A Vast Scale
[2011-04-10]

animation: Lisa Roberts
Sydney 2011

'A Vast Scale' is the title of an Antarctic Music website
being developed by Claire Beynon and Rupert Summerson.
I enjoy their play on the word 'scale'.
I made the animation before seeing the site,
imagining music played by the forces of the global ecosystem
with Antarctica at the centre.

Rupert alerts me to the 1906 quote
from Rudmose Brown, The Voyage of the "Scotia":

There is, I feel sure, no region in the world
more grand in its scenery than the Antarctic,
and no place more transcendent in its beauty.
It is a vast wonderland laid out on a vast scale,
in which littleness has no place;
but its very vastness, no less than its beauty,
while it quickens the traveller's daily wonder
and deepens his reverence,
forces him to feel
that it is a world he can never conquer,
a world in which the forces of nature
are too tremendous to overcome,
and must resignedly be bowed before
in the hope that they will suffer him
to come and pass again unscathed.