'A beautiful miniature harbour'
In calm air under sunny skies, on 8 January 1912, the men of Aurora emerged from under the towering cliffs of the glacier tongue that was later named for Xavier Mertz, to see a sweeping 60-kilometre bay to the west. Mawson called it Commonwealth Bay, after his newly-federated nation.
Near the eastern end of Commonwealth Bay, behind some outlying islets, the party saw a rocky shore enclosing what Mawson later remembered as ‘a beautiful, miniature harbour’. Here, about 2560 kilometres south of Hobart at latitude 67° south and longitude 142°40' east, he determined to establish the AAE’s main base. He named it after Sir Hugh Denison, a Sydney benefactor of the expedition.
The low rocky ridges and ice-filled valleys of Cape Denison occupy a coastal strip about 1.5kilometres long by a few hundred metres deep. A valley behind the cape ends at the sea in what Mawson called Boat Harbour. About 50 metres from the shore the AAE built its living quarters.
Ice cliffs flank the rocky cape on either side, and behind all looms the mighty Antarctic plateau. This great sheet of ice rises steadily to over 4000 metres – both in altitude and in thickness – and extends thousands of kilometres to the South Pole and beyond.
From Cape Denison, the nearest permanent human presence today is the French station of Dumont d’Urville, 233 kilometres away. But Cape Denison is remote from most Australian operations in the Antarctic – the nearest Australian continental station is Casey, 1000 kilometres to the west.
Aside from teams sent by the Australian Government and the Mawson’s Huts Foundation to conserve the historic remains, the most frequent human visitors are tourists, curious to make contact with the iconic structures that still stand a century later. But only a few actually get to land at Cape Denison. This is, after all, the home of the blizzard.
