This isn’t a book for dog lovers. If you like nothing better than taking your mutt for a walk in the park and enjoy the company of creatures who won’t let you throw anything away without running after it and bringing it back covered in slobber, go and read White Fang, The Call of the Wild or something like that. They die. Sometimes horribly and in pain, sometimes put out of their misery with a bullet. And sometimes to go in a pot.

To put it in perspective: in 1912, at the same time as Captain Scott set out to attempt to reach the South Pole, a predominantly Australian expedition set sail to fill in some of the blanks in what was known about the Antarctic and its geography. Led by Douglas Mawson, they spent up to two years in hostile conditions gathering what scientific data they could and surviving on tinned and dried food, supplemented with fresh penguin and seal meat when available. Between them, they reached locations several hundred miles apart and showed what the young Australian nation could achieve. But it was also a dangerous venture: two of the party did not return and the privations of Antarctic life also took their toll on the sled dogs.

At the heart of the book is the compelling narrative of Mawson’s own experiences. He set out from base camp with two companions and several dogs, and was the only one to return. One of his companions fell into a huge crevasse, together with several dogs and most of the provisions, never to be seen again. The other gradually succumbed to hunger and dysentery, and died in a makeshift tent with Mawson. The dogs, as intimated above, hauled the remaining sled as far as they could, but were sacrificed as they became incapable of further exertions, to feed both their fellow dogs and their human masters. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading when Mawson describes what had to be done to make the remains palatable, but by the same token the sense of relief when he returns to base camp and comparative comfort is palpable.

One of the book’s best qualities, in fact, is Mawson’s very Edwardian sense of humour- wry and understated, he comes through strongly as a personality. By contrast, other sections of the book are copied wholesale from the notes of other expedition members who were more concerned with recording scientific data, and make very frustrating reading as they give little or no impression of what it was like to be there. The final sections dealing with the halfway station on Macquarie Island are tedious by comparison and very frustrating reading- it’s one of the limitations of publishing in the 1910’s and 1920’s that a comparatively limited number of photographic plates illustrate the book, and all of course in monochrome.

This was, make no mistake, often a fairly dull and uninspiring read with tedious amounts of scientific data and the names of the birds observed without any illustration or real description. However, it deserves a great deal of respect because of what Mawson endured and his ability to bring his own experiences to life. Sadly this doesn’t extend to the experiences of his fellows on the expedition and their sections of the book are dull by comparison. But Mawson’s own description of his experiences and suffering, contrasted with his normal ebullient antipodean humour, are absolutely priceless.