Looking back on his time on the continent (1959–1965), my father – who began his Antarctic career as a scientific assistant at Port Lockroy and ended it as scientific leader at Scott Base – suggested that there was no room in Antarctica for politics or national gain. His optimistic perspective echoes the preamble to the Antarctic Treaty which expresses the belief that international co-operation in science, such as that evidenced during the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY), would benefit all humanity. My father’s view suggests that what might be a cause of tension between governments was less important on the ground, despite intense personal, social and political pressures on men living and working on a homosocial research station, in extreme conditions, often confined in close quarters. However, his optimism seems justified not only by the terms of the Treaty but also by the years of peaceful co-operation which followed it: the growing number of Treaty signatories and regular multinational collaborations, the Madrid Protocol and conventions such as the one addressing the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The writers of a psychological report from Halley in 1959 believed that in the Antarctic winter “[a] new sense of values [was] born” (Lush & Norman, Reference Lush and Norman1959, p. 5). The darkness of winter, with its introversion and increased need for vigilance and sensitivity in social interaction for the benefit of individuals and the group, is a time of rebirth. The values referred to by Lush and Norman are in some ways codified in the pragmatism of a treaty which recognises occasionally competing rights and claims of the Treaty signatories, while not endorsing them, and which insists on co-operation for the benefit of the whole.

“Met Obs” is extracted from a longer work which forms part of the creative element of my PhD. The poems are based on meteorological reports and journals from the UK station at Port Lockroy written in advance of the 1957–1958 IGY. They focus on the small-scale society of the base itself, where individuals are tested to their limits by close proximity and the onset of winter. The sequence follows the seasons, moving from light into darkness and back again, the relationship between the weather and the men’s mood demonstrated in “Codes (2)” where apparently trivial annoyances become the equivalent of a full-scale storm. The poems engage with the work and circumstances which helped foster a shared scientific imaginary, as well as the nexus of Antarctic “values” endorsed by the Treaty and the later Madrid Protocol.

It has been suggested (Codling, Reference Codling2001) that wilderness and aesthetic values, recognised by the Protocol on Environmental Protection, should be separated for the purposes of mapping the landscape and providing a consistent framework for decision-making. However, it seems that the Antarctic experience as it is expressed in the base diaries is absolutely about combination – the practical business of the scientists’ life alongside the extraordinary beauty and harshness of the landscape – and while there is a benefit to clarification, and Codling accepts that ultimately subjectivity cannot be avoided, the wording of the original treaty and the Madrid Protocol recognise the holistic nature of the experience. The opening poem in “Met Obs” takes a statement of material fact and places it on the background of a contemporaneous meteorological report from Lockroy, setting up the question of how far scientific data in a historical context can be employed in poetry. This question is further explored in “OP(i)” which challenges the view expressed in Edgar Allan Poe’s sonnet “To Science” [1829] that the “peering eyes” of science have stripped divinity from the natural world (Poe, Reference Poe1829). The entry for 3rd July in the Lockroy base diary reads, “Saw a very good illustration of ‘Mother of Pearl’ clouds during the morning…The delicacy of structure and the beauty of the colouring beggars description…Several of us bemoaned the fact that we hadn’t a colour film…” (Lockroy, 1954) The frustrated desire to record the clouds on film suggests that several men wanted a means not just to record a meteorological phenomenon, but also to convey its beauty and its effect on them. Along with the drawings which accompany the Lockroy meteorological reports, this is evidence that scientists on base were just as alive to the aesthetic qualities, as to the scientific value, of what they were observing in the landscape.

Making daily life possible is one of the most powerful aspects of the diaries, and a kind of commonsense “making do,” perhaps not unexpected from men who had often seen military service, is inflected by the grandeur of the environment. “In Antarctica,” remarks Francis Spufford, “even the butter is primeval” (Spufford, Reference Spufford, Crane, Leane and Williams2011). “Met Obs” questions whether the transformative experience associated with the sublime can be expressed in the language of work. The spiritual as well as the factual aspect of the experience is conveyed in “The Stevenson Screen” where both man and machine measure and record, number is poetic and instruments sound out “the music of weather.” The final poem, “OP(vii)” sets the observation and illustration of the parhelia circle in the context of Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned,” and asks with Wordsworth that we bring to our encounters with the natural world “a heart/That watches and receives” (Wordsworth, Reference Wordsworth1986, p. 131).

For me, there is profound hope in the terms of an Antarctic Treaty System which looks towards an approach to values which transcends international, academic and semantic divisions. We need to take seriously the range of ways in which those values are communicated; there is an impressive body of literature and art, as well as other disciplines, which explores various intersections of the personal, political, historic and scientific in the particular context of Antarctica and its global significance. The presentation of these poems suggests that the values they embody, despite deriving from the particular conditions of scientists living and working in the Antarctic in the mid years of the 20th century, remain as relevant now as it was to a time of heightening fears of potential nuclear war.