By Colin Monteath (Massey University Press, 2023)
Colin Monteath was the Field Operations Officer for the New Zealand Antarctic Research Programme in the seventies and eighties, and was the first person to descend into the inner crater of Erebus (I know – golly!). It’s a place he knows from all angles, and in Erebus The Ice Dragon he weaves together the many aspects of this remote volcano.
There’s the human history, from early ascents during the days of Scott and Shackleton to the mountain’s place in the national psyche of Aotearoa following the crash of Air New Zealand flight TE901 on Ross Island; there’s the ongoing scientific study of southernmost active volcano on earth; and there, in a final chapter put together by Antarctic art expert Adele Jackson, is Erebus framed as art, rendered in oil, in watercolour, as a chromolithograph, as music, in words, and so much more.
It’s a reminder that Erebus was, is, and will be many things.
Laura Williamson
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