His title comes from a poem, which was not discovered until 1985, by Sir Douglas Mawson. It lay in a copy of The Home of the Blizzard, his classic account of Antarctic venturing. That work was alert and responsive to the artistic problems of representing the southern continent. No-one has bettered Mawson’s prose, for all that it shows the dimensions of the task. His poem is less carefully wrought, but suggests the allure of the Antarctic, not this time through its visual impact: ‘if perchance you hear the silence calling / The frozen music of the star­yearning heights’.

Mawson’s prestige and influence were largely responsible for persuading the Chifley government, although it was in the throes of post-war reconstruction, to commit Australia to research in the forty-two per cent of the Antarctic continent that it claimed. Yet the key figure in Bowden’s narrative is Phillip Law who – in 1949 – became the first director of the Antarctic Division and held the post through seventeen years and many wrangles with Treasury bureaucrats. Bowden skilfully explains the political, and related logistic difficulties faced by the ANARE. It was a long step from the voyage of the Wyatt Earp south in the 1940s (a ship appropriately named for a chancer) to the eventual acquisition of effective ice-breaking vessels much more recently. Some ministers were keenly supportive of the Antarctic endeavour. Casey base is justly named for one of them. Others were hostile. Preoccupied with New Guinea, Paul Hasluck had no time for Antarctic affairs which he hived off from External Affairs to Supply. A Liberal attorney­general, Garfield Barwick, decided that on balance ‘the potential scientific and technological advances of peaceful nuclear explosions in the Antarctic outweigh the possible risks’. Happily someone overruled him, although an American writer blithely set off a ‘device’ in an Antarctic Cold War thriller not many years ago.

While never neglectful of how what happened in Australia affected the ANARE, Bowden necessarily concentrates on the adventures and dangers in Antarctica, and in such strange places of the earth above the Antarctic Circle as Heard and Macquarie Islands. Antarctica is dangerous. The voyage down can be demanding and frightening enough. Then loading and unloading from ships, dealing with ma­chinery in frozen conditions, avoiding crevasses and frost­bite are all severe physical hazards of the job. An appendix lists twenty men who were killed or died while working for the ANARE. In the early years of its operations, medical problems posed acute difficulties. Doctors spent most of their time being dentists. Appendicitis scares were frequent. One doctor was prepared to remove his own. Numerous circumcisions were performed. With a straight face, Bowden suggests that enforced sexual abstinence made it seem an apt moment for the snip.

But what of sex in Antarctica? Bowden includes multiple disclaimers of homosexual activity, although he notes men’s frequent fondling of one another, oral gratification through over-eating as well as ‘a growing ANARE penchant for cross­dressing at midwinter’. The notorious tale of the scientific analysis of frozen faeces near Mawson’s hut (supposed to reveal semen traces when initially diet was being investigated) is not aired here. The Silence Calling does give a detailed treatment of the harassment of women in Antarctica, whether specifically through obscene remarks and pornographic material, or by a less focused resentment of this disruption of a male preserve that must long have seemed the safest on earth.

The Silence Calling is a handsomely made book. The paper stock is rich, the leading generous, the illustrations numerous and functional. There are many colour photographs. Oddly, they seem less compelling than those in black and white and certainly than those which Frank Hurley took during expeditions with Mawson and Shackleton. Why is this? A character in one of Thomas Keneally’s two Antarctic novels (nothing by halves for him) remarks portentously that the continent is ‘a sacrament of the absolute’. It is ‘a place for prophets’. Perhaps black and white photographic art best limns the stark, unequivocal character of the Antarctic environment. Hurley’s pictures made beauty of workaday activities. Mawson’s prose sought to register the absolutes of climate, of physical and emotional strain that the Antarctic imposed on men.

Bowden’s book is less artistically ambitious, but its scope is broad. The mastery of details of scientific inquiry, international co-operation in an ecologically sensitive area whose mineral riches tempt but are untouched, political intriguing, personal relationships, the schedules of work and management of leisure (Law cut out spirits and tried to educate expeditioners’ palates for wine-drinking) in The Silence Calling is altogether admirable. His tone is that of an enthusiast, but never at the expense of a scrupulous use of evidence, shown particularly in the number of individual, sometimes conflicting testaments that he allows to be heard. A character in Conan Doyle’s thriller of the 1920s, The Lost World, laments that the sites of romance on earth are already exhausted. He overlooked Antarctica, a continent whose power to compel awe and allegiance The Silence Calling splendidly evokes.