1912 by Chris Turney

came former students of his, chief among them Douglas Mawson, a Yorkshire-born, tall and prematurely balding young geologist who was in the field at the time of the newspaper announcement. On 28 September 1907 Mawson wrote to David: ‘I should have dearly loved to have gone myself and shall in any case be with you as far as my imagination can carry me.’ Mawson was fascinated by the prospect that Antarctica held the key to one of the great geological unknowns: why living and fossilised plants and animals were commonly found across South America, Africa, Madagascar and Australia.
    David had asked in his 1904 Dunedin lecture whether Antarctica was home to the remarkable Glossopteris , a fossil plant that dominated the geological record during the Permian period, some 299 to 251 million years ago in Australia, Africa and India. With its distinctive tongue-shaped leaves, and growing up to eight metres in height, it appeared to be a form of tree fern but produced seeds. The most obvious explanation for it being found across the southern continents was an ancient land link to Antarctica, allowing wildlife to freely move between the continents.
    Some half-century earlier Joseph Hooker had first remarked upon the similarity of southern flora and asked whether the islands in the Antarctic region were ‘the remains of some far more extended body of land’. His friend Charles Darwin was inspired and suggested that the Antarctic region might indeed hold the key to the distribution of many species, speculating that it played a role in the explosion of seed-bearing plants. In1859, in his world-changing On the Origin of Species , Darwin ruminated about the similarities of plants in New Zealand and South America. He suggested that ‘this difficulty partially disappears on the view that New Zealand, South America, and the other southern lands have been stocked in part from a nearly intermediate though distant point, namely from the antarctic islands, when they were clothed with vegetation, during a warmer tertiary period, before the commencement of the last Glacial period.’
    Darwin wrote to Hooker in 1881 about how his ideas had developed: ‘I have been so astonished at the apparently sudden coming in of the higher phanerogams, that I have sometimes fancied that development might have slowly gone on for an immense period in some isolated continent or large island, perhaps near the South Pole.’ By the early twentieth century scientists had gathered a wealth of evidence pertaining to this theory. Large-horned tortoises known as Meiolania had been discovered in Australian and Patagonian rocks spanning what was thought to be tens of millions of years; living species of South American frogs had closely related cousins living in Madagascar; and marsupials were known to exist in both Australia and South America. The great Austrian scientist Edward Suess was the first to hypothesise that there must have been one large landmass that had united the southern continents. In 1885 Suess called it the lost continent of Gondwanaland.
    The Antarctic Manual summed up Suess’s evidence succinctly a few years later, stating that the evidence pointed to the possibility that ‘communication by land existed between the continental masses of the Southern Hemisphere and the Antarctic continent.’ Like Atlantis, these bridges must have sunk below the waves in the past. Antarctica’s fossil record offered a means of testing the concept of a land bridge.
    This intrigued Mawson, and David approached Shackleton about the young geologist joining the expedition. Reassured by the senior man’s recommendation but aware Priestley already filled the role, Shackleton appointed Mawson for the full duration of the expedition as physicist. Around this time, it seems Shackleton also invited David to lead the scientific program, rather than just having the Prof stay for a short visit. Shackleton now had serious scientific clout on