Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Victoria University of Wellington
Lecture Theatre 1, Faculty of Architecture and Design
139 Vivian Street, Te Aro Campus, Wellington
This is the second event to accompany the exhibition “Lessons from the Arctic: How Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole” (Link to event here).
“We took risks. We knew we took them” R.F. Scott, 1912.
As historians, we are interested in events. We take special interest in how an historic event had influence on people, on a country or to society. Events related to Scott and Amundsen are quite well-known.
This talk will introduce you to the wider context, and cover aspects and circumstances of the race itself, and consider the efforts of the fellow expedition members. In a historic sense, the race had no winners and no losers – it was an event of enormous effort in an extreme environment, driven by science, politics and the desire to prove themselves in the context of their time.
Biographical note:
Ursula began researching the social history of polar expeditions for a PhD at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and the University of Vienna, awarded in 2009. Her research draws on personal accounts such as diaries and correspondence. She is the recipient of a COMNAP fellowship for the research project “Reconstructing historic Antarctic climate data from logbooks and diaries of the Heroic era” in 2012/13. Ursula has been awarded with the New Zealand Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship 2018 for her research project: “Frozen History: researching, collecting and communicating Antarctic History.”
Contact: Peter Barrett, Antarctic Research Centre, VUW
Email: [email protected]
