Diana Calder 94/95
Diana Calder
| Born in Alice Springs in 1955, Diana is the youngest of four daughters and grew up with Aboriginal people, mustering cattle in the deserts of the outback.
Educated in Adelaide at Wilderness school and later gaining a Diploma of Photography at Elizabeth Technical College, she established Classic Camera Company in Alice Springs. Diana married in 1989 and worked freelance in Melbourne.
Diana applied and was accepted for a ship berth with the Australian Antarctic Division's then-titled Humanities Program on Aurora Australis during the spring of September, 1994. She spent a total of three months enroute, at Davis station and Macquarie Island.
She now lives in Noosa Heads, Queensland.
Antarctic Impression
Pancake ice
| All of my earliest memories are of the wide skies and emptiness of central Australia. During the first years we experienced a ten year dry when almost nothing grew and the vast plains were all dust.
There are strange parallels between this dry, quiet land and that of Antarctica.
I spent much of my time in the centre visiting and travelling with people, going to isolated regions by truck, helicopter or camel. This ability to hitch a ride somewhere interesting made my time in Antarctica more fruitful because a photographer is a non-essential person in that environment. We were considered "jollies" and to arrange company to travel across the sea ice to take pictures of a blue iceberg, required skills of persuasion.
The ship voyage is like a long slow-motion dream filled with grease ice, the gentle pitch of the swell, the increasing cold and gradual envelopment in sea ice. We travelled in early spring. The sea ice was still extensive and the way was often difficult.
The dynamic between other Antarctic voyagers and me was a challenge. I made friends with veterans and maximised all opportunities, assisting scientists in the field and going on sorties from the station in the Sikorsky helicopter over the dominating presence of the nearby Sorsdal glacier.
Being a Territorian, and a far cry from the outback, photographing Antarctica was the ultimate challenge. With experience and good equipment I was lucky to be able to travel and photograph this extraordinary place and capture some of its intricacies.
It is certainly one of the main experiences in my life. The material gathered has been used extensively to depict the environment and work of the Australian Antarctic Division. My images are in stock libraries around the world, are regularly sold in USA and have been used in published articles and recently in the issue of Australian stamps, featuring Antarctica.
Upon return to Australia I completed an honours degree in horticultural science at Melbourne University, graduating in 2001. The incentive for this surely came from the science witnessed during my trip.
I now reside in Noosa Heads and have become a surfer. Somehow, sitting out there in the pre-dawn light, waiting for waves in a vast sea, recalls the isolation of both central Australia and Antarctica.
Grounded berg
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