Showing posts with label antarctica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antarctica. Show all posts

Apr 18, 2009

Maurice Conly, Artist


LARGE IMAGE OPENS IN A NEW TAB OR WINDOW

At the end of a 3,488 kilometre flight from Christchurch, NZ7005, a 1969 Lockheed C-130H Hercules aircraft of the Royal New Zealand Air Force's No.40 Squadron unloads passengers and supplies at the Williams Field on the Ross Ice Shelf in McMurdo Sound in early 1974.

Seen above in original livery, but subsequently painted out in shades of camouflauge green and now in a monochrome gun-metal grey, the 40 year old aircraft is still in service with the RNZAF.


No work of a local artist would be more familiar to New Zealanders than that of the relatively unknown Maurice Conly.

For 54 years Wing Commander Robert Maurice Conly (1920-1995) was the last Royal New Zealand Air Force Official Artist. But beyond his stamp designs for New Zealand, Tokelau, the Ross Dependency, Niue and the Cook Islands, Conly's New Zealand twenty cent and one dollar coin designs are familiar to all Kiwis.

Dunedin born and trained, Conly was based at Christchurch when he returned to Antarctica in 1974 as an Antarctic Arts Fellow under the Artists to Antarctica Programme.


Commissioned to paint three large dioramas of wildlife studies for the Antarctic wing of the Canterbury Museum in 1977, he published Ice on my Palette in the same year. The coffee table sized book includes 27 sketches and 26 colour plates, with text by the Dunedin author Neville Peat, then an information officer with the Antarctic Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

One of the joys of the last town before Antarctica is the weekend Flea markets, not the trendy version on the city's outskirt at Riccarton, but the smaller, lesser known markets dotted around the inner suburbs. Signed by the authors, a copy of Ice on my Palette (from which the top illustration comes) was recently found in the Linwood Market at approximately a fifty-sixth of its international market value.

Sep 10, 2008

Lyttelton Base for New Icebreaker?


To be launched this month from the Pusan yard of Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction is the 6.950 ton diesel-electric research ice breaker Araon, which will be delivered to the Korea Polar Research Institute in September 2009.

With a 70 day endurance and a crew of 85, 60 of whom will be scientists, the ship will be capable of breaking 1 metre of ice at a speed of three knots.

Further reading: Korea eyes Chch base, The Press, 10 September, 2008

Jun 30, 2008

Podcast: Captain Cook and Georg Forster in the Antarctic

A 55 minute audio documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

It´s not well known that the first major scientific expedition to the Antarctic was led by James Cook during his 1773 voyage to New Zealand.

It´s even less well known that the voyage was recorded by a young German writer and natural historian who sailed with Cook.

Georg Forster´s A Voyage Round the World was one of the most famous and influential travel narratives of its time: a scientific adventure story which ranges from the terrors of the Antarctic ice to cannibalism amongst the Māori in New Zealand, which is graphically recounted in this documentary.

In this podcast hear readings from Forster´s book, Cook´s journals and The German Traitor, a novel based on Forster´s life.