AustLit

'Captain Robert Scott’s second doomed expedition to the South Pole is the stuff of legend. He and his comrades were beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen and then died in extraordinary blizzard conditions. The saga is the subject of what’s generally reckoned to be a literary masterpiece – The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – and its enactment of pain and heroism is central to Patricia Cornelius’s play Do Not Go Gentle, in which the struggle becomes a metaphor for the emotional life of a group of people in an aged-care home.' (Introduction)

'Dennis Glover’s third novel centres on the much-mythologised British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 that saw Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempt to reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in history. Scott and four companions arrived at the Pole too late (five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) and would later succumb to the brutal conditions encountered on their return journey to Cape Evans. As Glover alludes to in the preface (and dramatises throughout the novel), details of the Scott expedition – possible causes of the tragedy, potential alternatives – as well as its historical, cultural, and/or scientific significance, have long been the subject of voluminous print and broadcast media (both popular and academic) and have fuelled often obsessive and granular debates. Thaw is both a contribution to, and comment on, this discourse.' (Introduction)