Author Archive for: comms@nzaht.org

Conservator Ciarán shares his story about coming full circle on his conservation journey with tins of Fry’s Pure Cocoa. It was during my conservation training at Cardiff University in 2008-9 that I first heard about Antarctic Heritage Trust and the conservation work they were doing on the historic huts of Scott and Shackleton. However, it was not until the winter of 2010 that I got my hands on an artefact – an artefact that may have been part of that epic journey south undertaken by Scott and his teams. This artefact was a wooden box containing seven pristine tins of Fry’s Pure […]

While there is certainly nothing ordinary about a job that involves opening and conserving wooden crates of century old Antarctic expedition provisions left on the continent by the ‘heroic era’ explorers, it’s what we’re doing a lot of at the moment as part of our artefacts conservation programme and, to be honest, one day becomes much like the next. Today it might be tins of Seville orange marmalade or sardines in olive oil, and tomorrow could be tins of self-raising flour and essence of beef – all wrapped, labelled and packed by their suppliers, and all requiring documentation, unwrapping, stabilisation, […]

Preparations for all polar explorations must be meticulous and there are a very few things that you can forget to pack for a major expedition to Antarctica and think: “Oh well, I’m sure we will get on without it.” Soap, while not necessary for survival, is still not one of them; but it was in fact what happened to the Borchgrevink Southern Cross expedition. According to Hugh Blackwell Evans’ account the expedition found, once installed in Cape Adare and when the Southern Cross had departed, that apart from a few bars for washing and shaving that the expedition members had […]