The Southern Frontier

Antarctica looms large in the Australian psyche – as a place of science, adventure and peril. Our romantic entanglement with this unique environment is deep and enduring. The Southern Frontier traces Australia’s Antarctic obsession from its origins in the nineteenth century to the creation of the Australian Antarctic Territory and a permanent national Antarctic program in the 1930s and 1940s. It reconstructs Australian ideas, beliefs and anxieties about the Antarctic and shows how Australia