How Anthea Fisher learned to stay composed in a crisis.
When the helicopter smashed into Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, the force was enough to eject Anthea Fisher out of the four-point harness strapping her to the seat. It was so violent it ripped her boots off. In a few seconds, the sleek machine had become like the car wrecks you see in the news, mangled beyond recognition. The pilot had tried to fly out of thick cloud at full speed, but after losing situational awareness ̶ his ability to judge which way was up, down or sideways ̶ he flew into the ground.
It was December 1, 2013. Anthea was working as a field training officer, and she, a scientist and the pilot were about 240 kilometres, or two hours’ flight time, from the Australian Antarctic programme’s Davis Research Station. They were travelling in tandem with another helicopter, which had Anthea’s colleague Simon Cross on board.
They’d been visiting an Emperor penguin colony on Cape Darnley. The colony had possibly only been visited once before, and they’d spent the day wandering around it, backdropped by massive ice cliffs crammed with nearly 3000 birds. There were chicks present, who Anthea says weren’t “super-duper fluffy, but more mid-fluff”. They collected dead ones, thankfully already frozen, to take back to Davis Station where their cause of death could be analysed. As they moved around, their insulated trousers made a swishing noise. The scientist had asked them to walk like cowboys, legs apart, so as not to disturb the birds. Everyone got covered in penguin poo. For Anthea, it was a “once in a lifetime experience”.
Anthea doesn’t remember the impact, nor what happened as the chopper writhed and screamed its last scream. She has blocked it out. She does remember how she slowly became aware that she was on her back in the snow, and that her back might be injured. And she remembers the sound of the emergency locator beacon that was activated on impact: “Peow! Peow! Peow!” Then she heard a “swish, swish, swish” and Simon, who was no longer walking like a cowboy, put his hand on her leg.
“Great you’re here Simon. You’ll have to get on the sat-phone and let base know we’ve had a crash. And they’ll have to send a plane to pick us up. Oh, and I can’t move because I’ve hurt my back.” She jokes that she probably sounded a bit bossy. Despite the direness of the circumstances, Anthea took comfort in problem solving. “I think that was the first time I realised I was good at operating in really stressful situations”, she says. A plane was dispatched from Davis Station but couldn’t land due to the numerous crevasses and white-out conditions, despite Simon marking an improvised runway with 20 dead penguin chicks.
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Eventually, after 20 hours, they were able to self-rescue by using the other helicopter to get back to Davis, where Anthea was X-rayed and cleared of any back injury. When I ask her if she has suffered any lasting mental or physical trauma, she replies, “Not really. I knew if I wanted to continue working in that line of work, I was going to have to get over it.” She had help, mainly from an “amazing physio” who treats patients with chronic pain. He told Anthea, “Your body will heal in six to eight weeks, but what happens after that depends on the story you feel you need to tell. A lot of people need to repeat the dramatic story of how they hurt their neck and how sore it still is.” For some patients, he believes, this kind of repetition can reinforce the long-term effects of injury, physical and emotional. This is what worked for her.
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Anthea grew up 31 metres above sea level in Keith, South Australia, population 1355. The town slogan, which adorns stubby holders and fridge magnets at Keith’s main roadhouse, is “You’re in the good country now”.
How do you start somewhere as flat and hot as Keith (49.2 Celsius on December 20, 2019) and end up in Antarctica? There is Mount Monster, a 94-metre granite plug, for possible inspiration, though it only gets you just above paddock level. Anthea used to go tadpoling in an abandoned quarry near there, and after school she would climb trees with her older brothers, make cubby houses and ride her BMX bike around the flats. When it came to her two brothers, one of whom still lives in Keith, there was never any quarter given. “You either kept up or you didn’t.” Her father, a schoolteacher, thought there were activities that Anthea shouldn’t be doing because she was a girl. “Oh, that used to fire me up!”
School piqued her interest in the world beyond Australia. She did a project on the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s ̶ that really moved her ̶ and she was fascinated to learn about French-speaking New Caledonia. By 15, the desire to leave Keith had become overwhelming, so Anthea finished secondary school in Adelaide, then went to university. At 20, she got a job with an outdoor education company that took school groups on adventurous overnight tramping trips. She was young to be responsible for 14-year-old kids in the wilderness and she felt the weight of it, especially when they were misbehaving. It taught her a valuable life lesson, not letting “shitheads push her buttons”. She remembers saying to herself when the children gave her a hard time, “no, I’m the adult here. I’m not going to react.”
Anthea met lots of “outdoorsy types” who were into things like whitewater rafting, skiing, rock climbing and mountaineering. She had thought mountaineering was similar to orienteering and was surprised to find out it required special equipment like ice axes and crampons, which she discovered when she went to New Zealand for a winter trip with one of her early mentors, her then-boyfriend Nick Morgan, a young Australian mountaineer who was training to be a guide. They flew into Pioneer Hut, on the Fox Glacier neve, with another Australian aspirant guide Stu Holloway. New to telemark skis, Anthea found she could only turn left and not right; there is a photo of her somewhere with her climbing harness on upside down.
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During the climbing season, Mount Everest Base Camp becomes a temporary town with more than 1000 residents, complete with internet, heated dining tents, cot beds, even a hot face towel and cup of tea on waking in the morning. In 2015, 18 months after her helicopter accident, Anthea was the Base Camp Manager for the high-altitude guiding company Adventure Consultants. On April 25, she was having a late morning nap in her tent, having gotten up early to see a group of climbers off. When the 7.8 earthquake struck at 11.56 am, she knew immediately what it was. “I scrambled out of bed, grabbed my radio and phone, put my boots on and ran out of the tent,” she says. The earthquake lasted for 50 seconds, and its epicentre was near the Kathmandu Valley, just 160 kilometres northwest of Everest.
It was overcast and snowing and Anthea couldn’t see the tops of the peaks, but she could hear ice cliffs avalanching on both sides of her. This was a regular occurrence, but now the intensity of them seemed greater. Then out of the mist and snow came a cloud, like a desert sandstorm. The earthquake had triggered a large avalanche from a ridge between nearby Pumori and Lingtren peaks, nearly 1000 metres above camp. Anthea ran to the nearest shelter, a large sturdy dining tent.
The debris contained pulverised rocks and ice and it fell with such speed it compressed the air in front of it, resulting in a windblast equivalent to hurricane force winds. Base Camp wasn’t buried in snow, but a large area in the middle was levelled. An estimated 19 people were killed and at least 70 more injured. Anthea was unscathed and, along with other survivors, was thrown into triaging the injured and trying to find shelter, as it was cold and still snowing. Her own tent with all her belongings had disappeared; it took two days of searching to find it. The space where she’d been having her nap was swept clean, as if by a laser strike.
There were spare tents at Camp 1 and she requested for them to be flown down. A guide argued with her: “Why are you flying tents down from Camp 1? The helicopters are already overloaded!” Climbers above the Khumbu Icefall were having to be rescued because the icefall, the only route back to Base Camp, had become impassable. Even though he was just 500 metres away, he didn’t understand the scale of destruction. Anthea tried to explain: “Because we have nothing! You’ve got no idea what we’ve lost [and it was a lot more than just tents].” “Do you want a hug?” he asked. To which Anthea replied, “No, I don’t want a fucking hug! I just need you to stop hassling me.”
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The majority of Anthea’s work is in male-dominated fields and she says this has led her to adopt a particular leadership style, one that is collaborative, yet decisive. She explained how this works in a podcast. “I’m there to get across the river, not to fight the alligators … The alligators are all the challenges that we come up against, and my main objective is to get to the other side safely. And if I stop along the way and fight all the challenges, get distracted by them, I won’t get to the other side.” But it was the helicopter crash and earthquake that cemented her capacity to stay composed in a crisis. Both experiences helped her develop a resilience technique used by search and rescue teams and frontline medical staff the world over: the “third position”. She describes it as a form of detachment, one that allows you to become a casual observer as if floating over your own shoulder, able to take in the whole picture without becoming emotionally overwhelmed. Anthea decided she wanted to use this skillset to help others.
In 2017, while she was still going back and forth to Antarctica, Anthea did her first stint for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the French non-governmental organisation that delivers projects in areas affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, disease and malnutrition. She initially headed to Uganda where she worked as a logistician in Yumbe, a town near the northern border that at the time had the largest refugee settlement in Africa. Two years later, she joined the emergency response after 2019’s Cyclone Idai in Mozambique.
But it’s her three months with MSF at Aweil Civil Hospital in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, South Sudan that she talks about now. Two years after its 2011 independence from Sudan, a civil war erupted in South Sudan. By 2018, a US State Department-funded report by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimated that the conflict had resulted in nearly 400,000 excess deaths, about half due to “violent injuries”, the rest to disease, hunger and lack of access to health care. Despite a peace treaty signed that year, armed conflict continued through 2020, though it was calm where Anthea was based.
Anthea had 63 staff on her logistics team, all South Sudanese. They were the people who kept the hospital running. War was nothing new for them; the Sudanese civil war that pre-dated independence had raged for more than 20 years. None of Anthea’s staff had lived in a time when there wasn’t civil conflict. “There was a period when there was intense fighting in that particular region and when you asked them what they experienced during that time, it was horrific,” she says. Despite this, she found her colleagues to be fun to work with, as well as optimistic and hopeful about the future.
The hospital in Aweil mainly dealt with paediatrics. On any given day they would deliver 20 to 30 babies, with some of those ending up in an Intensive Care Unit. “I remember walking through the kids’ ICU. I was just checking to see if the fans were working. This was my job, keeping the fans working. The medical team were standing around a table resuscitating a baby. The whole CPR with two fingers deal. I found that upsetting.” One of her friends working there was a paediatrician from Melbourne. She told Anthea that after the death of a baby, parents would bring a new blanket with them, a beautiful one that would have cost a few months wages, to wrap their child in. “I tell them through a translator, I’m sorry we couldn’t save your baby. And they are grateful that we’ve tried. They are so thankful they had the opportunity to have their baby in a hospital. I find that level of gratitude hard to accept.”
Most recently, Anthea spent three months in West Timor working with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on a programme to vaccinate the dog population. There had been an outbreak of rabies, which is almost exclusively transmitted to humans by dog bites. Once symptoms appear, it is almost 100% fatal.
Attending government meetings was a large part of her job. As she doesn’t speak Bahasa, she was using a translator. There, her decisive leadership style caused some consternation. After numerous meetings, she became suspicious her translator wasn’t translating exactly what she said. “I was trying to pass on specific instructions that had to be followed exactly as set out by my employers, the Ministry of Health and Agriculture. Eventually I said to her, ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing … but I’d really like it if you translate what I’m saying.’” Her translator replied, “I am translating exactly what you say. I’m just making it a bit nicer.”
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Anthea says she is conscious not to approach humanitarian work like some kind of missionary. She’s not interested in changing a place; it’s about taking what she has learned and applying it to helping people who need help, just like she has needed help in the past. Plus, she says, “I find the work super fun, and I meet a lot of amazing people.” She’s always on the lookout for the next job, which can be a little haphazard. But of course, she notes, it is an unfortunate truth in our world that “there will always be another crisis.”
For now, Anthea is back home in Wānaka after another trip to Davis Station. This was a six-week round stint as Voyage Leader on the resupply ship RSV Nuyina, which was carrying 700 tonnes of fuel, 240,000 litres of fresh water, 13 tonnes of dry food and more than 20 tonnes of fresh and frozen food. She was responsible for all the resupply operations that happen from the ship, such as cargo discharge and the refuelling of the station, as well as around 100 tradespeople and researchers.
It’s all a long way from Keith, Australia, and from that first winter trip to New Zealand. She remembers how on an ice route on Mount Barnicoat she and her companions, after summiting, became benighted on the descent. Nick and Stu abseiled first, taking Anthea’s headtorch, as Nick had forgotten his. They left her on a boot-sized ledge hanging off what felt like a dodgy anchor, in complete darkness. For most beginner climbers, this would have been terrifying. But Anthea just watched as sparks came off her companions’ crampons on rock sections below. Overhead the Milky Way seemed to wrap itself around her and on the Tasman Sea, nearly 2,500 metres below, she could see the lights of fishing boats. She imagined them going about their work. Suspended from the side of a mountain in the dark, she felt not anxiety, but awe.
Allan Uren
