Tuesday 23rd July 2013

This morning the blizzard was still blowing fifty knots so I spent the morning in my room sorting emails and generally catching up on things. After smoko I went down to the operations building and searched through all the old station documents to find the 1960 station log book, the 1961 and 1962 logs and also a heap of other maps and field reports to aid me in some research I have been working on lately.

I scanned the entire 1960 station log book and found exactly what I was looking for and then I read through the 1961 log book and the field reports and also found what I was looking for. In December 1960 my step father Bill Kellas was extracted from Binders base by a Dakota aircraft and brought back to Mawson station but shortly after the Dakota was wrecked at Rumdoodle in a severe blizzard preventing a fuel drop to be made for the returning field party.

As a result, one of the two tractor trains had to be abandoned two hundred and ninety kilometres from Mawson when they ran low on fuel. The 1961 logbook and field reports revealed a recovery team left Mawson on the 7th November 1961 and succeeded in recovering the D4 tractor and sledges after a very eventful trip.

 

After lunch Chris, Peter C and Trent decided to replace our main UPS in the Operations building resulting in the crashing of our VoIP telephone system. By the time I knocked off it still wasn’t working.