On first sight, the island looks like something a child might draw when asked to imagine fire and ice.
Heard Island is a tiny volcanic dot in the southern Indian Ocean, one of the world’s most remote locations, about 4100km southwest of Perth and about the same distance southeast of South Africa.
Big Ben, a huge snow and ice massif, rises whale-like from its wildlife-congested shorelines. Part of it, the steep, sometimes smoking-steaming chimney-like cone of Mawson Peak, reaches 2745m, making it the highest point, and one of only two active volcanoes, in Australian sovereign territory. (There are three higher mountains in Australian Antarctic Territory, but that is an informal land claim.)
Its latitude, at 53 degrees south, is only a little below that of Campbell Island, and about the same as the English Midlands, yet it is an angry, wind-blown subantarctic outpost, constantly tossed about by ferocious westerly storms which reach lower latitudes here due to the uninterrupted passage further north of the cold seas behind the Antarctic Convergence front.
By all accounts, Heard Island is utterly incredible. Mind-blowing. From a distance it looks like a vast pile of ice cream. But up closer, it is quite a different proposition. The few who have set foot there felt it was an alien place, one not meant for people.
Legendary Dunedin climber and author Philip Temple, a member of the extraordinary sea expedition to take scientific observations on the island in early 1965 and be the first to climb successfully to the summit of Mawson Peak, told The Weekend Mix there was a great deal of relief when they "got off the thing" intact and were back on their ship.
"We watched the island disappear. And I was very glad. We had a terrific voyage home."
Heard Island’s vicissitudes are now laid bare in The Great White Whale, a feature-length documentary produced by film-maker Michael Dillon.
The film had its premiere in Christchurch at the end of June as part of Doc Edge, the New Zealand Documentary Film Festival, and was screened in Wellington and Auckland this week. Work is under way to organise screenings in Dunedin.
However, from Monday, 1000 Doc Edge subscribers can stream all the films selected for the festival, until the end of the month.
A non-swimmer, Temple, who was only 25, had never sailed before, let alone thrown himself at the mercy of the colossal swells of the southern oceans. But he says he never got seasick on the 87 days at sea.
"If it had been up to me in the very first place, I wouldn’t have chosen to go on an expedition down there. But I knew Warwick and I knew Colin, and I thought, all right, it’s a totally different challenge going on the ship."
Patanela skipper Bill Tilman, a 66-year-old gnarled, pipe-smoking climber and sailor, was one of Temple’s heroes.
"Once you got to know him, he was fine. He was a bit disappointing in the end, but it is always is, you know, because you build up this image of people."
Tilman didn’t talk much and didn’t suffer fools gladly, Temple says. As a non-sailor, he asked Tilman how the ship’s steering and the wheel worked.
"He said: ‘If you want the ship to go to the left, you move it left. If you want to go right, you move it to the right’. That really pissed me off," Temple says, laughing.
Their first view of Heard Island remains seared into his memory.
"We were sailing towards the island and, I don’t know if it was the spindrift and the spume, and a bit of cloud and fog, but this thing kind of took shape in front of us. Then it just got bigger and bigger, and I’ll never forget feeling in the pit of my stomach an ‘Oh my God!’, you know."
It had been arranged that the five to go ashore on Heard would remain there about a month, while the ship and its remaining crew returned to the French-administered Kerguelen Islands about 400km to the northwest.
"There was terrific tension," Temple says. "We actually started off for the island a couple of days before, but that hadn’t worked and then we got caught in a storm. So this was the second attempt.
"It was very tense getting all your gear on and getting all the stuff into this rubber raft. And then heading off, because although it had been chosen as the ideal place to start the climb, we knew it was an open coast and there were these big waves — we could see the surf breaking.
"Colin was on the tiller and he gunned the motor, and it all happened very quickly. We thought we were going to zoom in and up the beach, but we went completely head over heels. It was very quick.
"When the waves receded, we were actually on the beach and the raft was upside-down. I think I had my knee trapped, because it blew up a bit later, but John [Crick] and [scientific officer] Grahame [Budd] were completely trapped and we had to get them out as quickly as possible because another wave came and washed all over."
As Putt says in the documentary, this was probably the first mountain-climbing expedition to start below sea-level.
Temple recalls they unloaded the raft and stacked their gear on the beach, soon to be named Capsize Bay, and went back to the ship to get a second load of equipment. They had planned three trips, but the last one was optional and never happened.
From base camp, they carried the heavy pyramid tent up the mountain, with about half a tonne of food and equipment. They made dumps halfway to Fiftyone Glacier and then set up a camp there for two nights, before lifting it all up the pass and setting up the main camp.
That was home for a week in total, initially for several days while they waited for a break in the weather allowing them to climb to the Mawson Peak summit.
Temple says his pack weighed about 30kg.
"Going up to that pass, it was deep snow and the weather was deteriorating. I felt really terrible. I said, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t actually put another foot forward with the load on my back’. Colin took something off me so I could."
The wind direction and the weather was changing constantly. Somewhat optimistically, they knew a break in conditions would eventually come, just not when it would come.
"There were some half-OK days and maybe a few hours where we would go up and have a look and put poles in. Finally, we got the break, but it’s actually a slow process, at the top of something like that, because the snow is so deep and you’re moving quite slowly. You see the target in front of you and it takes a few minutes to finally get to.
"We stopped and let Grahame go first, because he was the one who was devoted to that island. Then we all came up after him. There were lots of hugs, rude remarks and that sort of thing.
"But the next thing was, as you can see from the photos and the flags, the wind was starting to get up and we were starting to get a bit of a whiteout, just cloud, and we realised that, while Grahame wants to go down a bit into the crater, it was a bit dangerous. We realised we had to get off that thing as quickly as possible."
There were sulphur deposits and fumaroles at the top, but they descended back to camp in driving sleet.
Once back closer to sea level at base camp, the team spent their second fortnight carrying out experiments. Temple studied the island’s insect life and was the only member paid for his work, by the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. He discovered a tick and a mite, both of which bear his name in their Latin nomenclature.
For Temple, now 85, just because you’ve travelled to what has been called the world’s loneliest island, it doesn’t mean you liked it and want to return.
Asked if he still thinks about it much, he says: "No I don’t. I wouldn’t be bothered to [go back]. I’m too old now; the knees are shot. In any case, I was very glad to get off that damn thing.
"The wind never really stopped. Occasionally it would die down, a bit, and you’d get a bit of sun. But there’s that shot [in the documentary] where all the gravel is being blown along the beach. I mean, it starts to get you — it’s a bit like living in Wellington.
"It’s just a ferocious place. And that’s why, when I was collecting the insects there are flies, but nothing flew there. No insects flew! Too hard," he laughs.
Getting off the island and back to Patanela was also highly stressful, and even more tricky now they were on the beach working against the powerful incoming breakers.
"That really was difficult. The days leading up to it again were very tense. We spent a lot of time putting rocks down on the beach to gauge the tide and everything, and watching the waves.
"The decision was made relatively early that there’s no way we can take all the gear off. We’re going to get ourselves off and the essential stuff, like cameras, the scientific collections, that valuable stuff. I mean, how could we possibly carry it all? Impossible.
"When I think about it, that hadn’t been thought through. The idea that five blokes could carry all that and the raft into the surf was a bit stupid."
Left behind were tents, sleeping bags, ice axes, ropes, and the Frost and Snow books.
What has really stuck in Temple’s mind is the "incredible teamwork, and the leadership of Warwick", who started the Australian Outward Bound school.
"The way he picked people with their different skills was quite remarkable. The other thing Warwick and Colin must have thought about were the personalities of the people.
"In four and a-half months, the only slight tensions that developed were between John and the skipper, because John was a bit stroppy, a young guy, and he didn’t get on with a skipper who didn’t take fools lightly. But that settled down."
Apart from gangs of sealers in the mid-1800s, Heard Island has never sustained a human population. Birds and marine mammals rule supreme.
Temple talks about that sense of being invaders in the documentary.
"With all these animals, there’s wild sea out there, incredible weather - I feel we were a minor entity on this island. We were really very vulnerable. I felt we were always exposed.
"Human beings didn’t belong in this place."
