Chasing the Light
by Jesse Blackadder
Harper Collins
In the 1930s, while historians were busy recording the attempts of explorers to reach the South Pole, Norwegian whaling ships were mapping parts of Antarctica. Despite hundreds of women applying to go the British and Australian expeditions, none succeeded. But there were women on the Norwegian whaling ships and many set foot on the mysterious continent.
Sixty years later, Diana Patterson, the first female station leader in Antarctica, searched to find the name of the ‘first woman’ to set foot on Antarctica and belatedly celebrated her achievement while she was stationed on the white continent. Australian writer Jesse Blackadder traveled to Norway to find out that Ingrid Christensen was not an explorer, but a 38 year-old mother of six children who traveled with her husband on a whaling boat he owned.
She went to Antarctica four times in the 1930s, taking a couple of female companions with her each time. This was the inspiration for Blackadder’s adventure, which is a tribute to those Norwegian pioneers and also to the thousands of women who were prevented from going to Antarctica until the 1970s. Information about the women is sparse but Blackadder has managed weave fact with fiction to capture the hardships encountered by these pioneers as well as the beauty and brutality of the icy world.
Lezly Herbet
