Speaker 1: We'd like to acknowledge that traditional custodians of the land
Speaker 1: on which this podcast was produced, the Galliger people of
Speaker 1: the orination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
Speaker 2: It's the ninth of November twenty nineteen and David Knof
Speaker 2: has been at sea for two weeks. He's on an
Speaker 2: icebreaker's ship that's tediously making its final slow approach to Antarctica.
Speaker 2: He's here to take over the role of station leader
Speaker 2: at the Davis Research Station. He's thousands of kilometers from
Speaker 2: home in one of the world's harshest environments. Wis there
Speaker 2: He'll experience hargh Gane force winds, freezing temperatures, and total
Speaker 2: darkness for six months of the year. But he's grinning
Speaker 2: from ear to ear. He's finally made it. But what
Speaker 2: was meant to be a routine mission lasting just one
Speaker 2: year was thrown into uncertainty when the COVID nineteen pandemic hit,
Speaker 2: leaving David and his team stranded in one of the
Speaker 2: most isolated places in the world. I'm at Middleton and
Speaker 2: this is head Game Today, a story of remote leadership, insurance,
Speaker 2: and humanity during a time of absolute uncertainty. David Enuff.
Speaker 2: Welcome to my podcast, head game Mate. Now, before we start,
Speaker 2: I just got to ask how old are you?
Speaker 3: That's an interesting first question.
Speaker 2: Nine thirty nine?
Speaker 3: Yeah, wow, well.
Speaker 2: Thirty nine mate, You've had quite the career and I'm
Speaker 2: going to reel off a few things. You graduated from
Speaker 2: Monash University with a bachelor's of Art. Whilst completing officer
Speaker 2: training in the Australian Army. You served in the Solomon
Speaker 2: Islands as an infantry platoon commander in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: Following this, you joined the Australians Department of Foreign Affairs
Speaker 2: and Trade. Is that defact correct? Serving at the Australian
Speaker 2: High Commission in Islamabad, Pakistan. And then you decided to
Speaker 2: join the Australian Antarctic Program as station leader at the
Speaker 2: Davis Research Station. Mate, for the age of thirty nine,
Speaker 2: you have car talk about a resume too. I thought
Speaker 2: I'd done a lot, so let's unravel this. Let's unpick
Speaker 2: it because it's fascinating me and it's first and foremost
Speaker 2: good to speak to one of my own. Let's start
Speaker 2: from the beginning. I suppose what made you want to
Speaker 2: join the military, and do you come from a military background,
Speaker 2: of military family, not.
Speaker 4: From a military family other than sort of some Second
Speaker 4: World War grandfathers, like everyone had. There was no real
Speaker 4: drive other than at the end of my first year
Speaker 4: of university, I'm like, this isn't enough, this is just
Speaker 4: not exciting enough. And I joined the Army reserv or
Speaker 4: the territorials or National Guard or whatever it is in
Speaker 4: the different nations, and straight away, like a a kind
Speaker 4: of horse.
Speaker 3: To water, I'm like, this is this is what I want.
Speaker 3: This is more exciting.
Speaker 4: It's out, it's adventurous, it's leadership, it's all these other things.
Speaker 4: And thankfully I joined when I was nice and youngster's
Speaker 4: only nineteen. Then a couple of years a year or
Speaker 4: so through officer training and the strange thing I lead
Speaker 4: that platoon I led over in the Solon Islands back
Speaker 4: in two thousand and seven. I was the second youngest
Speaker 4: guy in the platoon as the platoon commander, which outside
Speaker 4: of the military sounds ridiculous, and people go, how on
Speaker 4: earth could you be the officer and be in charge
Speaker 4: of you have thirty soldiers, some of whom are nearly
Speaker 4: fifty years old.
Speaker 2: That's why I asked, mate, That's why I ask your age,
Speaker 2: because I think it's extremely important to realize, you know,
Speaker 2: how rare that is to have such a young platoon
Speaker 2: officer commander as yourself, even for me and I know
Speaker 2: the military inside out, like yourself, that's extremely young. Did
Speaker 2: people take you seriously or did they? How did that?
Speaker 2: How did that play out for you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think that.
Speaker 4: I mean I had a good platoon sergeant like straight
Speaker 4: away in good NCOs. As you know, that's the one
Speaker 4: thing that makes a young junior officer work well, is
Speaker 4: that a they've got with there e is and don't
Speaker 4: come in with an idea of hey, I'm in charge
Speaker 4: with doing.
Speaker 3: It my way, which is absolutely at the breastpeit for disaster.
Speaker 4: It happens, has happened throughout history. So listen to my NCOs.
Speaker 4: Trusted them and they are incredibly experienced, and they they
Speaker 4: set me up for success.
Speaker 3: And there was a lot of things I think, even
Speaker 3: just the.
Speaker 4: Delineation of the roles between all the officers and the
Speaker 4: NCOs do when you're staying you're lane, there's stuff that.
Speaker 3: The NCOs don't want to go to.
Speaker 4: All the boring meetings at company and task force headquarters,
Speaker 4: and come up with all the ox plans and do
Speaker 4: all the reconnaissance stuff to kind of go, hey, we've
Speaker 4: got to we're going to go to these three villages
Speaker 4: in the coming month, and we're going to do it
Speaker 4: this way, like they don't really want to do that.
Speaker 3: Look, I think as well, I probably wouldn't.
Speaker 4: Have been able to go to all war zone as
Speaker 4: a platoon commander at that age that given that there
Speaker 4: was a peacekeeping operation that the bar was probably a
Speaker 4: bit lower, And so it works well to go, okay,
Speaker 4: and then the few real live operations we had to do,
Speaker 4: you just had this great thing. I go and do
Speaker 4: the planning stuff with the task force or the INK
Speaker 4: guys and work out how we're going to crack that.
Speaker 3: None of okay, we've got to go to these village.
Speaker 4: We're trying to look for these people and do these
Speaker 4: things much to patrol the jungle, get inserted by helicopters
Speaker 4: or trucks or whatever we're going to do. While the
Speaker 4: sergeant the NCO is they're off just getting a platoon
Speaker 4: level ready. You've given them the warning, You've given them
Speaker 4: the kind of parameters of Okay, we're going to go
Speaker 4: and do this So you walk out of that briefing room,
Speaker 4: the platoon's ready to go, You give them the orders,
Speaker 4: a little bit more battle prep to finalize it. Then
Speaker 4: you jump in the vehicles and you drive out of
Speaker 4: the fob and that when that's coming and I look
Speaker 4: back and goes, geez, that was, And that's why I
Speaker 4: never stayed in the army.
Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't think it's going to get much
Speaker 3: better than this.
Speaker 4: To get operational command of a platoon at that younger age,
Speaker 4: you kind of go oh. After that, you kind of
Speaker 4: you come back and you end up in training command
Speaker 4: and as a staff position, as a company to I see,
Speaker 4: and all these other things.
Speaker 3: You go, well, I don't know how exciting that's going
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 4: Whereas joining foreign affairs and trade, they were like, oh mate,
Speaker 4: you we don't have kind of non operational jobs. You're
Speaker 4: out and you can go any embassy anywhere in the world.
Speaker 4: And everyone aways thinking why didn't you go to Paris
Speaker 4: and Tokyo or somewhere lovely, And I'm like, no.
Speaker 3: I don't to do that.
Speaker 2: So how did that transition happen? So I know it
Speaker 2: all too well. I was the same you know, I've
Speaker 2: done three tours of Afghanistan. In my later years of
Speaker 2: my military career, I'm a bit like you in that way.
Speaker 2: I sort of get bored of things, you know, and
Speaker 2: I think, what's the next thing that I need to do,
Speaker 2: What's the next hype, what's the next big adventure or
Speaker 2: what's the next adrenaline sort of fueled task ahead of me.
Speaker 2: What made you transition? And was it quite a seamless transition?
Speaker 3: It was fairly seamless.
Speaker 4: So yeah, when I was in the Solomon Islands, we
Speaker 4: worked closely with the embassy there and DEFAT and it
Speaker 4: was the Regional Assistants Mission Solomon.
Speaker 3: I was led by DEFA.
Speaker 4: And had Federal Police and had Australia AID and all
Speaker 4: these different organizations, and that the uniform military was just
Speaker 4: one part of it. With of course, with the actionable art,
Speaker 4: we'd do all the anything that the police couldn't handle,
Speaker 4: we'd step in and do it. Always in tended with
Speaker 4: the cops as well, But so we do a lot
Speaker 4: of operations.
Speaker 3: With the EMBSC and I coind thought well and at
Speaker 3: the time I was.
Speaker 4: Still finishing off my degree which was in history and politics,
Speaker 4: so that was enough that was going to get me
Speaker 4: in the front door, or at least to an interview
Speaker 4: with them, and then having worked alongside them and seeing
Speaker 4: what the embassy did or what embassy staff would.
Speaker 3: Do overseas, and like that's you're actually affecting change.
Speaker 4: You're having a closer impact on it rather than just
Speaker 4: chasing down bad guys.
Speaker 3: And it was as fun as that is as a twenty.
Speaker 4: Two year old that's right up there flowing the alicopms
Speaker 4: and stuff.
Speaker 3: It wasn't quite fair.
Speaker 4: And then it was a calculated, calculated, not risk, but
Speaker 4: calculated decision around staying in the Army would have meant
Speaker 4: the chance. And at the time, you've got to remember
Speaker 4: back in two thousand and seven was the most operational
Speaker 4: Australian Army you'd been almost in.
Speaker 3: Half a century.
Speaker 4: We had troops in this on Loon Islands, East Team
Speaker 4: or Iraq, Afghanistan, and then the peace keeping observers and stuff.
Speaker 4: We've got all these other places and Company in Butterworth
Speaker 4: and all these things at the Army does. So there
Speaker 4: was a lot going on, but it was still not guaranteed,
Speaker 4: and it was this risk of all right, if I
Speaker 4: go to a full time unit, you might be lucky
Speaker 4: enough that you're on the next online battalion, you get
Speaker 4: another trip, or you might end up just over in Afghanistan,
Speaker 4: but in a role that.
Speaker 3: Isn't that inspiring.
Speaker 4: You want command, Whereas with DEFAT there was certainly a
Speaker 4: much stronger chance or probability you're going to get to
Speaker 4: go overseas, you're going to get to do the actual work.
Speaker 4: And I saw that as a there's some safety elements
Speaker 4: to it as well. You know, yes, government war's got
Speaker 4: an excitement to it that only soldiers kind of understand of, like, well,
Speaker 4: I wanted to go to war, which sounds ridiculous, and
Speaker 4: yet at a point you probably would have found this
Speaker 4: with yours, like once you get to your second or
Speaker 4: third trips, you start to go the clock sticking at
Speaker 4: some point or what next?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you do get to level of what nexten what's
Speaker 2: the difference between the military and the Department of Foreign
Speaker 2: Affairs and how you adapted to that?
Speaker 4: Straight away, you're going from work at the tactical level
Speaker 4: or operational level of platoon and company or even just
Speaker 4: task force operations, switching to defact work with the embassies.
Speaker 3: You're straight to the strategic level.
Speaker 4: So you're working even as a fairly junior diplomat, you're
Speaker 4: working very very very sensitive things. You're working right at
Speaker 4: the point of end. You'll be briefing foreign ministers or
Speaker 4: prime ministers when they're visiting the country. And certainly the
Speaker 4: postings I did to Pakistan and Iraq, it was like
Speaker 4: chartering new ground. It wasn't kind of a strong relationship
Speaker 4: that had been going for years. It was very dynamic
Speaker 4: and very reactive to what it did, the enemy did,
Speaker 4: or what other nations did. And certainly in Pakistan Iraqi
Speaker 4: were closer with the British and the Americans, the French,
Speaker 4: Italians and all the other NATO countries involved in those
Speaker 4: two conflicts. And yet you don't know what you're doing
Speaker 4: next week. You'll have an idea and a plan. And
Speaker 4: that's what I found fascinating. And the great thing was
Speaker 4: you had this freedom of as at a fairly junior level.
Speaker 4: And the role I had in Iraq, I was embedded
Speaker 4: with the Australian Task Group, so we were north of
Speaker 4: Baghdad training and advisorsist stuff with the Iraqis. I was
Speaker 4: kind of the lead of that self. So you're not
Speaker 4: the ambassador per se, but you've got this sort of
Speaker 4: delegated authority of hey, you're the Australian scene to diplomat
Speaker 4: on the ground up there working with the Australian Task Group.
Speaker 3: You've got this freedom.
Speaker 4: And again I was probably thirty ish and you've got
Speaker 4: that authority and you're briefing foreign ministers, you're breaking defense ministeres,
Speaker 4: wrecking Prime minister's, all this sort of stuff on what
Speaker 4: you're doing and advising what you should do, which to
Speaker 4: me was a great jump to kind of go from
Speaker 4: platoon level and reading about international relations in history books.
Speaker 3: And I was never the youngest.
Speaker 4: I was always on the younger side, and people are like, oh, jeez,
Speaker 4: you're young for this role. But then you'd found an
Speaker 4: example of like, oh no, there was someone younger, or
Speaker 4: just going back to history, as you're a young platoon commander,
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, but historically platoon commanders have been young,
Speaker 4: and same with junior diplomats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a first.
Speaker 4: Secretary political and an embassy in Paris or Tokyo, they'll
Speaker 4: be older. But in the war zones, finding people young
Speaker 4: enough and keen enough and adventurous enough, and there was
Speaker 4: fitness elements to it, not necessarily like you're not stomping
Speaker 4: around packs and weapons and all the other stuff. But
Speaker 4: you're jumping on and off helicopters, you're in vehicles, you're
Speaker 4: wearing body arm and you're wearing practical clothing and stuff
Speaker 4: in fifty degree heat. So there's a fitness element to
Speaker 4: it that attracted and made it more suitable to the
Speaker 4: younger generations and ida well. And even with the Antarctic program,
Speaker 4: I was quite young moving into that as a station leader,
Speaker 4: but I wasn't the youngest and I never had a
Speaker 4: problem with it. Occasionally you'd meet people who had a
Speaker 4: chip on their shoulder over it of hey, we're the
Speaker 4: same age, and you kind of look at where they're at,
Speaker 4: they look at where you're at. You can see them
Speaker 4: looking in their own mirror, going you would you get
Speaker 4: to be in charge?
Speaker 3: I am.
Speaker 2: So you went from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs
Speaker 2: to joining the Australian Antarctic Program as station leader. Now,
Speaker 2: talk to me about the Antarctic, because before you join
Speaker 2: this program, it wasn't the first time you went to
Speaker 2: the Antarctic, was it.
Speaker 4: No, So the first time I went down was was
Speaker 4: with a bunch of mates who we'd all spent a
Speaker 4: number of years in war zone, so it would be
Speaker 4: cast up. So I got an email from my maid
Speaker 4: who said, Hey, I'm thinking of putting together this Antarctic trip.
Speaker 4: It's got to cost about this, which was a pretty
Speaker 4: number of exits, and this is.
Speaker 3: The loose plan. Will work it out depending on who
Speaker 3: says yes. And I couldn't have.
Speaker 4: I'm just like yes, not knowing anything else other than
Speaker 4: like I want to go to Antarctica.
Speaker 3: And let's do it. And then we kind of put
Speaker 3: together like what are we going to do?
Speaker 4: We worked out who was on the trip, what skills
Speaker 4: they had, and we ended up doing ski mountaineering. So
Speaker 4: I was riding a split board so you can kind
Speaker 4: of turn it across country skis to do your ascent
Speaker 4: and then look it together and become a snowboard to
Speaker 4: do your decent. And we had we had an aim
Speaker 4: of doing a first ascent of a kind of there's
Speaker 4: there's so many mountains down there you can get first
Speaker 4: as sense of any rock. You to stand on a
Speaker 4: rocket like I'm the first human to stand here. And
Speaker 4: we had that plan. We got weathered out. We never
Speaker 4: actually got a first descent. Every time we'd get close,
Speaker 4: just be wide out and you want to speak to
Speaker 4: Mallory and Irving if you're yeah about ascending into clouds.
Speaker 4: But in those scenarios you do it. But these days
Speaker 4: that's not a great idea. So yeah, that was sort
Speaker 4: of at the first trip I did. And then when
Speaker 4: the option came up to join the formal like Australian
Speaker 4: Antarctic program and go as a station leader, it was
Speaker 4: an easy decision to be like, well, I loved Antarctic.
Speaker 2: How did that spark the interest of you joining that program?
Speaker 3: It was the wildlife and the wilderness of it.
Speaker 4: So I I'd not gone down there with the intent
Speaker 4: of changing careers and moving to the Antarctic program, but
Speaker 4: when I got down there, sore and it is just
Speaker 4: the most spectacular place on Earth. I mean, if you
Speaker 4: imagine you've seen the character and Range and k two
Speaker 4: of those, imagine that they're at sea level though, and
Speaker 4: you're driving around in a zodiac with still water and
Speaker 4: orcas and leopard.
Speaker 3: Seals and whales and penguins and everything.
Speaker 4: But then also you've got thousand meters mountains just rising
Speaker 4: straight out of the ocean. There is nothing on Earth
Speaker 4: Earth that comes close and that was what got me
Speaker 4: across the line to say, hey, I want to get
Speaker 4: back down here.
Speaker 3: And at the time I was looking for something else.
Speaker 4: I'd had a decade with DEFAT and in war zones
Speaker 4: again and thought I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to do something different here.
Speaker 4: But at the same time, the Antarctic program it's very
Speaker 4: similar to the operational elements of running a forward operating
Speaker 4: base or a military base overseas, except it's colorful, so
Speaker 4: you're not using camouflage and gray and green. Everything's brightly
Speaker 4: colored buildings. You're down there for science.
Speaker 3: But it's got a whole lot of other risks and.
Speaker 4: Challenges where the bad guys aren't trying to kill you,
Speaker 4: but the weather will. And if you get your equipment wrong,
Speaker 4: or you get your planning wrong, you get your weather
Speaker 4: forecasts and understanding wrong, you can you can really create
Speaker 4: a lot of problems down there. It can change quickly.
Speaker 4: So that was something that appealed to me on the
Speaker 4: work side of it, not just the adventure and wilderness.
Speaker 2: There's a common denominator here, Davis, is the leadership mole.
Speaker 2: If it wasn't a leadership role, would you have taken it.
Speaker 3: So the only job I was qualified for was station leader.
Speaker 4: So that was because, as one of my team pointed out,
Speaker 4: he's like, you know, the only thing required for your
Speaker 4: job is a driver's license.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yep, that's right. Now.
Speaker 4: I've got diplomas in ops management and all this other
Speaker 4: stuff as well, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Like, technically, all you need to be an.
Speaker 4: Attaching station leader is a driver's license, manual drivers, a
Speaker 4: drive stick. But whereas all the other roles on the station,
Speaker 4: you've got your scientists seeded to be a PhD level
Speaker 4: glaciologist or seabird ecologist or benthic ecologist or some sort
Speaker 4: of scientific field that you've never even heard of.
Speaker 3: You've got to be that, or you've got to.
Speaker 4: Be mechanics, plumbers, doctors, radio operators, comms.
Speaker 3: Technicians, satellite technicians, chefs.
Speaker 4: Everyone has a specific trade and skill set, whereas as
Speaker 4: a former infantry officer, you're not that qualified. And a
Speaker 4: lot of transit transfers.
Speaker 2: Other too tough for mate, No cuff too tough, that's right.
Speaker 4: Other than other than being in charge of things and
Speaker 4: telling people what to do, which is what infantry officers
Speaker 4: are greater at the time, I would have taken a
Speaker 4: different role. I think now, having done six different trips,
Speaker 4: all in leadership roles in Antarctica, I'd struggle, and I
Speaker 4: do struggle when I'm not in charge, Like I've had
Speaker 4: a few. The role I was running, I was running
Speaker 4: a field camp. We were like four hundred k's away
Speaker 4: from the main station, running at the field camp of
Speaker 4: forty two people out in the middle of They where
Speaker 4: their own helicopters and owned planes and all this sort
Speaker 4: of we're in charge, We're doing it our way. But
Speaker 4: to get there we had to go through the main
Speaker 4: station at Casey, and the times I had to go
Speaker 4: through there, and I'm the kind of field lead to
Speaker 4: trying to get my flights out and get my team
Speaker 4: out to dowfield camp. And there was both one of
Speaker 4: the stage leaders we senior but been around a bit
Speaker 4: so I didn't have to tell you much. But the
Speaker 4: other guy, I was quite don and the amount of
Speaker 4: times I've been there, like, oh hey, it's just a
Speaker 4: quick one, like when out station, I actually think you
Speaker 4: should do it, and like he was sick of me
Speaker 4: with about ten seconds of telling him how to do things,
Speaker 4: and my team are like I think you could need it.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, I'll just shut up and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, because it's definitely I would say that, you know,
Speaker 2: there's definitely that leadership mentality and once it's ingrained in there,
Speaker 2: and you know, it's it's a different mentality, isn't. It's
Speaker 2: just a different way of thinking, different way of process
Speaker 2: and things, and a different way of dealing with people.
Speaker 2: And yes, it's a great position to be in.
Speaker 4: I always like to say though, like in terms of
Speaker 4: leadership mindset, yeah, you can come across as a control
Speaker 4: freak and there's elements of that, But at the same time,
Speaker 4: the best leaders out there, they're really good followers, and
Speaker 4: they're really good fundamentally. The first thing you need to
Speaker 4: be is a good member of the team and a
Speaker 4: good follower.
Speaker 3: So when you're not in charge, you go, right, what's
Speaker 3: the what's the job here?
Speaker 4: And whatever needs to be done, you just pick up
Speaker 4: the shovel or whatever it is, and you're doing it
Speaker 4: and helping and supporting other lead. And I say this
Speaker 4: a lot of times, and you learn a lot more
Speaker 4: from your bad leaders than your good ones. The good
Speaker 4: ones you barely remember some elements. You're like, oh, Jesus,
Speaker 4: aunt was great, you know, why was he great? He's good,
Speaker 4: whereas the bad ones you'd be like, oh, this, this,
Speaker 4: this is this. So you always encourage people to look
Speaker 4: at that. But when there's poor leadership ahead of you,
Speaker 4: and it's so easy for a team to sit around
Speaker 4: and be like, oh, jeseus doing this or this is
Speaker 4: I wouldn't do that, and you go, have you actually
Speaker 4: communicated that to them formally or properly, you know, in
Speaker 4: a constructive way, And then if they have had a
Speaker 4: chance to listen to it and they've ignored you, then
Speaker 4: you start your decision and process changes a little bit.
Speaker 4: But if you go, if you're not actually there, and
Speaker 4: then what have you done to help them succeed? And
Speaker 4: I always use the example of the letter that Obama
Speaker 4: wrote to Trump in terms of like, your success will
Speaker 4: be our success as a nation, So I wish you
Speaker 4: all the best.
Speaker 3: Now, sure you have to do that through gritted teeth, but.
Speaker 4: It's this thing of yeah, it's easy to look at
Speaker 4: another leader who go they're doing this wrong and blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. You go, but what have you done as
Speaker 4: a team, What have you done as the apparatus around
Speaker 4: that to give them success and help them do a
Speaker 4: good job.
Speaker 3: Of leading you and what are you doing to be
Speaker 3: a good follower now?
Speaker 4: At the same time, if they start ignoring you and
Speaker 4: not listening to you, and not listening to the team
Speaker 4: and not taking your advice or doing it their way
Speaker 4: every time, there's some other elements that play, and that's
Speaker 4: when you start to maybe go around a little bit
Speaker 4: and communicate to your informal leaders and your informal structures,
Speaker 4: and that becomes a really important part of your own
Speaker 4: leadership process is understanding the informal processes around you that
Speaker 4: by the time feedback gets to you, what's it going
Speaker 4: through and how much courage is taken for someone to
Speaker 4: actually stand up and give you that and how you
Speaker 4: take it on board or incorporate it into your plan
Speaker 4: can really make or break your team.
Speaker 2: What was in your mindset when you decided to take
Speaker 2: on this station leader role, What was the vision of
Speaker 2: this of this task ahead of you? And you know,
Speaker 2: how did you how did you prepare for it?
Speaker 4: Yes, so it was a one year contract for myself,
Speaker 4: for the team of twenty four. We'd go down to
Speaker 4: Davis on a one year contract. The first summer was
Speaker 4: going to have one hundred people in station, all the
Speaker 4: scientists and all the kind of helicopters and all the frantic.
Speaker 3: Work that gets done.
Speaker 4: But we'd stay on for the winter after that and
Speaker 4: run the station per year, so it had a very
Speaker 4: definitive set of goalposts.
Speaker 3: We were the.
Speaker 4: Seventy third continual rotation of Australian Antarctic presence, so you know,
Speaker 4: we're certainly going into a very very structured and established
Speaker 4: system of Okay, the ships do this, the planes through that.
Speaker 4: Stuff goes wrong down there in terms of logistics, chains
Speaker 4: and different events, but we could have never expected what
Speaker 4: would play out in our particular.
Speaker 3: Years, so we went in with a pretty clear mindset.
Speaker 4: Yes, this will be challenging, this will be hard, but
Speaker 4: challenges and obstacles and issues that were fairly predictable or
Speaker 4: fairly known challenges, and we'd do a lot of train
Speaker 4: We all got together at Hobart before we left, and
Speaker 4: you do mental health.
Speaker 3: And resilience training.
Speaker 4: Everyone's gone through a pretty rigorous selection process with sykes
Speaker 4: and assessments and physical tests and everything's well to make
Speaker 4: sure you're fit and healthy and you've got the mental
Speaker 4: mindset as well to go down there. But that's only
Speaker 4: going to get and that was, but it was all
Speaker 4: based around Yeah, it's a fairly set period of time.
Speaker 4: And the analogy I use as well with a lot
Speaker 4: of the military stuff of how different it must have
Speaker 4: been when they went and landed at Normandy. They didn't
Speaker 4: know how long it was going to take to win
Speaker 4: the same and they didn't even know they were going
Speaker 4: to win. Whereas when in Afghanistan for yourself and the
Speaker 4: tours and stuff I did, you're on this six month
Speaker 4: or three month cycle or you know, four months on
Speaker 4: and then you get a two week trip to Rome
Speaker 4: and it had a good structure to it. Now you
Speaker 4: still don't know if you're coming home and live at
Speaker 4: the end of it, but you have this goalpost. And
Speaker 4: what happened to us in twenty twenty was we went
Speaker 4: from that structured system in the world that we all
Speaker 4: live in. Now, Okay, you're going to do this. You'll
Speaker 4: have these challenges and prepare yourself for this, and that's
Speaker 4: that's what's ahead of you. And it might deviate minus
Speaker 4: ten twenty percent. But what happened to us was we
Speaker 4: got to nearly two thirds of the way through our
Speaker 4: trip when and the writing had been on the wall
Speaker 4: for a while but then formally they just said came
Speaker 4: out and ripped the band aid off and told us like, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: due to the pandemic, we don't have any ships, we
Speaker 4: won any planes that can get to you this summer.
Speaker 4: We can't use an international team as well on an
Speaker 4: international ship or anyone where everyone's doing their own thing.
Speaker 4: So the best thing for us is to leave you
Speaker 4: and your team there for an extra six months, potentially
Speaker 4: even longer, while we work out how to get you home,
Speaker 4: and you're over to you And it was this just bombshell.
Speaker 4: I see the chapter of the book, I called it
Speaker 4: the bombshell of just straight away from that moment on,
Speaker 4: we were in uncharted territory. If we don't know when
Speaker 4: we're going home, we don't know how we're getting home.
Speaker 4: It's just twenty twenty as well, so we didn't know
Speaker 4: what home was going.
Speaker 3: To look like when we did get there.
Speaker 4: And you're just trying to piece all that together, and
Speaker 4: it became this thing of well, this might not be
Speaker 4: our fault, like we didn't have a hand in that
Speaker 4: decision at all, but it's our problem.
Speaker 2: Just give us a picture of how your day to
Speaker 2: day life looked. What are you doing on this program.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I mean day to day in the life
Speaker 4: on an Antarctic station, it gets pretty routine and every day,
Speaker 4: but at the same time, every day is different. Outside
Speaker 4: it might be minus ten minus thirty degrees for minus
Speaker 4: forty even in the winter. If you don't wear the
Speaker 4: right equipment, you're going to get frost bol or freese
Speaker 4: death within moments outside.
Speaker 3: So you've always got a factor that and like, right,
Speaker 3: I've got to get.
Speaker 4: My ass out of bed, stretch, get the blood moving
Speaker 4: for the day.
Speaker 3: And that's when you're on a station. When you're in
Speaker 3: a field camp living in a.
Speaker 4: Tent, you're waking up and you're in your nice polar
Speaker 4: rated sleeping bag, but the minute you start unzipping that,
Speaker 4: it's minus fifteen ambient in your tent. You've got your
Speaker 4: water bottles frozen, your pea bottles frozen, Your socks are
Speaker 4: frozen because they were sweaty yesterday. And you're just going like, okay,
Speaker 4: I've got to try and find some non frozen socks
Speaker 4: to get it.
Speaker 3: So I used to like these are better than the station.
Speaker 4: Example is you shuffle your ass to the kitchen and
Speaker 4: you have a bowl of cereal and look out the window.
Speaker 3: But living in an antarctic field camp.
Speaker 4: I'd have to do I'd roll over and plank for
Speaker 4: like a minute and start doing push ups just to
Speaker 4: get warm.
Speaker 3: Enough to get out of my sleeping bag.
Speaker 4: To then put on your overalls and put on all
Speaker 4: your antarctic layers to even get out of the tent,
Speaker 4: which you know some days that then be a foot
Speaker 4: of snow.
Speaker 2: This is what I mean. Just to live right, just
Speaker 2: to function, you've got to be disciplined right, and you've
Speaker 2: got to be motivated. You know, you've got to love
Speaker 2: what you do because and you'll be the best one
Speaker 2: to tell this, because if you're not, you're not getting
Speaker 2: out of that sleeping bag. But you've got to be
Speaker 2: disciplined in different ways as well. So not just disciplined
Speaker 2: of okay, it's the alarm's going off or the generators
Speaker 2: have started, which means the camp's.
Speaker 3: Got to get up for the day.
Speaker 4: But then so you get yourself dressed, and you're dressing
Speaker 4: in probably ten kilos whether of antarctic gear, to move.
Speaker 3: The fifty meters to the main mess tent that we'd.
Speaker 4: Have and to get a brew on and get some
Speaker 4: food into you to start warming up for the day.
Speaker 4: The one thing we had to be incredibly disciplined on.
Speaker 4: The only thing I really called everyone out on early
Speaker 4: in the piece was do not ask work questions, like
Speaker 4: before eight o'clock. So we're going to wake up at
Speaker 4: six ish, You've got until eight o'clock to do whatever
Speaker 4: you need to do to get your ass out of bed.
Speaker 4: Do not ask work questions. And that was for me,
Speaker 4: and then mainly the pilots and then the field officers
Speaker 4: as well, who they know what team they were taking out.
Speaker 3: For the day.
Speaker 4: They'd know the plan because we'd have revised that and
Speaker 4: gone through it the night before with the forecast and everything.
Speaker 4: But we're sitting there trying to have breakfast or have
Speaker 4: a brew, and ye yes, you're staring out the window
Speaker 4: and your brain is starting to think about work. But
Speaker 4: the last thing you want is someone walking up and
Speaker 4: me're like, oh, hey, Dave, well, how are we looking
Speaker 4: to go to X location?
Speaker 2: And I'm going to just be like, morning, how are
Speaker 2: you going to Let's have a normal conversation.
Speaker 4: Exactly At eight o'clock, we'll do the ops brief and
Speaker 4: we'll look at the formal forecast, we'll speak to the
Speaker 4: forecasters and we'll refine the plan. And everyone really respected
Speaker 4: that and it became a real key part. And try
Speaker 4: and talk about not work. There's not much else to
Speaker 4: talk about when you're living with forty people in an
Speaker 4: antarctic field camp. You're living a breathing work. But you're
Speaker 4: try and just keep it social, chat about different things
Speaker 4: and that that's the real discipline.
Speaker 3: That's the hardest part as well to not have that creep.
Speaker 2: So your threequarter the way through a yearly trip, right, So,
Speaker 2: how do you get the news? Mate? How do you
Speaker 2: get the news? Is it a phone call?
Speaker 3: Is it it's a video call?
Speaker 2: Like this, it's a video cool, So you get a
Speaker 2: video call? What's going through your head when you're getting
Speaker 2: that call?
Speaker 4: When I got that call, so to me, it wasn't
Speaker 4: really news. And to a number of the team, we
Speaker 4: knew that was coming. We'd seen things play out with
Speaker 4: what the pandemic was doing, the impact was having on
Speaker 4: international shipping, and we were reliant on our new icebreaker
Speaker 4: being built, which was under construction at the time, was
Speaker 4: supposed to come and get us on its maiden voyage
Speaker 4: and that didn't happen, and the ultsup couldn't get it,
Speaker 4: So there's a few.
Speaker 3: Operational factors that you could predict.
Speaker 4: And at the time though, when it was formalized and hey,
Speaker 4: you're staying longer, we're going to work out a plan later,
Speaker 4: we'll let you know. I basically started going through everyone
Speaker 4: in the team and trying to assess where they're going
Speaker 4: to be on the spectrum of acceptance and how they're
Speaker 4: going to deal with it, and to work out a
Speaker 4: plan of how to pitch it to everyone.
Speaker 3: But then realize, Okay, there's.
Speaker 4: Going to be a few here that aren't going to
Speaker 4: go well with this, for really really good reasons. Of
Speaker 4: one of them had a very, very sick parent who
Speaker 4: if they've been able to get home as planned, would
Speaker 4: have had a chance to have seen them again. But
Speaker 4: now with this extension, that wasn't going to happen. There
Speaker 4: was a number of other members of the team who've
Speaker 4: got partners back home trying to homeschool multiple kids and
Speaker 4: deal with all that, going like, that's all right, if
Speaker 4: you're home by Christmas, I'll make it, and you all
Speaker 4: of a sudden going, oh, you've just not only committed
Speaker 4: the person who's here to another six months here, but
Speaker 4: You've committed their family to another six months without their
Speaker 4: parent and their homeschooling. You've got all the lockdowns, you've
Speaker 4: got all the job crist You've got all these other
Speaker 4: issues back home that through no fault of their own,
Speaker 4: and this other decision. So it had all these second
Speaker 4: and third order consequences, and that was all going through
Speaker 4: my head of trying to work out what's going on
Speaker 4: here and how do we break the news. So I
Speaker 4: what I did. So when I got the news, finished
Speaker 4: the phone call, and then I went told my deputy
Speaker 4: station letter. She was the wintering chef and shed she
Speaker 4: had a lot more Antarctic experience than me, and she
Speaker 4: was the absolute.
Speaker 3: Yin to my yang.
Speaker 4: And the best decision I ever made was appointing her
Speaker 4: as the deputy and went and spoke to her and
Speaker 4: said hey, and she knew and she's like, we're staying,
Speaker 4: and yeah, we're staying. And we sort of hugged it
Speaker 4: out because we knew that it was going to get rough,
Speaker 4: and she's like, all right, well, how are you going
Speaker 4: to tell everyone?
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm going to go.
Speaker 4: And tell two or three people who were the worst affected.
Speaker 4: I went found them at their workplaces and just said, hey,
Speaker 4: by the way, you'll see and notice that we're doing
Speaker 4: a station meeting tonight. To rip the band aid off.
Speaker 4: That's what this is what it's about.
Speaker 2: Rather than giving a centralized brief, you went round and
Speaker 2: prioritized to me the people.
Speaker 4: I put it on the board and said, hey, we're
Speaker 4: doing a meeting tonight. But everyone was at work and
Speaker 4: it didn't really.
Speaker 3: In some ways don't change anything.
Speaker 4: So calling a snap meeting, which we could do, you
Speaker 4: hit the emergency alarm and everyone had come to the
Speaker 4: mess which we we do want to know all the
Speaker 4: fire lines that go. Well, he wants a week because
Speaker 4: of dust and stuff anyway, but there was a real
Speaker 4: point doing that. I just said, hey, after dinner, station meeting.
Speaker 4: The word got out pretty quickly anyway, but what I
Speaker 4: did so after telling a few key people and kind
Speaker 4: of getting the word out, setting the meeting up and
Speaker 4: making sure everyone knew that, hey, this is the sort
Speaker 4: of meeting after dinner that you turn up to. Most
Speaker 4: of the time, everyone turned up there with a few
Speaker 4: times you go, you don't need to come to this one.
Speaker 4: But then I went got my own head right, So
Speaker 4: I went for a walk and there's so many places
Speaker 4: you could walk by yourself in Antartica. But luckily it
Speaker 4: was a nice ish day, which in the middle of
Speaker 4: winter was simplely minus ten or fifteen. So is boody cold,
Speaker 4: but you wear the right gear and it's not windy.
Speaker 4: So I went for a walk to get my own
Speaker 4: head right and go okay. So you wanted a leadership
Speaker 4: challenge of running a station. Now you've got an unprecedented
Speaker 4: and ridiculous scenario.
Speaker 2: That just hasn't Now you've got one.
Speaker 4: Now you've got one. So you know, well done, your muppet.
Speaker 4: You wanted this, You've got it.
Speaker 2: You wanted that at the highest order. You wanted to
Speaker 2: be tested by the program and and the Antarctic. And
Speaker 2: guess what it's it's certainly done that. How important beforehand
Speaker 2: were your briefs and debriefs and how did your communication change?
Speaker 4: I think, yeah, So we had a weekly station meeting,
Speaker 4: and we'd have smaller ops and group meetings, and I'd
Speaker 4: do one on one with each particular leadership in like
Speaker 4: group and team once a week and all these different
Speaker 4: like pretty predictable structures. They were all pretty routine, and
Speaker 4: there was never anything that heated or spicy at any
Speaker 4: of those meetings, whereas after the extension, some of those
Speaker 4: meetings became like press conferences, and I was then the
Speaker 4: front of this situation and think but thankfully, and I
Speaker 4: had some great members of the team that then even
Speaker 4: like yeah, they'd sort of be throwing questions at me
Speaker 4: and asking this, like what And then yet at the
Speaker 4: same time they'd be like, we're not yelling at you.
Speaker 4: We want to get get And I'm like, well, let's
Speaker 4: get the buddy director on the phone, and let's get
Speaker 4: other Let's get the people that.
Speaker 3: Made this buddy decision on the phone. Now, we set that.
Speaker 4: Up to do a video call with the ops manager
Speaker 4: who kind of been the drive the decision, but the
Speaker 4: zoom link was so bad, it was worse. So we're
Speaker 4: sitting in the town hall in the cinema trying to
Speaker 4: ask questions and it's just like dropping out and they
Speaker 4: so somebody be like, well, why couldn't you have done this?
Speaker 3: Why is the ship delayed? And what? This was predictablelah
Speaker 3: bah blah blah, And then it'd kind of be like
Speaker 3: it's just like God.
Speaker 4: So at the end of the day, I kind of
Speaker 4: made the decision like, look, old manager. I'll just get
Speaker 4: all the information I can and I'll pass on to you.
Speaker 3: Guys.
Speaker 4: Please don't shoot me as I'm messaging this stuff out.
Speaker 4: We're all in the same boat. I've been as stuffed
Speaker 4: around by this as you all have. We're going to
Speaker 4: find a way to get through to the end. Let's
Speaker 4: take take ownership all the classic things of take ownership
Speaker 4: of this, the sphere of control in terms of choose
Speaker 4: how you face what you can't control and get your
Speaker 4: mindset right on that.
Speaker 3: That became super important.
Speaker 4: Didn't work for everyone, worked for most, and that became
Speaker 4: another change of in these station meetings, and from a
Speaker 4: leadership spective, I'd always been trying to get total group
Speaker 4: harmony and one hundred percent success at times, and I
Speaker 4: realized after that, like, this is going to get pretty
Speaker 4: ugly and I'm not going to be able to achieve that.
Speaker 2: How do you cope with that from a psychological standpoint?
Speaker 2: Or did you cope with that? And how does that
Speaker 2: affect you psychologically? What was your coping mechanism?
Speaker 3: No great question, So probably a good percentage.
Speaker 4: They're probably eighty percent of a station leader's job, and
Speaker 4: certainly my job in that second half of the whole
Speaker 4: scenario was uncited by most of the team. You're one
Speaker 4: on one chatting to different team members constantly about whatever
Speaker 4: it is they've got going on or their particular problem.
Speaker 4: They're problem with someone else in the team, or theyir
Speaker 4: problem with you, or their problem with back home, and
Speaker 4: they're keeping that pretty private. So people might know they've
Speaker 4: got this issue, but they don't know you're helping them
Speaker 4: through it. And you've got all these different subgroups, and
Speaker 4: so you'd be out and the best thing to do
Speaker 4: is ralling, get something in your office and talk and go, hey,
Speaker 4: let's talk about you. You're going out and you're going
Speaker 4: out on their science project or you're helping them with
Speaker 4: their works, so that you can then have that conversation
Speaker 4: while you're shoveling snow, or while you're watching a hose
Speaker 4: spray water into a reservoir, or driving on in a vehicle,
Speaker 4: while you're out on the quad bikes and you're looking at.
Speaker 3: Penguins or changing cameras.
Speaker 4: That was the best way to keep in touch with
Speaker 4: the team, and I started to lose contact with a
Speaker 4: few of them who just weren't keen on some bit.
Speaker 4: So that became a bigger challenge, and then you're starting
Speaker 4: to go, Okay, if I'm losing direct contact with this individual,
Speaker 4: who does slove contact? What friendship networks have they got
Speaker 4: on station? Are they talking to the deputy station? They
Speaker 4: are they talking to the doctor, They're talking to their
Speaker 4: boss and their other mates, and that's enough for great.
Speaker 4: They're fine or they're managing their own mental well being
Speaker 4: without me. And yet some people did want their boss
Speaker 4: involved and that others didn't, and so having to just
Speaker 4: constantly work with that became a real day to day
Speaker 4: grind of just keeping every individual on track, but keeping
Speaker 4: the group on track.
Speaker 3: So that was tough.
Speaker 4: But keeping my selfh one track then became the other
Speaker 4: part of it, and that was too pronged. One was,
Speaker 4: like I said before, my brilliant deputy. She kept me
Speaker 4: in check. And I had a couple of other quasi
Speaker 4: deputies in different leadership groups on the station who they
Speaker 4: backed me up, and they backed me in on a
Speaker 4: lot of stuff as well, to kind of help out
Speaker 4: rather than create a divide. They'd be like, no, that's
Speaker 4: what Dave said, We're happy we do it that way,
Speaker 4: and you just go bloody hell, thanks for that, because
Speaker 4: if they'd gone the other way, then you've got other issues.
Speaker 4: So that was great to bounce ideas off them or
Speaker 4: be able to feel that we could park the formal hierarchy,
Speaker 4: to just be same level. Two people stuck in this
Speaker 4: scenario and have those chats on station was really important.
Speaker 4: The other one was then chatting to the other station leaders.
Speaker 4: So yes, we're thousands of kilometers apart, but we could
Speaker 4: set up a zoom link for a phone call and
Speaker 4: we'd do a weekly or fortnightly catch up and we
Speaker 4: laugh at each other's problems, and that became this great
Speaker 4: in the face of adversity, absolutely and classic and some
Speaker 4: of the tougher moments as well, which I had and
Speaker 4: my team had. You then be looking to history to go, well, yeah,
Speaker 4: nothing that happened to us had never happened before, but
Speaker 4: it had never all really happened.
Speaker 3: In the same year, and that became really important.
Speaker 4: Then those outlets of speaking other stations, but they're looking
Speaker 4: at historical examples, and one of the worst it really
Speaker 4: that ties the book together.
Speaker 3: But one of the lowest points is when one member
Speaker 3: of the team he.
Speaker 4: Just had it, had enough of this particular job we're
Speaker 4: doing at the time and the whole situation. He just
Speaker 4: sort of let it out. He's like, mate, I can't
Speaker 4: do this anymore. This F that, F the government, F
Speaker 4: the ship, F the planes, and I quit. And I'm like,
Speaker 4: what the is going on? You can't quit where you're
Speaker 4: gonna go?
Speaker 3: What are you gonna do?
Speaker 4: And part of your brains like, all right, we'll cook
Speaker 4: take a tent in six months where the rations and
Speaker 4: going off, you go, and you can't do that. You're like, now,
Speaker 4: we're going to get him back to work. We've got
Speaker 4: to work out a plan here. You've got to work
Speaker 4: with HR and the sites and the doctors and the
Speaker 4: team and everything.
Speaker 2: You just that's why, that's why I asked these questions
Speaker 2: about yourself. Because one someone's head is out the game,
Speaker 2: or they lose hope and they lose belief, and you know,
Speaker 2: they lose sight of the mission. It's super hard right
Speaker 2: to be able to bring them back into the fold.
Speaker 2: Psychologically for sure.
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of that came down to control.
Speaker 4: So there's so many regulations and rules around going outside,
Speaker 4: all these different things that that had kind of overwhelmed
Speaker 4: him a bit, and we were able to get him
Speaker 4: realigned and change his role and change a few parameters,
Speaker 4: which then I had to extend to the whole team,
Speaker 4: which was something as well, you go, well, don't just
Speaker 4: focus on your bad eggs. Whatever you've done for them,
Speaker 4: you got to do that for your good eggs. What
Speaker 4: about the twenty two other people that didn't quit? And
Speaker 4: that was a good leadership lesson in some of those
Speaker 4: elements as well. I'm spending a lot of time focusing
Speaker 4: on problems, but what about the other end of that spectrum?
Speaker 4: What am I doing to encourage and reward the good
Speaker 4: side of it? And that, Funnily enough, they were all
Speaker 4: pretty happy anyway. I'm like, I'm going to everything I've
Speaker 4: done to solve this issue. If you need to change anything.
Speaker 4: They're like, we're happy, We're good. I'm like, okay, well
Speaker 4: that's easy. And yet at the same time, it was
Speaker 4: a weird parallel that that same scenario had happened on
Speaker 4: Shackleton's expedition, the Trans Antarctic Expedition in you know, back
Speaker 4: in nineteen fourteen, where a member of his team had
Speaker 4: quit as well, and that goat me a good laugh
Speaker 4: of like, oh, well, every Antarctic leader wants to be
Speaker 4: up there with Shackleton and I'm like, well, now I
Speaker 4: get some.
Speaker 3: Sense of how he felt about whenever his team quit.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, God didn't like what a ridiculous scenario,
Speaker 4: But he dealt with he and I kind of went
Speaker 4: along the same tracks as He's like.
Speaker 3: You deal with it head on, you chat to the individual,
Speaker 3: you work out a.
Speaker 4: Plan, and you get them back because everyone has to
Speaker 4: work and everyone has to be part of the team.
Speaker 2: And so as all this was going on, say, the
Speaker 2: chaos of the unknown, of uncertainty, of you know, people
Speaker 2: suffering back at home families. You know, how did that
Speaker 2: affect the mission?
Speaker 4: Well, a huge part of your mission down there is surviving,
Speaker 4: so you can't down tools. And that's really a lot
Speaker 4: of that's on the trades team, which is more than
Speaker 4: half the station, the mechanics, the plumbers, the spark's, carpenters,
Speaker 4: the chef, and everyone. If they're not working, we're not surviving.
Speaker 4: And everyone supports elements of that. Everyone's on the search
Speaker 4: and rescue teams and fires.
Speaker 2: So you needed each other to survive one percent.
Speaker 3: You can't stop.
Speaker 4: Even when we'd have a day off, six people and
Speaker 4: one of the leadership team would be on call at
Speaker 4: all times, and even then.
Speaker 3: You're all on call all time, all the time.
Speaker 4: So yes, it might be there's six people who are
Speaker 4: at a higher degree of readiness and they're sober and
Speaker 4: they're ready to go, and they're on station.
Speaker 2: Talk about the purpose correct, So yeah, at.
Speaker 4: The same time, they might they're just the first six
Speaker 4: responders to a building burning down. Now there's double and
Speaker 4: triple redundancy with most of the buildings and situations, but
Speaker 4: if we were to lose the main mess facility, or
Speaker 4: the main storage warehouse, or the main generator house and everything,
Speaker 4: it would be disastrous and really really would put us
Speaker 4: all of the risk of changing it from a very
Speaker 4: easily survivable situation logistically to a massive challenge. Well, hang
Speaker 4: on a minute. We've lost our main powerhouse, and we've
Speaker 4: lost all of the food from.
Speaker 3: The main security.
Speaker 4: We're now down to the buckets of flour and sugar
Speaker 4: for another six months, so you've got.
Speaker 3: To take that stuff seriously.
Speaker 4: So that kind of helped kept us focus of well,
Speaker 4: if we want to go home, we've got to keep
Speaker 4: working hard to keep the place running and leave it
Speaker 4: running well for the next group.
Speaker 2: So your plan or the project was meant to be
Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty five days long. It's supposed to
Speaker 2: be a year. You end up after five hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty seven days getting a call to say that you
Speaker 2: know it's it's over. Took me through that call when
Speaker 2: you knew that you were going home ultimately, and this
Speaker 2: is this.
Speaker 4: Is such a good story in terms of it ain't
Speaker 4: over till it's over. So we got picked up and
Speaker 4: so we did the station handover. It's actually day about
Speaker 4: four hundred and ninety nine when we formally handed over
Speaker 4: the station to the replacement team. Jumped on the ice
Speaker 4: break and we had to go past one of the
Speaker 4: other Australian Antarctic stations at Mawson, which by which point
Speaker 4: we were very late in the Antarctic season. So due
Speaker 4: to the pack ice, we couldn't get close enough to
Speaker 4: the station. We're about ninety nautical miles away, which is
Speaker 4: for Australians listing it to the distance across Baths Strait,
Speaker 4: I think it's probably the distance from Bloody Scotland to
Speaker 4: Norway or something like that as well across the North Sea,
Speaker 4: so considerable distance about to a helicopter fly off of
Speaker 4: this station. So we ended up on the boat for
Speaker 4: about a month before we even got back to Australia.
Speaker 3: But when we finally finished.
Speaker 4: That resupply set course for Hobart, you know, finally, and
Speaker 4: this is now early late March, early April twenty and
Speaker 4: twenty one, we knew, okay, we're going to be home
Speaker 4: that yes.
Speaker 3: Besides, we've done everything we need to do.
Speaker 4: We're now just on the ship as passengers and we're
Speaker 4: setting a course across the Southern Ocean. Two weeks from
Speaker 4: now we'll sail into Hobart and the whole journey will
Speaker 4: be over. And that's when it goes from just ridiculous
Speaker 4: to hilarious in terms of what happened to us. Because
Speaker 4: on the fifth of April, halfway across the Southern Ocean,
Speaker 4: the nearest land is a place called Herd Island, which
Speaker 4: is in the middle of absolutely now in the Southern
Speaker 4: Indian Ocean, near the Kirgalen Plateau and the Kerbland Islands,
Speaker 4: which is a French outpost pretty much uninhabited. And ten
Speaker 4: fifty eight in the morning I get rudely awoken from
Speaker 4: my morning nap by the sound of the ship's fire
Speaker 4: alarms and the captain just declaring fire, fire, fire, fire
Speaker 4: in the engine room, not a drill. Grab my life jacket,
Speaker 4: grab my survival gear. Head down to the folks, all
Speaker 4: the ship. One hundred people standing in the folks, all
Speaker 4: of the ship. It's zero degrees outside six meter swell.
Speaker 4: Ship's now dead.
Speaker 3: In the water.
Speaker 4: You beam on to six meter waves, so you're rolling
Speaker 4: thirty degrees either way, holding onto things to try and
Speaker 4: keep going.
Speaker 3: And the fire. If you look in the book or look.
Speaker 4: Online for this, and it's a ship called the MPV Everest,
Speaker 4: the fire had engulfed the entire engine room. This massive
Speaker 4: fireball exploded out one of the air intakes, and the
Speaker 4: ship was in a real bad state and they had
Speaker 4: no guarantee they were going to get the thing going again.
Speaker 4: So we were very very very very close to jumping
Speaker 4: on those lifeboats now abandoned ship in the middle of
Speaker 4: freaking nowhere, And we stood there for six hours until
Speaker 4: we did finally get the credit to the ship's crew
Speaker 4: and a number of my team. We fought the fire
Speaker 4: boundary cooled and did all this incredibly heroic stuff to
Speaker 4: get the ship under control safe and then get the
Speaker 4: other remaining engine house operable, which had a whole lot
Speaker 4: of other challenges systematically. It is a brand new icebreaker,
Speaker 4: which a bit like a Tesla. If a Tesla is
Speaker 4: not working perfectly, it's like I don't want to drive
Speaker 4: today because one tires of it flat. This ship was
Speaker 4: the same, I'm not driving on one engine while one
Speaker 4: engine's exploded, and they had to kind of reprogram at
Speaker 4: safety settings to go no, no, no, the best thing you
Speaker 4: can do is drive.
Speaker 3: On one engine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's okay. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And finally, so at reduced pace and about half speed
Speaker 4: somewhere between about three and five knots, we limped home
Speaker 4: to then Fremantle, which was slightly closer on the western
Speaker 4: coast of Australia. And there was a strange poetic factor
Speaker 4: that that like the last Australians or the last members
Speaker 4: of my family to sail into Fremantle, that actually been
Speaker 4: my grandparents and my father when they'd arrived in the
Speaker 4: nineteen fifties. So there was this sort of funny end
Speaker 4: of like I was standing on the heli deck of
Speaker 4: the ship as we sailed into Freematt with the news
Speaker 4: helicopters trying to circle and get footage of the burnt
Speaker 4: out sections of the ship and the damage as we
Speaker 4: sailed in, And that was just such a strange but
Speaker 4: somewhat fitting end to be standing there and contemplating abandoning
Speaker 4: ship in that situation. And that was the moment where
Speaker 4: you really realize what my team had been through is
Speaker 4: they were the ones that jumped on fire hoses, that
Speaker 4: were helping people with their survival gear and helping people
Speaker 4: understand it, and they really just talk.
Speaker 3: About rising to an occasion.
Speaker 4: You'd think at the end of that we would have
Speaker 4: gone like, oh, bugger, this what a ridiculous situation. I
Speaker 4: can't believe this is happening. We all just went Okay,
Speaker 4: of course, the ship's on fire.
Speaker 3: That'll do. Let's go fire hoses.
Speaker 4: Life Jacket's helped people where we can and do what
Speaker 4: we can to be part of the emergency response, which
Speaker 4: became a really strange situation as well as we weren't
Speaker 4: out of the woods. It dragged on for another It
Speaker 4: took another week to stay off home. Every time the
Speaker 4: ship's engine would even shudder or change speed, people would
Speaker 4: just be out of their cabins, being like, what's happening something,
Speaker 4: what we're doing?
Speaker 3: We're doing four knots now and then we're doing five four.
Speaker 2: Well, mate, yeah, that was still think everyone's like me
Speaker 2: a cats, what's going on exactly?
Speaker 4: And rather than before that, everyone just to sort of
Speaker 4: sitting in the cabins watching movies and reading books with
Speaker 4: them in their cabin mate. Everyone would prop their doors open,
Speaker 4: and it was very social on the ship, as we
Speaker 4: all just sought to have this kind of unity of Ye,
Speaker 4: we're all stuck in this burning boat together.
Speaker 3: What's we're going to go down? Let's go down as friends.
Speaker 2: We're running out of time and I must wrap up,
Speaker 2: not that I want to. You've got a book called
Speaker 2: five hundred and thirty seven Days of Winter. Now I
Speaker 2: see that you've signed me a copy. I'm truly grateful,
Speaker 2: and I'm definitely gonna get my head in that book
Speaker 2: to to really bring it alive. Because talk about such
Speaker 2: a young age leading such teams and expeditions and programs,
Speaker 2: and you know, platoons, et cetera, et cetera, got nothing
Speaker 2: but admiration for you, mate. I know how hard it
Speaker 2: is to be a leader, and I know the hardships
Speaker 2: that come with it. If you add one word and
Speaker 2: one word only to describe leadership, one word. What would
Speaker 2: it be? Humble humble humidity. Yeah, you know what, That's
Speaker 2: exactly what I'm thinking. Stay humble humidity is definitely It
Speaker 2: helps you to really merge into a team, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: And it helps you It helps you listen and really
Speaker 2: take on board what other people are going through as well,
Speaker 2: so you can put yourself in their shoes and lead
Speaker 2: from the center. Listen, David, you're a great dude.
Speaker 3: Mate.
Speaker 2: It was great to speak to one of my home
Speaker 2: and have a conversation. That'll be fad. Thanks ever so much,
Speaker 2: May and thanks for coming on my podcast again.
Speaker 3: Cool. Thanks thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: David Knof is the author of five hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: seven Days of Winter. I'll link the details in the
Speaker 2: show notes. Thanks so much for joining me on Headgame.
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