ABSTRACT
Expeditions are theatreplays of power and possession performed for indigenous spectators, distant audiences back home, and even curious penguins in a howling wilderness. Antarctic expeditions, which often drew on naval traditions, were especially devoted to dress-ups and high jinx as ways of maintaining morale through the long, dark polar winter. In the early twentieth century Antarctica became an additional site of European colonial rivalry, the place for one last burst of continental imperialist exploration, which had been such a trademark of the nineteenth century. To the invaders and colonisers of Aboriginal Australia, there was an attractive moral simplicity about colonising an uninhabited continent. For Australians in Antarctica there is no more powerful word than Mawson. Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition was strategically establishing residency their hut was significantly a homestead and a house. Mawson employed more scientists, explored vastly more territory, compiled more data, and published more findings than any other Antarctic expedition of the heroic era.
