Making a statement: NMA conservator Daniel Bornstein is dressed for the Antarctic with a handmade anorak, mittens and balaclava. Photo: NMA.
A National Museum of Australia conservator is en route to Antarctica on a dream voyage to walk in the steps of polar explorers and return a precious artefact to one of their restored huts.
Daniel Bornstein, 32, joined seven other select young explorers aged 18 to 35 in Christchurch this week for the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust expedition to the Ross Sea region, which is the focus of the Trust’s conservation efforts.
Daniel is the only Australian on the 28-day ship expedition, which will retrace the voyages of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.
It is the first time a group of young explorers will visit the iconic expedition bases of the legendary Antarctic explorers.
The Trust launched its Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project in 2002 and has been conserving these significant heritage sites on behalf of the world – the largest cold-climate heritage conservation project ever undertaken.
Daniel has been working primarily on Australian Antarctic artefacts at the Museum, but the one being returned to Scott’s Discovery Hut at Hut Point, Ross Island, is a well-worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, originally published between 1844 and 1846.
The book was given to the Trust by an anonymous donor who received it as a school prize in 1965.
Daniel said prior to his departure that the book, missing its cover and a few pages and smelling strongly of the seal blubber that fuelled stoves and lamps used by heroic-era explorers, was the only object from the Discovery Hut that spoke to the explorers’ leisure or downtime.
“This copy has been so well thumbed,” he said.
“Every single page of it is smeared with these kind of sooty blubbery fingerprints, and it’s an amazing artifact in the sense you can really see how precious it was to them at the time.”
Conservator Daniel Borstein and Conservation Technician Louise Piggin work on the Monte Cristo artefact. Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust.
Daniel worked on the book with other members of the team, saying there was a balance between conserving the work and retaining its well-worn character.
The huts have been restored to the state in which the explorers used them and can be visited physically but mostly virtually for online tours.
“It’s sort of like you step into them and it’s like they’ve just stepped down the street to buy a pack of smokes or something,” Daniel said. “Everything is as it was, and so the book will go back into the hut and sit in a spot that tells a story.”
Daniel has also got into the spirit of the journey, making his own waxed canvas anorak inspired by those worn on the Scott expedition to keep the chilling wind at bay and taking his own mini banjo to play, as a member of Shackleton’s crew did to entertain his stricken comrades.
He said waxed canvas was notoriously not very good at being waterproof but was windproof.
“So I figured it would probably only take me a couple of hours to make myself an anorak, and I made one in an afternoon, waxed it up with a microcrystalline wax, which is often known as Renaissance wax or museum wax, and now it actually works pretty well,” Daniel said.
The British expeditions infamously went for modern waxed canvas rather than the traditional Inuit furs that the Norwegian Amundsen used.
“So I guess this is a good opportunity for me to test just how bad it was in those situations,” Daniel said.
The well-thumbed and sooty volume of The Count of Monte Cristo. Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust.
To complete the look, he has also made sheepskin mittens and his partner Carly knitted him a Douglas Mawson pattern balaclava.
“So I’ve kind of got the whole look going now,” Daniel said. “I’m decked out in a lot of handmade stuff, which wasn’t really an intention of mine, but it’s kind of happened, and now it looks like I’m sort of making a statement, which is nice.”
For Daniel, who is steeped in classic and adventure literature and has worked closely with the Antarctic exploration photographs of Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting, the expedition is a dream come true.
“For a long time I sat underneath a beautiful big print of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition from that period and so I guess it’s always something that’s been a bit of a dream, but it’s like a dream that I didn’t dare to have, and so this has kind of made it a reality in a way that is unexpected, but I’m certainly very happy that it’s the case,” Daniel said.
To learn more about Scott’s Hut, visit the Antarctic Heritage Trust.
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