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