UNCONQUERED CONTINENT
ANTARCTICA, the. great island of * . ~ 7 ‘ ice, for before men solved the riddle of its existence. When its whereabouts was known, it waited generations again to feel the tread of the first foot, and years more before men journeyed at great hazard to its centre. Now it waits patiently for its discoverers to find some way to put its land to use. Neville Friedlander, a young Australian writer, has written a feature about Antarctica which opens with a vivid description of this last and loneliest Continent: "Picture yourself for a moment at the southernmost tip of the world. You are in the centre of a great plateau of ice rising ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. Travel over this vast blanket of ice and pass with it through steep mountain. openings as it falls slowly towards the sea. For a moment, the ground is flat and the massive sheet of ice lies even. Suddenly, there are huge cracks in the earth and the ice drops sharply ... now, the ice runs straight again and forms a frozen plain. Twelve hundred miles from its
starting-point, the great dome of ice. slides into the sea, sending pieces of its body tumbling out across the water." Four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosophers had cal- | culated that there must be land at the bottom of the Giobe. They called the Arctic after Arktos, the Constellation of the Great Bear. What better name to give its opposite than Anti-Arktos? But it was seventeen’ hundred years after Christ that Cook caugltit the first glimpse of the Great South Land. Since | then, Antarctica has seen great epics of exploration-the expeditions of Bellingshausen, Ross, Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott, Byrd-and there has lately been talk of another American expedi- | tion and also of a Commonwealth one. What is the future importance of Ant-arctica--economically? Politically? Listeners to 1YA at 8.0 p.m. on Thursday, October 28, will ,hear those questions ‘discussed in the NZBS production, by Alan Morris, of Antarctica-The Unconquered Continent. The illustration shows the Antarctic pack-ice--photographed from the masthead of the Terra Nova.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 21
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351UNCONQUERED CONTINENT New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 21
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