Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica

Tom Griffiths

In Earth's only true wilderness, the fundamentals to existence are exposed. To survive, you need food, you need warmth, and you need stories.

When you voyage to this Great South Land, you journey with more than a hundred years of wisdom and warnings from the human encounter with the ice.'

In the summer of 2002-3, acclaimed writer and historian Tom Griffiths voyaged the Southern Ocean to Antarctica. He was with the first Australian ship to 'slice the silence' of a year, arriving at Casey Station to deliver the new team of 'winterers' and take away the old. In Slicing the Silence Griffiths interweaves his own diary entries with essays that explore the human history of the mysterious continent of ice.

In this rich and vivid book, earlier stories of science, politics, exploration and love weave through and deepen the author's own experience. it is inspired by a landscape where the laws of chemistry and physics - and indeed the power of metaphysics - dominate. Slicing the Silence is a book about travelling in time, travelling into oneself, and travelling to the end of the earth.