Antarctic Thesaurus
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totem
Can home be situated in one's head?
As a person who has led
a contemporary nomadic lifestyle
for many years
I certainly hope so.
Internally is where I have stored
my lack of possessions
and often I have luxuriated
in a cosy private time-out place
somewhere behind my eyeballs.
Travel has somehow turned into dwelling
after twenty years of jumping
from place to place.
Home has drastically shrunk:
transformed into a fluid concept
that's easy to move.
Antarctica will be home
for the little sculptures I make
but it cannot be my home.
Stephen Eastaugh, 2002
Australian Antarctic Division website
Hans the carpenter Man Sculpted by Antarctica [1977] Photo, Ian Phillips, Davis 2007
The Africans say that you leave
a part of yourself,
your spirit,
in each place you camp
hence the searching looks
as we leave the campsite
even when we have nothing to leave.
The head holds my spirit of that stay.
He looks out to the forests
I left behind me,
when I stand on the coast
and look for auroras in the southern sky
he was there to look back at me...
After a while
I returned to my little village,
I got on with being
a part of the community here
with renewed vigor.
The beauty of Antarctic base communities
is similar to the one here,
we all live here because
we like the place and want be here.
Hans the carpenter
AAD website 8 Jan 2008
Totems provide the physical expression of metaphysics. To the person unaware of the metaphysics, the totem is merely an object, or music, or dance, or ritual or whatever, and that’s as far as it goes. However, it is possible to use someone else’s totem for your own thoughts. Whatever Beethoven had in mind in his Fifth, it is my totem for a year spent at Heard Island.
I hope we never lose our wondering, nor arrive at the point where all is explained and there is no mystery left.
Fred Elliott, Melbourne 2008
