You see them dotted all over the Otago landscape - grey plastic water tanks for holding thousands of litres of water.
In two months' time, three of them will form a tiny imprint of humanity in the icy vastness of Cape Adare, about 700km north of Scott Base.
But they will not be holding water. Instead, they will serve as huts for a team of seven from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust, which is conserving the continent's first building.
The team will spend a month there during each of the next four summers, working on the hut of early Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink.
Mr Bradshaw, an Arrowtown-based mountaineer, ski tourer and businessman, loaded the huts on to a Chinese government icebreaker on Monday after building them in Lyttelton, with the help of a small team, over six weeks.
He has dubbed them ''turks'' because they are somewhere between a tank, a hut and a yurt.
With a floor area of 10sq m each, they are waterproof, light enough to be lifted by helicopter and strong enough to withstand temperatures of -30degC and 200kmh-plus winds.
Mr Bradshaw and three others, including Queenstowner Doug Henderson, will fly to Scott Base at the end of January.
They will then fly north to a Chinese base, reunite with the icebreaker and sail to Cape Adare, where the turks will be helicoptered ashore.
Because the 20,000-tonne icebreaker - with up to 300 people on board - would be ''sitting around twiddling its thumbs'' while they set up the huts at the site, Mr Bradshaw and his team would be on the clock, he said.
''It's kind of like Mission Impossible - you've got 24 hours to install three huts in the least accessible part of the world, and with some of the worst weather.
''As much work as possible, and thinking as well, has been done in New Zealand. So when we turn up with that 24-hour window, we can be incredibly efficient and have all the right tools and just get the job done.
''If the weather suddenly turns really bad when you're halfway through, you've got to think through how you're going to manage that.
''So it's quite a challenge - it's going to be fun.''
The timing of the huts' installation was partly dictated by penguins, he said.
''Cape Adare is one of the world's biggest penguin colonies, so we don't want to install them in the middle of the breeding season.
''One of my roles is going to be keeping an eye on them. If they're getting distressed by all the helicopter activity, we'll have to review operations.''
The huts would then sit empty until next summer, when the conservation team arrived for their first month's work on Borchgrevink's hut.
''They can just turn up next year, open the door and get started.''
Each turk had a specific purpose: one was a living area, another was a workshop and the third was a store room with a toilet cubicle. The conservation team's members would sleep in their own tents made with timber.
Mr Bradshaw and a group of friends built a turk prototype in his backyard earlier this year before it was flown into the hills behind Arrowtown in July.
It has been used by back-country skiers and will be a refuge for trampers over the coming summer.
He said he was surprised how quickly the turk project had progressed from an idea he had last spring.
But as one Antarctic veteran had told him, the huts were a ''simple solution to a complex problem''.
The turks' design was an evolution on that of some rudimentary huts, also made of plastic water tanks, used by the Australian Antarctic Division on its subantarctic islands
He was confident the turks were an ''incredible solution'' to the widespread need for a temporary shelter, with a relatively low build cost, that could be dropped into a remote site quickly.
As the Cape Adare huts proved their worth, he hoped to get orders for more from other Antarctic programmes.
Although the first three had been commissioned by Antarctica New Zealand for about $15,000 each, he saw the turks as a ''fun, interesting project'' rather than a commercial venture.
He would retain a commercial licence over their construction for such ventures, but would make his design available for anyone interested in building their own, possibly with a supplied kitset of some harder-to-make components.
