following him. “I remember that the only reasoning that I was capable of at the time was: keep the throttle wide open, turn in a very wide arc for shore and look out for thicker ice to get home on. It seemed important to psyche myself to prepare for the machine to break through and to try to make as slow and as spread-eagled a descent to the ice as possible, in the hope I would not follow it through. After another mile or so – which felt like an eternity – the wave vanished and clearly both the bike and I made it back.”
The use of motorcycles at the Australian stations seemed to come to an end in about 1980, possibly the result of quad bikes being taken to the stations officially, as well as a tightening of safety rules.
I will finish this article by mentioning earlier motorcycles. In 1947 Dr Alan Gilchrist took an Indian to Heard Island, but the terrain proved too challenging for it to be used very much. The first motorbikes on the Antarctic continent were two 120cc machines that had been donated to the 1949-52 Norwegian-British-Swedish Expedition to Dronning Maud Land by the Husqvarna company. Charles Swithinbank, the youngest member of that expedition, took the motorbikes out of their crates and used one for riding around and adapted the other to become a back-up generator for use on field trips with tracked vehicles. The Husqvarna that he rode had factory-fitted skis on both sides and these proved very useful for maintaining balance. Charles, who, sadly, died in early 2014, said that he managed to start the motorbike at temperatures as low as minus 46°C.
Learn more about Dr George Cresswell at www.research.csiro.au/educator-on-board
