 Professor Tom Griffiths
Tom Griffiths and the International Polar Year
The International Polar Year (2007-08) has been launched worldwide and RSSS is making a major contribution to this cooperative global research effort. Tom Griffiths' history of Antarctica is being published in May 2007 in both Australia (UNSW Press) and overseas (Harvard University Press). Entitled Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica, the book is a history of international endeavour on the continent of ice over more than a hundred years. It represents a significant contribution from the social sciences to this international scholarly event.
The book was launched by Sir Guy Green in Hobart on 23 May 2007, with the support of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Australian Antarctic Division. There is also a peculiarly Australian moment that the book will mark. After a century of voyaging to Antarctica, Australians will soon be able to fly to and from the ice, for the Australian government is this year establishing an air link to Casey Station.
Tom was also a guest of the Sydney Writers' Festival in early June, and gave a public lecture on Antarctica at the National Library of Australia on 27 June. To mark the International Polar Year, he was invited to contribute one of the introductory essays to the Australian Yearbook 2007.
Photograph from the Harvard University Press cover of Slicing the Silence
Voyaging to Antarctica by Professor Tom Griffiths
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Slicing the Silence
Photograph and text from the UNSW Press book cover
‘In Earth’s only true wilderness,
the fundamentals of existence
are exposed. To survive, you need
food, you need warmth, and you need stories.
When you voyage to this Great South Land, you journey
with more than a hundred years of wisdom and
warnings from the human encounter with the ice.’
In the summer of 2002-03, acclaimed writer and historian Tom
Griffiths voyaged the Southern Ocean to Antarctica. He was with the
first Australian ship to ‘slice the silence’ of a year, arriving at Casey
Station to deliver the new team of ‘winterers’ and take away the old.
In Slicing the Silence Griffiths interweaves his own diary entries with
essays that explore the human history of the mysterious continent
of ice.
In this rich and vivid book, earlier stories of science, politics,
exploration and love weave through and deepen the author’s own
experience. It is inspired by a landscape where the laws of chemistry
and physics - and indeed the power of metaphysics - dominate.
Slicing the Silence is a book about travelling in time, travelling into
oneself, and travelling to the end of the earth.
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