When you actually prioritize your own happiness and well being and yet you get paid less, your happiness will be worth more. Keep something in your school life or your life that you actually like doing. It's not about how you get there. There are a lot of different ways, and there'll never be a clean journey, and if there is, it'll probably be pretty boring and underwhelming.
Welcome to the Sees the YA Podcast. Busy and happy are not the same thing. We too rarely question what makes the heart seeing. We work, then we rest, but rarely we play and often don't realize there's more than one way. So this is a platform to hear and explore the stories of those who found lives. They adore the good, bad and ugly. The best and worst day
will bear all the facets of seizing your yay. I'm Sarah Davidson or a spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned entrepreneur who swapped the suits and heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha Milk Bark. CZA is a series of conversations on finding a life you love and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy and fulfillment along the way. I am so excited about this week's guest, and how wild that coincides with the very weekend I landed in Antarctica exactly a year ago. Time has flown so much.
I still can't believe that actually happened. It's kind of like a dream of going to a different planet. But how amazing to get to relive it all in this episode. I'm so pumped to have David Knoff with us this week. You'll be able to hear in my voice very quickly, how fascinating I found his apath yay, not only his Antarctic journey, which you'll hear all about, but all the crazy dots that had to connect to get him there.
Think starting off with doing woodwork in Vce, do a career as an officer in the Army, commanding a whole platoon with the Regional Assistants Mission at Solomon Islands, turned diplomat at the Australian High Commission in Pakistan, which then became their secretary at the Australian Embassy in Iraq, with a side of professional photography in Turkey, metals for formation, skydiving in Dubai, and even some records in splitboarding, which by the way is a hybrid snowboard that can be
separated into cross country skis for ascent. And that's all before he became an Antarctic station leader at Davis Station, which is not only already a uniquely intense and challenging role to Phil let alone, when you get stuck there during an unprecedented global pandemic for five hundred and thirty seven days, you can only imagine how interesting that story is, such that he has written it all into an incredible book which I absolutely poured over. With more exciting projects
related to that story on the horizon. I'll let David tell you more about it himself. He's a far better storyteller, but I hope you find it as captivating and invigorating as I did. There is more side note. For some reason, I use the same exact setup with microphones and everything as I usually do, but my audio got a little bit distorted and we don't know why. We've fixed it up.
Mostly but his audio is far better than mine. He had a pro set up, So for any of those very accustomed ears who noticed my audio isn't as good as usual, my apologies, but I hope you enjoy it. Nonetheless, David welcome to seize thea.
Thanks for having me. I can't wait to delve into this.
I am so excited about this. I just mentioned off here that we have been chatting for a little while. In fact, we had one RANDO call that just went for like an hour and a half that was just becoming mates. But also with the Antarctic connection, I landed in Antarctica on this day last year, so this was meant to be.
Oh absolutely, And I mean I was just saying as well, like this is quite early in the Antarctic summer to get down there, so it would have been great to go. Like the first time I ever went down was a tourist as well, back in sort of twenty fifteen or something.
We went in sort of January and at the peak of summer, whereas you would have still got it in November, you can still get some very very cold temperatures, you still had a lot of sea ice, and the wildlife is still kind of returning from its winter abroad and then they all go back to Antarctica for the summer.
And we did hear that. I had a couple of people say who had been in sort of the November, like there were a lot more whales later in the season. But they also were like, oh my god, the smell. And I was like, what smell? We had pristine ice, like nothing had been touched for a whole winter. It was amazing. I didn't smell anything.
I love that because I had someone the other day chatting her out because I'm heading back down to Antartica this summer as well, and it was sort of gearing up and doing some training and stuff, and so I was like, I really really wanted to spend a night like out at a penguin colony, just like in and amongst it. And I'm like, well, first of all, under the permitting regulations, you're not really supposed to do that. Second of all, the mini you've smelled a penguin rookery
and a colony. It's spectacular, but the smell will put you off ever spending any longer than the minimum amount of time.
It's pungent, like not from Antarctica, from other experiences. And we actually did this random thing out in Sorrento where you can swim out to the seal. There's like this I think it's the some famous hut anyway on the peninsula, and all these seals like have made it their home and you can go and dive and with your snorkel on. It's fine. Accidentally took my snorkel off. I was like, I'm going to die, like I am deceased from the scent of the fish and the wee. Oh my god,
it was so much so I can't even imagine. But I have just finished your incredible, incredible book, Five hundred and thirty seven Days of Winter, And as you listeners know, I dropped hints last week and a lot of you were already very excited without knowing anything really about David's story that he's an antarctic expert, among so many other things.
I cannot wait to get into this. But before we do, I start every episode with a little a little ice freaker never been more relevant, which is to ask, what is the most down to earth thing about you? Because you have an incredibly impressive resume You've done before the Antarctica chapter even starts. You've done incredible things, and I think we all just need to know that you're a regular dude who does weird, quirky, down to earthshit.
Oh I regaon the best one at the moment, I'm so excited by my house plants and one of my projects in Lockdown twenty twenty one, amongst writing the book, was seating avocado pips and being like, right, avocados aren't supposed to grow in Melbourne, but I'm going to just every avocado I eat, I'm going to work with the pips and try and grow them. And now I have two years gone after that, one of my avocado trees
in the back. I was standing there and stare at it, going like that was a pip that I like, was that was an avocado pip from an avocado I ate, And now look at it, it's a tree. I'm so proud of it. It's just so that's probably the dorkiest, down to us, least adventurous thing about me at the moment.
I love how it's like the basic pleasures of not living in Antarctica is that you could have plants like an avocado, Like how exciting, Oh my god, of course you would have had avocados.
We have. Yeah, So it's funny with the food we did and didn't have down there, and even you would have seen this on a short trip to the peninsula, like bananas and some of these things they just don't last eve. You just can't freeze them properly. You can dehydrate them, and I did get addicted to dehydrated banana only en half and they're a very acquiet taste. I've tried them now that I'm back, and you're like, nah, not really, but yeah, avocados you have, like guacamole paste,
you can you can craze people that. It's just like that's the sort of stuff from your supermarket aisle that you look at it and go, oh, I don't have time to make Guacamoleans buy that, and no one really enjoys it that much. That's all you get. I mean, these are first very problem because in so many ways, the food down there on the Antarctic stations and even
some of the more adventurous expeditions, it's pretty good. There's no parasite, like, there's no flies, there's no bugs and ISOs, and it's ninety nine percent of the time it's at least below fridge temperatures, so below four degrees or freezing. You can leave your food outside. He's got to put in the shape with some stew on the top of it. You can just leave anyway, just leave it anyway, Like you just bet people like, oh, what do you do with food? And then you go, well, how much of
your diet these days is frozen? And they go oh, yeah, wow, and exactly so we you know, we're stuck there for a year and a half and still right at the end of that we still had eggs. Now, I wouldn't describe them as fresh.
Fresh is not the word I'd use.
But no, but the especially preserved they but this like oil coating on them, and this company and tassy that do it. Then you keep them at the right temperature and in the right locations, and you just make sure that when you're cracking them, you're cracking them all separately if you're putting a bunch together, so if you get a rotten one, it's not it doesn't small, but you kind of go wow, like, in terms of food technology, we've come a long way from you one hundred years ago.
When they went tied together. They kind of have like tinned meat and see a blood, add some pepper to it.
I mean, that was one of my favorite parts. I mean, apart from the more awe inspiring and like hated leadership questions and the rescue missions and actually it was like the banal kind of day to day what do you actually do on an Antarctic station that I found so fascinating because it's just so foreign for most people to
read about. Like this is what I love about this show is I get to dive into lifestyles that you don't have to live the lifestyle to hear from someone who's done it to kind of like live it yourself.
But before we get there, my favorite thing about getting to spend time with people like you is to trace back that people will meet you through your book or through your public speaking and you're an Antarctic expedition leader who's gone on this incredibly once in a lifetime journey at a time when the world has never seen you know, there's so many big ticket things, and forget that you were once a kid who had no idea he'd end up here, who had to make decisions about your career,
who had an entire career before this. By the way, and I've got you know, in my kind of like weird creep research, have gone back to like the subjects that you studied at school and like what you thought that would translate to. And I think tracing back to who you were as a kid and all the decisions it took to get you here is what's really relatable for people listening who don't know where they could end up one day, and that it could be on an
Antarctic station. So can you take us back to three kids in Clint Waverley physics maths would work keeping your options open for after school, your first jobs. You know, what was your childhood like and who did you think you'd be?
Well, that that is taking it a long way back.
It's my specialty. Let's throw back.
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, graffic club where there was the second of three kids parents. Parents ran a small business which I think in so many ways set the three of us kids up in terms of we didn't see it as a like the whole family was the business and that yes, dad went to work and mom went to work, and we went to work. There in the school holidays we were running like an automotive parts business.
So in the holidays we'd go and working around sticking orders and learning all that stuff which under modern workplace health and safety you would just be completely not You cannot get a twelve year old kid on school holidays to pick orders in a warehouse on a skateboard while there's forklifts in operations.
I was going to say, were you fourteen and nine months Let's pretend you were, like yeah, anyway.
Won't name the company, but yeah, it was ally it's easy. You got good at skateboarding, and so I think that set us up. We sort of had a good work ethic from a young age. But also we're fairly free range kids. This was in the nineties out in gloomily pretty safe suburb we'd ride bmx's and or skateboards or rollerbades or whatever the phase of your childhood was for your method of transport out into the parklands, and you just you'd go and then you've got to be home
by sunset sort of thing. And there was a group of other kids down the street and around the corner, and you kind of just off you went. And I think as well, I was lucky enough to go to a school that had outdoor ed programs, and those memories from school were my favorite ones of those those camps. And it's such a shame here as well now that a lot of schools have shied away from camps and overnight camping for a for whole range of reasons, and I just looked back up. But that was the best
part of school. Now, obviously not every kid loves the outdoors, but I really loved getting out saying intense and learning how to do that well. And so yeah, when it got to then academia and school, I wanted to be an engineer, and looking back, I didn't want to be an engineer, but it made sense. I liked building stuff, I've been creative, and I was relatively good at physics and maths and some pretty classic boys sort of skills, and so then that was the path that I was
going down. Yet when it got to them picking subjects for year twelve, as you said, I was like, no, I really want to do woodwork, and the cruise adviser is like work for like do another math, So I'm like, I hate the one that's I have to do. Why am I doing two maths? I want to do woodwork. I want to have I want to do something practical. And there was two of us at the school that were doing kind of your physics and advanced maths and would work but keep something in your school life or
your life that you actually like doing. And that became such a and then even to this day now when renovating my house, I built my kitchen bench, I built coffee tables around my house, and rebuilt my staircase. All these carpentry skills and someone's like, hey, we have to learn how to do this stuff. I like, I did DC would work? Would work? Yeah. It basically led you to a cabinet maker's apprenticeship, which I didn't go and do. So my cabinet making skills they're not that good, but
they're good enough. Yeah.
I was going to say that don't sound terrible.
Exactly, whereas I have just not used algebra as often in my day to day life. Trigonometry, yes, you do need a bit of that with cabinet making. That was and they got to UNI and started doing an engineering degree, likely it was a double degree engineering Arts, and like two years into that, I just I don't want to be an engineer. Nothing about it inspired me, and I bailed on that spent I joined the Army Reserve. When
its transferred to full time service with the Army. I'm like, this is unreal, getting me outdoors, it's leadership, it's all these things I didn't really know I wanted to do in life, and just straight away I found it. I'm like, great, I love this. It's practical, it's adventurous, and it's a good gig. And then I've got to go overseas with the army as well as a platoon commander, so leading
sort of thirty soldiers. I've been through officer training. Took a platoon over the Solomon Islands in two thousand and seven on a peacekeeping mission. And while I deferred UNI, you know, most people's gap years, you go to Canada and go snowboarding. Background up.
You can just get wasted in pubs in Europe and you're like commanding soldiers in the Solomon.
Islands, which was I mean, it was a pretty We called it an armed vacation, so it certainly wasn't it wasn't that dangerous in the war warlike kind of way. But it was still just amazing. And I got back and then went right, that's it. I'm not going back to engineering. I'm going to finish my art's degree. And at the time then had started working with Foreign Affairs and Trade to get a job with them later on and succeeds. We did a lot of joint work with
them under the Regional Assistance Mission and Solon Islands. So I got back, finished my Arts degree with the politics major, joined Foreign Affairs and Trade, and spent the next ten years as a diplomat before joining the Antarctic programs.
So wild. I love that we actually connected through the wonderful Dean of Arts as both graduates of Wanash University Arts faculty. And how funny it was that you were, like, I am proof that with a plain arts degree, which most people don't know what to do with because it's so broad, you can do these incredible things and go and like I mean, like literally, I've said this to you before,
and everyone listening knows. For some random reason that has nothing to do with anything in my life, military and international diplomacy is like my jam. It's like the thing I would have done if I didn't go into business. That's what I would have used law for. So reading about you going, you know, from Solomon Islands to Canberra to then oh, let's just like hang out in this
lava bard for like five years before Antarctica. Like, it's just wild that this is your journey, but also a really interesting kind of reiteration of the idea that also your life happens in chapters. So like in the army chapter, you might have thought this is going to be my career. I'll be military, but then actually it's diplomacy. And then you do that for five years or six years or whatever, and then suddenly it's like, no, it's time for a
next chapter. And I think we all think that we need to find our dream job, and then we arrive there and then we stay there for the rest of our life. And it's like, actually, life is always evolving in these like these chapters that inevitably you'll kind of like get to one new thing, it'll stretch you, your comfort zone will catch up to you. You know it's time
for something new. So I'd love to hear how, firstly, I mean how going from sort of done trun to then changing your whole skill set to diplomacy and then working in these high risk, high intensity environments, what that was like, because that's my favorite big personally. But then also when you know that it's time to move out of something like that into something new.
It's so right. And I know so many people that chase their dream job and it's just not what it cracked up to be for so many different reasons, and yeah, that idea of eye I want to and I say this one when I talk to school students, either kind of in an actual session or just one on one. Hey, they want to ask questions. Always say like, there are so many careers out there where there is no path. Now, there's a lot of job You want to be a doctor, you've got to go and do that. You've got good
Mark's got to get into medicine. You've got to be a doctor. Then there's like a hundred different types of doctors you can be. You can be a doctor that just sits at one cleaning at their whole life and does the same thing and work with retires after fifty years, or you can go and do a million other things within that career. But yet, there's so many jobs out there, and I look at my kind of job and lifestyle now and there is no set career. PATS. Everyone asked
that around around DEFAT. They're like, how did to get into DEFAT? Now? Classic way to get into DEFAT is you do an international relations degree. Like international relations, you get a master's in it or a PhD. And you speak Japanese and Chinese and French and Italian or something like that and you go bang and you're into it,
they'll hire you, right, that's what they want. There are so many people within Foreign Affairs and Trade and that represent Australia overseas at our embasses who have just completely illogical career into that, but they're great at it because
that's what you need, you mean, diplomats. From what people see is but the most obvious thing they see is dealing with consular issues overseas in Australia that's banged up abroad and something's gone wrong and they're incarcerated or they've lost all their belongings have been robbed, and all the response to say like the Barley bombings or something, the embassy official is going to do that. The last thing you want is a bunch of just PhD students and
international relations like you need a combination. And so there's some very very practical backgrounds from all. One of my mates has got an agricultural degree and he's a great diplomat and it's just his pathways into that. So that's something as well I think people forget is it's not about how you get there. That there are a lot of different ways and there will never be a clean journey, and if there is, it'll probably be pretty boring underwhelming.
But to back up then to your real question, there is around like okay, well, how do you know when to change careers? And you're right, Like, when I was in the army, I loved it. I was really enjoyed being being an officer and being an infantry soldier as well.
Like it it was everything I wanted and I kind of felt that when I got back from my trip to the Sollis, I'm like Geez and most of the other old old veterans and everyone and other people I spoke to, they were like, it doesn't get much better than that, like leading your platoon on your first TRIPID And I'm like, now, I really I wanted to go to war in so many it sounds so stupid, but you do. When you're a soldier, you kind of wanting, you want to go and do something. And I'm like,
maybe that was enough. I got to lead a peacekeeping patrol and did some cool little bits in there, and there's a great story at the end of the book around that of kind of like, oh, that's that's about as good as it gets for an infantry officer. And at the time then I realized that the Army doesn't
give you a lot of choice in your career. It'll tell you where you're going, and you can have And I know some stellar army officers who just through no fault of their own, missed out on a lot of troops, didn't get to Afghanistan, or went once in a kind of advisory headquarters role where they don't feel like they really did what they wanted to do. And so I kind of saw that and went, nah, I don't want
to do that. I want more control. And Front Affairs gave me a lot more control everywhere to go, because I ended up going to places like Pakistan and Iraq and not going to the embassies in Paris or Tokyo or new and yet, because you could do that, you could do that later when you've got a family. But b we get along in those like this. It's fascinating work. But I'm like, no, I want to go and work
at an embassy where we don't get along. And then a decade after that, in and around the conflict zones, I just realized I'm like, you know what, I'm pretty tired of this. I then cornered myself with that career that I probably wasn't that competitive to then get a job in Vienna or London or somewhere like that. I was going to have to go back to Canberra for a while, wait another couple of years, reskill internally to
get out to one of those places. And I'm like, you know what, three years in camera just doesn't do it for me.
Oh really, that's so surprising.
Nothing against camera.
Especially with your personality as is emerging from the things.
You like to do well. I I spent two years in camera and I did love it. You could get mountain biking for work and it's two hours from the ski fields, two hours from the coaster. It's not too bad.
I mean it's no Pakistan or the Antarctic Peninsula, but it's got a lot going for it.
Like Islamabad, the great mountain biking story before worked then in.
Camera is Lamabad Safe safe, you know, just.
Both designed by so Walter Burley Griffin had a hand stop it dead set, dead set Burley Griffin had I'm pretty big. I'm pretty sure that was the room of it.
It is roundabouts and straight lines everywhere. Islamabad is designed by the same guy, but so I have my mountain bike over there, and Islamabad is nestled up against a set of hills called the Margala Hills, which essentially start from the kind of flatness of the Punjab province of Pakistan, but then it heads so from Lamabad north is the Margala Hills and then eventually gets into the Characa Range and then heads up into the kind of you know,
the highest points of Earth and hits k two, et cetera. Okay, so you've got these just spectacular hills that go straight out of Zlamabad. And I had when a couple of mates of minds I had mountain bikes having we go before work and you go up these hiking trails that weren't really mountain bike trails, but if you went early enough on a day, you just you didn't think there
be people. But one morning I was I was honing honing down the hills on my mountain bike having a ball, when like a wild ball ran in front of me and I'm like, oh wow, like ah, and that's not
it wasn't too crazy. But then like a bunch of dudes just started firing rifles and were like hunting and chasing the boar, and I'm like, Okay, that's about a dang, Like I was just killed nobody cross fire, because like these these dudes are obviously going like, oh, if we go hunting in the hills, no one's hiking this early. They hadn't expected that idiots would be mountain biking that early. So you kind of yeah, one of those moments.
So do you think that, Like one of the things that fascinates me is that we are just conditioned to sort of think that certain pathways are better than others, or that we should be siloed in this particular way if our personality is X, y Z, And it fascinates me that actually we're just all built to find what I call yay, like your fulfillment or your joy or
whatever it is, in completely different things. So what I would think of, I mean, probably there's a part of my personality that would have been very suited to that, because I do really thrive on that adrenaline and risk and danger in a diplomacy context, like I love the idea of working on international conflicts. But some people would think what you did in Pakistan and in that diplomacy chapter of your life is their nightmare, not only would they not actively seek it. It's like they would never
You couldn't pay them to go and do that. But obviously for you it was like something that felt like an amazing career at that time. So like, what was it that drew you to it? Was it the challenge? Was it outdoors? Was it the risk?
Like?
Are you an adrenaline junkie?
I have been told I'm an adrenaline junkie.
I have been informed.
Yeah, I resent the term because I like, I take calculated risks. And you're absolutely right. The reason I went into the army and diplomacy and the stuff I do now, the Antarctic program and those trips. Yeah, there's elements of uncertainty and danger, but that's life, the natural order of things. And you look at the animal world and our evolution
as a species. We never knew where our meals were coming from, and then we created all society and order and all these things to kind of give you you want a balance of Okay, we know that if we've
got we've got grains and crops. Now we've got a village of one hundred and fifty people, and we can go from there and you could start any but still you would go off on the hunt, or the season's changing, we need to move higher ground as a community, and everyone packs up and you bring the kids, and you do all the stuff, and you go out the front door, and you have to go on these adventures. That's how we're designed to operate. That's how every other species on
the planet operates. They don't have the comfort zones and everything that we've created, all these man made structures. And even I love one of my favorite quotes that I don't know where it's from, but someone was telling me this morning about oh, we're trying to get some cargo and one of the flights we've got and they're like, oh, we might have to stuff it in our own bags, and I'm like, no, forget about it. We own the planes, we own the contracts, we can all of these rules
are man made. There is no man made law that can't be broken. Nice great only laws that matter are the laws of physics, because everything else is a man made construct, and there's probably a way around it in terms of we can get approvals or we can change this.
And half the time, especially if it's a government funded trip, you're like, well, we probably wrote the blood guidelines, so we can probably there's been some government is so hello, this is I always like love debugging conspiracy theories to people like, oh the government does this, and like what about Antarctica. There's like, you know, secret bases and all these things, Like have you met the government?
Governments?
There's no way that the government couldn't conspiracy.
Yeah, they're struggling with the things that are overt.
The rest I mean, and that's just a function of the size of how compling up the amount of times government is fighting. I've gone way off track.
Yeah, well, actually the government versus government thing has brought me back to your Antarctic adventure because there's a huge operation in the books that I'll get to that involve different governments, which again is like so fascinating to me. But I personally would love to spend more time on the military and on diplomacy because that's my jam, but I want to spend a lot of the episode on
your Awntarctic experience. So moving on to sort of the transition away from one career again to this totally new career, which seems like it has a lot in common with the outdoors and leadership and all that, but obviously is completely different. You had to retrain. You also had this transitional period where guys like this guy come on. He then worked as a freelance photographer, made like skydiving records, has qualified in open water diving, Like there's basically nothing
he can't do. It became like a hybrid snowboarder who like broke all these records, Like just just a really relaxed gardening leave that you took in between your two jobs. How did you know that you were at the end of a chapter? And then I think what's most overwhelming for people, particularly if they get thrown into that involuntarily like soral redundancy or COVID or whatever. How do you rEFInd a new pathway then and find your place in
the water. It's like you're almost going back to the end of high school and it's like, hey, be whoever you want now, Like, how do you do that?
I think the minute you know and I don't know where you got things. I don't hold any records from I've done. I've certainly done a lot of stuff.
One of the first people to snowboard down a range of peaks on the Antarctic pinicially using slip boards.
Okay, that's Guinness record. It's just a record hard place to get to that few people have away.
He's humble, guy is humble. Yeah.
But I think that the look, and I use that in my talks and stuff, is around the link to resilience. People go, how do you get so resilient? I'm like, just you need to know why you're doing something. The minute you know why you're doing it, and you've you've got a high level of desire to succeed or even get to a location or achieve that goal your set. But the minute you don't, and the minute you kind of find yourself going like, oh why am I doing this?
Or oh you know, it's a good paycheck, or it you know, it's you know, it's just like I need to do this for another two years too, And then I can be like nah, the minute you're talking like that, or you're telling that to yourself or you hear yourself telling that story to others, you need to get out of it now. It's the world is a complicated, complicated place, so you do have to factor in like, Okay, I
can't just quit my job and do something else. But I think COVID taught This lesson to a lot of people.
If you haven't learned this through COVID, learn it now on this podcast, is that when you actually prioritize your own happiness and well being and yet you get paid less, you'll be your happiness will be worth more and then you'll find you you're better at it and you'll just the whole thing works better when you've got more time with your family or more time to focus on your side hustle all your passions, but your your core money earner or bread breadwinning kind of job. Don't let that
define you. And I tell peoples well, like don't get out of bed for someone other than yourself. Like you're getting out of bed to do something you want to do. And if that and yeah, if you've got to get up and you've got to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning, are cool, Get you're getting up at five so you can then do something that you
want to do. And that might be standing in the backyard and look at your avocado and like avocado flap, I did that, or your kids or your dog, or you have some fitness stuff, or get up and read a book, because then you get out of bed and you did something you wanted to do and then you go, I now better go earn some money and pay the bills,
because you know life. But then outside of that, and one of the cool things on the Antarctic stations is, yeah, we will work sort of eight or nine hours a day and you're always you're kind of always working, but you're actually without the commute to work and a whole range of other factors. You then still have hours to do other things. And some of the hobbies and the sessions we run down there, this is kind of delving into the depths of the story as well, but then
use your professional development side of it. And we used to rhyme like some of the best stuff we do down there is every Wednesday night we'd run different talks, so and if you've never done public speaking before banging, there's a chance get up back yourself in. We'd run for group fitness classes, workshops, hobby heart sessions, building development, language things, music lessons, whatever it was. Everyone would learn from each other and do different things and it's a
real unique thing. You probably even had this on your own Tarctic voyage. Like the talks and learning from those around you is so important and workplaces that value professional development, which I really enjoyed because one of the people that
get in to come and talk about this effect. But the minute you go to a workplace that actually encourages that their ability retain people and keep them going, and people go, we don't have the budget to get in speakers, you like, use your own people, like, you don't need to go and higher. You know, you don't need expensive speakers,
you don't even need anyone from outside. Use your own people, encourage them to develop and learn from each other, and you can just and you see the group come together, you see people backing each other up, and everyone then can can grow. Like I'm not good at public speaking, You're like, cool, Well, what better way to get better than to go start with a small group of people. You know, they'll help you out, they'll give you some pointers, it's a feedback or whatever it is, and you can
you can grow and learn. So when you're going to get right back to your question, how do you know that? I think the minute you're questioning, like, all right, why am I doing this? You go and I think for me, at the end of my career in diplomacy, I was I've been in Iraq for about a year and a bit, you know, back and forth a lot of times, and I was looking at other people around me. I was tired of a lot of the complicated elements around what we're doing in Iraq. Fascinating at the start, but by
the end you're like, this is pretty complicated. And I loved delving into the thousands of years of history of what on earth we were doing there and trying to explain that. I remember once trying to explain this to I was working with an ANZAC task group as well. This is newly a arrived group of Kiwis. I'd say, I was about to say little that they were not little, these units.
Little baby soldiers exactly exactly.
They're like, so, what's what's what's this all about? What are we doing here? From your point of it? And I'm like, right, cool, So let's go back, Like, first of all, we're going to go back one hundred years to the Sykes Peako Agreement, but then we're also going to go back to the Ottoman Empire.
But then we're my god, sykes Peako, and you just go.
And you're starting to go like all right, I'm kind of I'm sick of all this, let's do something else. And for me that was a shift away from diplomacy in war zones to the austral Antarctic Program and working
on climate science. And now I'm not a scientist, as we established earlier, but the way I can help that is to get down there and and work around them and get them to where they need to go and be part of that, and then communicate it to others and tell everyone I can about some of the work that gets done down there and the importance of it and how we're trying to understand what's happening down in Antarctic.
And that for me became the new renewed sense of like, all right, I'm good at logistics and operations and adventurous places, and I'm also good at understanding that nuances and complexity of government funded operations. So I'm like, great, let's just put all of that together and get down and work with And I've been down six times, i think in total,
on various different voyages and expeditions. I'm heading back down this summer and I think after this trip that'll probably be it, and I'll be like, all right, let's if you've done a lot of Antarctic. I've been to all Australia stations. You've led teams, small teams, big teams, done some complicated stuff, written a book about it. Like I think I'm going, I'm gonna be ready for what's next. And again when you are, so I'm in that phase now, and you go, don't be to ration and try and
latch onto something too quickly. Be content to sit back a bit and go all right, might have to wait and see what comes up. And again, you've got to pay the bills, so you might have to take some sort of backward step where you are, but be honest with yourself with that, go this isn't a great opportunity. This is this right. I need to make that amount of money a year to pay my mortgage, so I'll take that. But then that gives me four hours a day to do my side hustle. And then as that grows,
I remember saying, like seeing a great thing. When I sort of transitioned to what I do now, I was like, don't quit your job to focus on your side hustle. Focus on your side hustle until you get fired. I'm like, I didn't get to that, but it gave me a good mindset of like, don't just quit everything and go right, I'm finished with that. I'm now going to be a
podcaster and do this stuff. Start all of that in your spare time until you get to a point where you're starting to make money with your side hustle or your other job, and you go right, I could now turn off again. I'm using my hands too often for a podcast.
No, I love it. But I also I love that you're like the perfect speaker for this entire show because everything is just slightly different wording on what I like hammer into people about the idea that you know, everyone's yay is a jigsaw puzzle, and you're always adding new pieces and getting rid of other pieces, and at some times your joy and your job overlap, at sometimes they don't.
It's like, this is the reality. Pay the bills, do the stuff, and then but you find your joy elsewhere, and as long as the puzzle is kind of all somewhat balancing, it doesn't matter where you're getting that fulfillment
as long as you're finding it somewhere. But I think the other part of that, when you're transitioning from one joy to the next is and I'm really interested to hear your answer on this, because this question varies a lot often between the genders, mass generalization, no scientific research behind this, but I'd love to know your view on the fact that when you are doing something that requires to us on the outside, is very obvious that your
skills are transferable from diplomacy to Antarctic expeditions. But you've gone from somewhere where you're awarded service medals and defense medals and like very qualified and accomplished to like never been to Antarctica, had never Like I want to ask you also about how you become qualified. And I know
the training and the testing was like extreme. How do you deal with like the doubt or imposter syndrome that creeps into your mind of like whoa I was like senior and now I'm junior and I don't know what I'm doing here and like this is a whole new world. Did you have.
That that is not that is tough and that the older you get, the harder that becomes, Like how do I start again? How do I go from being an expert in your field to I've never been an Antarctic station leader, I've never been with the Australian program. Didn't know, and being humble in that is important, but also you'll quickly understand where you know. Your skill sets feed into that.
Even if you're starting again, you're starting with a lot of experience from something hopefully similar and also also might be completely do And actually would just said about this before you going into being a parent, how on earth do you don't what to do? But you go, no, I've got a lifetime of experience of doing all sorts of other stuff that when you become a parent, you'd be like, oh great, it's just you know, organizing chaos
twenty four hours a day and that's that. And you'll have done sleep deprivation when you're a teenager, and like all these things that you're now gonna have to do you can. You'll realize that everything in life is kind of the same, it's just the context will be different. So I think that that can be part of it. But for me, I was I was pretty humble going into the Antarctic program, and then now only a few
years later, I've got quite a lot of experience. I still never think you've got a you've got the market cornered on experience and knowledge. There's still a lot you will never know. And if you ever think you know everything, you're kidding yourself and you need a realiz to check. Because even the most expert people in the world will scientists and stuff are probably some of the best examples
of this. They will still go, oh, we don't understand this, or we don't know what's going on here, and they'll seek an answer and they'll try and learn and find a way. And that for me, is a way to approach any problem, especially when you're changing careers or you're changing lifestyle, changing locations. Is knowledge to spells. Fear is a great quote from this parachute training school, and I use that in so many different places. You guys, ye
I don't know something, learn about it, you know. The more you can then learn and go, Okay, well I don't know anything about this particular topic. Let's learn and read everything, talk to others about it, and they make your own opinion. I think that's probably the more important one of still backing yourself to make your own decisions on the information you've got.
Oh, I love that. And then having said that, reading the book about your five hundred and thirty seven days are being thrown into not just being a station leader, which was already foreign, but then not getting your reinforcements at particular times and the experts that you were meant to have on hand, and like, it just got even more chaotic. So I am so excited to enter the
Antarctic chapter. Now, tell us, so you became station leader at the Devas Station from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty which ended up being over five hundred days because COVID the world changed and you couldn't get home. Can you first give us a lay of the land for people who have never been to Antarctica and don't know the layout sort of what the Australian stations are. Who else
has stations around? Like how you got there? I've only ever shared it from a tourist perspective, which was obviously South America. We only did the peninsula. We stayed on a boat, there was no landing, whereas Davis is a station, it's in Antarctica and you're not on a boat the whole time. So first, just like lay out the logistics of it all and how you became the station leader so people understand kind of the context that the rest of the story comes out in all.
Right, So twenty nineteen. I've left Marther, Korea, and I've decided to take a job as an Antarctic station leader. The Australian Antarctic Program manages our three continental Antarctic stations of Casey, Davis, and Mawson. Casey is pretty much due south of Hobart, maybe a little bit west, about four
thousand kilometers away. Davis is a bit further west, maybe due south of kind of Perth ish and about five thousand k's away, and then Mawson is due south of Herd Island, which is off the coast of westerns Trail amount you six thousand sort of kilometers away. It takes two weeks to sail there on an ice breaking ship.
You can fly to Casey if you're lucky in the weather windows, and then using smaller planes you can you can ferry between the stations, but only in the summertime, from kind of November through to sort of March April, it's the end of flying operations and even the ships. So what we do is to man those stations in the summer time. They'll have scientists in there and they might be up to Casey Davis about one hundred people at each station maybe a fifty to fifty split of
science and operational support. But the core group on the stations is always the wintering team, which will be about twenty people give or take depending on what's going on for that particularly year. So twenty four of us went down on the Aurora Australis, which was the ice breaking ship. We left on twenty third of October twenty nineteen on a one year contract of like, right, you're going to go down for a year. You'll spend that first summer
with one hundred odd scientists. Today you've got helicopters and small boats and it'll be all the things you wanted twenty four hours at daylight, hashtag and penguins, And honestly is that the leader in that situation is pretty straightforward. You've got maritime experts, aviation experts that just run everything for you and just sit back and go Maybe if we communicate better this week.
Yes, let's take out with more penguins tomorrow.
But when it got to March twenty twenty, so we're a few months in, the ship came back to pick up all the scientists and go home, and that was the last ever visit of the Aurora Australas ship to Antarctica because we were supposed to come home in November twenty twenty Australia on Australia's brand new icebreaker, the RSV Noiiner, which was being built in Romania, and there's gonna be fitted out in the Netherlands, commissioned and sail down and pick us up on its maiden voyage. And so we
it's March twenty twenty. We're like, yep, no worries. We've heard about COVID. Everyone was still in this phase of like, oh, yeah, there'll be some travel restrictions and a little lockdown, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve, you know whatever flat curb.
Oh my god, yeah PTSD exactly.
So we're all we all just went okay, great, what a year to winter in Antarctica. And as a spoiler alert, as the year rolled on, it went from bad to worse in terms of yeah, we're the novelty phase when it was like people are calling us, going what do you do on the Antarctic stations during lockdowns? And we did these great little social media media video clips and we were all having a ball going on, this is great. We have plenty to do, but by midwinter, so we
celebrate Midwinter's Day. It was is the winter solstice twenty first to June twenty twenty, and we celebrate that by doing a very formal dinner. But we also go for a swim. So at the time it's minus twenty two degrees outside on that particular day, ocean's two meters snick of sea ice. You've got to cut a hole in the ice. You with a little pool, not at the same time. One at a time. You jump in for
up to a minute. I think I'll last about twenty seconds, and you go swim around a bit, get out and go, wow, what a cool stupid thing we've done, is go swimming in the middle of Antarctic winter. And for us, even though that's the midwinter's halfway point, for us, it was actually two thirds of the way through our journey. We was supposed to come home a couple of months after that. So for us, we're like, great, let's see it after this.
You know, you get twenty fo hours of darkness at that time as well, you go all right every day after this to be seven more minutes of daylight and one hundred and fifty odd days later we'll be coming home. Yet two days after that swim and the dinner, twenty third of June twenty twenty was when we were told was I was told first by the operations managers like look, Dave, the new ship the dockyard in Romania's shut down. It's not going to be finished in twenty twenty, probably not
even twenty twenty one. So there's no ship there. We can't use the old ship that's been on sold to a different company. Australia doesn't own it anymore. You can't come home that way. We can't do the aviational link because all the planes we used to ferry around the stations, all those planes are stuck in North America and can't
get through Central America because of the COVID lockdowns. And we have a lot of great relationships with the partner nations, and namely the French, the Italians, the Americans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, who all have stations in and around Australias. We normally share a lot of logistics. We share flights, We pill cargo on different ships, put people on different ships at times, and move around. They were
like because of COVID. No one's cooperating. It's just bang every man for themselves or every nation on their own. And we were stuck in this weird sixty year swing where we'd had one ice breaker for thirty years, we're due to have a new ice breaker commission for thirty years, and the one year in between those two ice breakers was COVID and the year we were.
There, what are the chances the boat would be scheduled for renewal that year?
Oh, and look, there's so many variables in that. And people go, but you know, why didn't they have a better transition period, and you go, well, obviously, but in so many ways they didn't need to worry about that as much because they knew, well, okay, if the ship's late, we can fly everyone in and out, and then we can use we can borrow the French will do a voyage for us, and we can share logistics with the Chinese, or we can charter another ship, or we could do
something in a normal year. But when it was twenty twenty in the COVID year, none of that was available. So the program did have levels of redundancy to deal with any one of those incidents or even two of those incidents, but when you had all of them multiple, yeah, it was. It was kind of crazy because they had to have we have and any of your corporate listeners and others will know these structures like your emergency business
continuity plans and your incident management groups and teams. We ended up like we had the Umbrella Incident Management team of COVID and then you had all these other sub incident groups and it just started to get and I'm sure businesses had this is well, you're going geez. We planned on okay, that's how we set up for one incident, but no one had ever thought that'd be incidents within the incidents that require different breakout groups and you're just
trying to manage that and navigate it. And for us, in so many ways though, there was a simplicity to being stuck on an Antarctic station. It's twenty four of us. We had two years worth of food and fuel and for some reason, five years of toilet paper, which makes no sense.
Oh, you were the reason why Australia had the toilet paper shortage because it was all in bloody Antarctic with you guys.
You can't eat it though, well, have you tried. I'm sure people were given the rate it was selling back here, but anyway, so that had a simplicity of like, great, we were stuck here, and we knew we'd be there into sometime into twenty twenty one, and that we went around. We were involved in some of the planning and thinking around, well what are the options, but largely it was left to our bosses back in Hobart to go, We'll come up with a plan how to get a different ship
or a different aircraft or whatever. And part of our mind was prepared for staying another winter and an entire other year, which would have got pretty interesting. If I've said, you know, the book at the moments called Fire and thirty seven Days of Winter, I'm like, if it'd have gone another year, the book would be like a thousand days of mutiny, mayhem and cho of hell. It would have got pretty messy. But or it would have been fine.
Like it was a great team, and I know we all had ups and downs along the way, yet by and large you came back as professional colleagues with a very interesting shared experience and that we would have otherwise never met. And one of the kind of interesting things I think your listeners would appreciate, though, was the ability for not just myself but the entire team to reframe that's almost straight away and go, Okay, we signed up
for an Antarctic adventure for a year. We've now been told that's going to be a year and a half, and it has a whole other way of uncertainty of well, what does home even look like? Not just you're there longer, but also when you get home it's going to be weird. But everyone was really able to just go, oh, let's make the most of this. There's some really unique elements too.
We've got to do a lot more science in that second somewhere because there weren't all the other scientists down there to help out and do what they would normally do, so we got to jump in and do some of that. We're able to give the group more freedom on account of Okay, ordinarily, and you would have found this with your trip. You know, you're fairly controlled. You can do this. You can't do that. You've got to go out in
pairs and take this equipment and take these things. But when I was able to say, well, actually everyone's been here for a year, they know what they're doing. We can change the way we interpret some of these regulations to give so rather than people having to come and ask me for oh, can we go and do this, and be like, well, you know the conditions, you know the equipment required.
Just go for a walk.
You need to tell someone and you need to take the communication strategies so if you've got a problem, but you don't have to come and find me. And that giving people more autonomy and control was really important, and letting them get out and about and make their own fun and make the most of that unique opportunity because for so many people that's their one trip to Antarctica. You do your winter. It's the only winter I've done. I've done multiple other summer trips, but winters are rarer.
Some people do, you know, dozens of them, but it's pretty rare, and I think that's something that you can go. There's always a uniqueness to whatever situation you're in, especially when it's hard, and that was something that got me through it. Of Hey, you wanted an Antarctic challenge, you wanted to be a station leader. If it had gone to plan and been a normal year, it would have been interesting, but jeez, it wouldn't have been everything that
it became. And as it went from bad to worse, and all of the things that came up along the way, none of them were unique. They'd all happened before, and all happened again. That never all happened in one year. And that's what became really really bizarre. That when we were standing there trying to do a couple of other members of the team to just go and there's a great quote I think in the book around that of just like, well, besides the pandemic, besides this, and besides that, like,
oh what else could be wrong? And it was just a funny moment to list everything that had happened, what.
We coped with that through that well, before we get to some of the more colorful moments and how you got through them. I think I loved it as an Antarctica lover but also someone who finds human nature and
behavior fascinating and then how that leads to leadership. I mean, your experience was like an extreme, like microcosm example of leadership everywhere, except that you also became like a mother and an emergency services coordinator, the main doctor, the main like you were making calls on everything but there were so many lessons to pull out of that in the tougher moments, but just before we get to when it
got difficult. What I found so interesting about Antarctica is not only that any rules of life just go out the window because talk about humility and Doubtaca humbles you as a human, like nature doesn't care what you want to do. You're visiting there and it will just ruin any plans that you have. But also the conditions you live under, like what's normal in Antarctica is so different. So you had Wi Fi, but it was patchy. Your sunlight in summer is constant, your darkness in winter is constant.
Like what was your day to day life, what did you have access to? And also the fact that when you're you said you were working all the time. You're living with your colleagues, so that in itself is like you get no escape from each other. You do have downtime, but everyone, including scientists, would have to get involved in some of the water plumbing activities because you're just all there to make it work for everyone, and that's not
normal in human life. So can you explain some more of the logistics of living, like how you you know, did you have a doctor there all the time?
Like?
Did was there a gym? Like? What was life like?
Yeah? So life's actually pretty good when you look at it, especially the Australian stations. It'll have been about a dozen other national stations as well. They were pretty much the same and they'll all have different pros and cons. So, and the previous director of the Istralian program used to describe them a ski resorts. I'm like, yeah, but if you spend a year and a half with your twenty
four best mates on a ski resort, it's not all sunshine. Yeah, but yeah, there's there's a gym, there's a sauna, there's a hot tub, there's a library, there's a cinema, there's a bar, there's a kitchen. Everyone gets their own room on the AUSSY stations as long as you're there for more than a couple of weeks. Sometimes we have to share during resupplies and really busy times, but or less, you get your own room way for thin walls. So if you you know, it's not pretty good, but you're
absolutely right. The worst part about it is that there's there's really little privacy, even if you are locked in your own room and you've shut the door and you're trying to watch a movie or nap during the day or whatever it is, someone will slam a door or cough loudly or snore or fart or my room was really close to wear.
Haircuts, Oh my god, haircuts, of course.
So we had one guy that even did a great job, and a couple of girls in the team as well, and he did. One of them had really long, curly hair and the hair dress. He was one of the mechanics. He did a great job one day where they just parked in the bar, set up, the whole barbershop set up, and he just he'd watched a few YouTube clips on how to do women's hair, and off he went. Then
it did an amazing job. So there was some of those things that, Yeah, I mean, if you look at the photos of me at the end of the year and a half, pretty that's the longest hair i'd had a long walt and a lot of people got some pretty interesting twenty twenty eight ish haircuts, I think. Yeah, the photo of me at the airport.
The photo section in the middle of the book is my favorite, I know, with your fancy shirt.
Yeah, the fancy shirt, which was a lot darker blue at the start of the year, not the faded blue bother you and a half. So you have to do all those things yourself. And yeah, there's there's one doctor, and then there's there's one builder, and there's a couple of builders actually, and then your builders, electronics technicians and
engineers and meteorologists and all. Everyone's got their job. And I used to say as well, and the best way to approach it is, yes, you've got job, and if your hierarchy of work, but socially and there's a community, everyone's equal. It doesn't matter like everyone. There's a roster for it that you know, I do the roster. But if really you could, anyone could do it. It's just
it just repeats and you've got to shuffle. So at any point, you've got six people that are on the fire team and the emergency response team, so that if anything goes wrong, they can man the fire hoses because then we do some great firefighter training before we leave,
which is really cool. There's surgical assistance, so to help the one doctor, four people are trained as surgical assistant, so they spend two weeks in the er and Hobart doing everything from like delivering babies to car accidents, and also just as the assistant, so they get probably I think some of the coolest, most unique. You can't just say, oh, hey, I want to go spend two weeks in the er as a scrubbed in surgical assistant any other hospitality to get stuck.
Unless you're going to Antarctica.
Unless you go to Antarctica or a nursing student or something. So that that's pretty cool, and because if anything happens, and all this stuff happened, it's it's just you that people have to then help out at one point when none of them are available. I actually helped have to suiture some dude's head. He just banged his head on a staircase and I was and the doctor saw it happen. He's like, oh what are you doing. I'm like, oh, not much, and he's like it just gives a hand.
And so he's just in there with your gloves on holding skin together while he's stitching, and you're going, this is this is unreal because there's that's it. It's it's just your team.
That's human agility right there.
And it's so fascinating learning all those the other one, the one I really love about. I say, this is a look out the window, it's a nice blue sky day. Is really becoming quite in tune with nature and the conditions that now, if it's a beautiful day back here, my ability to stay inside and do any work, I'm like, no, I've got to go for a walk over running and to do stuff like got to get out and about. And then on a rainy day, I'm like, great blizz day,
today's the day you work. And now that works better Arountarctica because it's sort of works since sort of these three day swings give or take, but it means you'll get a good balance done. The problem is Australia has
generally pretty good weather, so it can be tough. But I think that's something I think in the modern world where not very in tune with nature, and it doesn't matter what the conditions are, because we've created a society and buildings and infrastructure and everything to mean that we can deal with it. And yet you go and chat to Norwegians and Canadians, they're very in tune with the weather and the conditions because over there they have to
still deal with it. But for us, it's a bit different, and that's one of my favorite takeaways is all those little soft skills and community things that you don't have to do back here, but we have to do down there.
I feel like, even in just such a short time that we were there, you can't ignore, especially because we went with Intrepid and their becore certification meant there were so many scientists on board, and the sessions are amazing. They make it without shoving it down your throat. They make it impossible for you to visit without appreciating the enormal of nature there, which then makes you reflect on
the normality of nature everywhere. You just block it out when you're back home, but having to see how nature is just like in its most pristine, untouched by humans, and how you're just at the mercy of weather like it's literally there's nothing you can do. Someone's having a heart attack, you can't fly. If you can't fly, you can't fly like you just can't get them there. It's a modern science has absolutely no strength compared to Mother Nature,
and it changes the way you think about everything. It's so interesting.
I think even things around like rubbish and sustainability and recycling, like for us we're pretty very environmentally conscious down there and have really strict rules around all these things. You can't take polystyrene and you're doing all these different things, and you can't use certain types of hair products and soaps because they're bad for the water set. And we treat all the water and like the water that does
get discharged is drinking level quality, et cetera. That goes back out into the ocean, and we just desalinate water and all sorts of different things or will melt ice to get it. So you your water is actually coming from diesel because you're like, well, it's either frozen or salty, so we've got to either decalerate or melt it, and that's going to cost diesel. So if you're showering, imagine yourself showering and diesel, because if you have a long shower,
you're just burning more fossil fuels to do that. And even then the recycling, like when you be on rubbish study, which every other week or something, you probably in a rubbis studio every day you go, oh, it turns out and you just realize how much rubbish twenty four people are accumulating and how we deal with that in terms of cycling, recycling some of it and do you have to incinerate other bits and incinerate human waste from the field and different things you kind of and you look
at how much that's you know, that's twenty four people. If more people back home realize what happens when you put stuff in your bin and where it goes. And I think there's a great SBS thing on this now as well, like the war on trash or whatever one of the chaser guys some of that of looking at the chain of what happens to all this and like massive hate but beyond a pet hate now just again like the amount of freaking packaging and everything, and just look at it and go, why is all this stuff
individually wrapped? And I make a real good point of my Hessian bags and everything at the supermarket, like never using the other ones to like put all your other fruits together. And I think the woman and all the check out people at the market I go to, they look at.
Like individual like everything which is the chaos that has to go in a Hessian bag and it all rolls off the thing like no.
But you go, I just I can. I don't want to use any bags unless I absolutely have to use a plastic bag or something. And so that stuff becomes really because you have to see it and you have to deal with it. So you go, I need I want to create less rubbish because I'm going to have to deal with the rubbish or I'm going to have to carry the rubbish walking around with me. So before
you go out, the armies, good at this. Taking me this as well, Like, don't take anything into the field because you've got to carry.
It for the rest of the ever.
People cut their toothbrushes in half. That's an It's just like yeah, right, But.
I actually love that. It makes you think in a way that like you can easily ignore where things go, but when you're in Antarctica, you can't because like you see where it goes, like there's nowhere for it to go because you live in a station and like you're trying to keep your footprint small, and I feel like you just you have to confront that. I think we get so accustomed to thinking we're so advanced as a human race that we're like, there's a way we can
solve everything. But then I feel like in Antarctica, every problem you had was like like sometimes there's just no solution, Like humans can't outthink the fact that there's a blizzard and I'm stuck at in the hut that's far away from where I'm meant to be, but I can't get back, So I just have to wait three days with this one dude with a puzzle, and that's just what I'm going to have to do. And I think it that's so interesting because in our daily life back here, you're
never forced into discomfort like that. So what were some of your toughest moments in that five hundred and thirty seven days and then some of the coolest examples of humanity that came out of it?
Well, I think the story was talking about it is the story in the book. Or we get stuck in one of the field huts, which I mean a lot of ways were safe. Because we were stuck in a hut.
It was just me and one other guy, and we hadn't planned on it, so we didn't have We had enough like the huts of stock with food and supplies, but I didn't have I didn't have like my headphones, I didn't have a book that I was reading, so I was just stuck with Right, what have we got in this hut and it was it was blowing like one hundred kilometers an hour winds outside for a good
few days, so we just couldn't go outside. The only job outside we had was every few hours one of us would like open the door and shovel the doorway clear, so we knew that we could still get out, and that was great because you're cool. And we started to have a problem with the amount of waste and human wasts we were accumulating.
In the hut.
In the hut, which was getting it. We're like, oh, this is getting interesting. Don't drink too much, but I drink just enough. And then it'd be like, get really excited because I've got a cook dinner today and you started cooking it one day. You start at five o'clock, then you start at four thirty. Is that at four and started.
Three clutching at straws here, paper straws.
Obviously, yeah, exactly, you've got nothing else to do. So that was but I think that was a really cool moment, and he and I both agreed later that and even at the time, we're like, well, it's always been on our Antarctic bucket list, like get stuck at a field hut away from station for an extended period of time. So it was kind of cool.
That was a new bucket list to get stuck.
I think. So, I think it's a good one of like it was. You know, we had no Wi Fi. We only had we had a VHF radio back to station was our only means of communication. And yeah, we're probably only probably thirty or forty ks away, but we may as well have been hundreds of k's away. With that, the weather meant we just couldn't couldn't go anywhere, and that was That's not a low point. That was a tough time. I think when that happened as well, that
was right around our extension. We've been there for a year,
and that period of time the toughest. So we'd had members of the group that had decided yep, I'm not dealing with this well, and they were wavering, and I felt the group was fracturing at that point where it always had different like not necessarily clicks, but different just groups, you know, very different bunch of people, so you have very different conversations, and I felt at that point people were kind of sick of trying to make it all work.
And they're like, you know what, I got my four friends. I'll get along with everyone, but I don't care anymore. Like everyone had lost like motivation to motivation, and we
dealt with that a couple of ways. We got everyone together and did a kind of wellness week where we took some reduced work hours and were able to prioritize some field trips and learn from each other again of hey, what strategies are you using because stuff that we were using a year before didn't work, and as a community, to acknowledge that we're all struggling in our own way and we're all in the same boat, that became important.
But it didn't work for everyone. And I think at moments there were people that I'm like, oh, this would be great for you know, Sarah to do this thisvity and then of course you're not going to turn up to an activity because you don't want to do it, so you just go and I'm like, oh, man, in the first half, people would always turn up to everything, And then you know, by that point you're running an event or you're running a professional development session and you're
getting like two attendees, You're like, OK, what's everyone doing? And yet and also once we were able to then just just get through that lull and know that the lull at all end, it was always going to be a really tough time that anniversary when we still kind of had months to go and we didn't quite know exactly what the end was going to look like. And I was trying to get some answers and some definitive advice on what does the end look like, what does home look like, and what is the end going to
be like? So we've got something to horizon to swim too, as they call it. That wasn't the solution to everything though, It was just you had to just ride that lull. And then there was a great moment where we ran
an art show. So in the first summer, we'd run an art show the first year, and then we did it almost on the word new anniversary in that second summer, and for me that was a bit of a turning point where everyone had then got these projects and there were some great then memorabilia of our year and some amazing watercolor of the station, and we had framed photos of everyone on the field trips and the team team
photo and framed flags and cool mementos of everything. We've done, and I think from that kind of moment people started to go, this is pretty special, this is pretty interesting, and it will end and we'll get home. That was a low point, and I think you always have to just admit that you'll always have your low points, and then it can be quite empowering to go all right,
that's what rock Bottom was. Cool's let's find a way up from there, and don't be afraid of failing or feeling like you're struggling, because that's the human experience and you'll learn from it and you'll be better.
It was so interesting because even in our show, I think it was twelve days or something, including our Drake Passage sailing, there were moments where, for absolutely no reason, like we had really good we had a really rough drap pass it on the way back, but really smooth on the way over, and still nothing, No one was
in actual danger. I still had moments where I was so remote, just your brain getting used to it all, where I was like, I'm going to die, like this is really scary and I can't come home, let alone. If I was in winter when there's no light, you're just not used to that. And as an Australian. We just never have that. And then you're stuck, literally stuck being told you can't come home, Like I can't imagine.
Did you have fear around that of like, oh my god, like I'm almost like claustrophobia even though you're in a big space.
I never had any fears or doubts that we wouldn't make it through. Yeah, okay, it was around what's this going to look like at the end. Yeah, my one goal and the goal of everyone was get everyone home safely just became the goal. And besides all the other scientific research, all that other stuff, it's just get everyone home safely. That's it. That's the bar. If you achieve that, you've done your job. You've done your job. It's not going to be pretty. You're not all going to be
friends at the end of it. And I had to give up on that and that as a leader. That's something I think you asked a little bit earlier about imposter syndrome, some of those things as a leader, making my peace with being unpopular or just not being able.
To everyone to love you.
Yeah, that was a moment years ago. You know what, You're just not going to achieve that anymore let it go and I could have maybe a better leader could have done it better and all come home as absolute best friends. But I just I felt that wasn't at all got to be and accepting that and going but it doesn't matter if you get everyone home, get everyone home safely, and most pretty much everyone's still in touch in some way.
Oh that's so nice.
And more than half the group have actually either been back or still involved in the Antarctic program in some way. So I think that was testament to that. As tough as it was for everyone, when more than half the group.
Are voluntarily going back there, it wasn't that bad.
And so that was that was part of it that helps you get through just the darkness of like, all right, this is this is so I wasn't fearful. I was worried at times about what like reintegrating home. That became a worry of far out what do we all do after this? We'd all signed up to go away for a year, but you know, a year and a half change, and you kind of then you rebuild your comfort zone.
So then you've got that Stockholm syndrome of and you know, how do I now reintegrate into the world, and a lot of people went out of the group, went back and changed careers. And you'd argue that when you've signed up for a year in our tart, your other career probably wasn't.
Your top priority.
You probably has pretty good stats that you're going to change careers. But for me, it was that was a daunting experience of what am I going to do when I get home? Do I want to go back to what I was doing? Do I want to work with
the entireic program more? And that that becomes a challenge, and I probably am a bit of a day dream and I think that'll always help you get through your dark moments and your fears of going well, well, yeap, crossing the drake passage on a rough day, that's that's pretty yeah, I've done that, and yeah, you're right, you go geez if if something is wrong with the.
Boat we are rolling, Yeah.
I remember that I did it on a sixty three foot yacht. We were like and the change to the captain about him like, well, what happens if someone goes overboard here? He's like, He's like, you're gone, mate? Is a my ability to even turn the yacht around? He's like would compromise the whole yacht. So well, we'll throw you a life ring and hope you drift.
North, hope for the best. Well, then this is the thing, like you're reading the book was so interesting because you're reading it as a participant in this experience, but also through the person who is the leader of that experience. So and in Antargaga, it's so unique because you're like the legal leader as well. You're not just on a school camp where you're kind of in charge nominally, but then there's like the police, and then there's like the government.
You're in this like ungoverned territory that doesn't belong to anyone, where you literally are making big legal calls at a time when there's no precedent for this. Like you're the messenger for all the shit news as well, And then you can't be best friends with everyone because like that dude who just quit halfway through and was like, I'm stuck here, but I'm quitting. The fact that you came out at the end and people have wanted to go back is a huge testament to your ability to lead,
which is incredible. But I love that you brought up the idea of reintegration because I again on like the smallest level after twelve days of pure simplicity, like the basics of life, no Wi Fi. We didn't have Wi Fi at all, the starlink wasn't working, and just immersion in nature and waking up with light and going to sleep with dark and eating when like, just everything was so basic and simple in a complicated way, but blocking out the rest of the noise of the world. I
did not like coming back. I was like, I just want to go back and live on a ship and live in Antarctic.
Or and just be nature and the simple life. You don't need all of the stuff we create around ourselves here. You start to go, I don't need that.
Was it hard for you to come home? Then?
It was really the hardest part coming home, I found was telling the story, understanding what on Earth had gone on, And that was weird. Everyone had this idea of like, oh, geez, you were lucky you missed out on twenty twenty. You know, you were stuck in Antarctica, Like what, And I'm like, do you have any idea? It's pretty rough down there, man.
But I also then realized it's about people's perception. So there were some people never I never ever discount how hard it was for people to get through the last couple of years of COVID, but even just get through life. Like everyone's struggle in their own everyone's their own first person narrative, and some people's struggles are just insane for a whole range of reasons. And so you see this
a bit around PTSD. It's not just someone that was in the middle of the last days of carble and fighting over the walls to get to plane and getting shot into. Yeah, that's probably going to put you on the spectrum, but there can be a whole range of other things that can give you elements of trauma and that you don't realize. And that's when trauma can really hurt you, as if you haven't acknowledged it and realized it.
So for me, when I got back, understanding what had happened back here was tough, but taking some time to myself to just almost lock myself in my cave, run about my house and not socialize and not really get out there. And it took a few months to really really make the decision and start putting pen to paper with the book. And when it I had a couple of publishers chasing me, and I knew I was on a story that was that was going to get a book deal, which was quite empowering me. Like, Okay, great,
I'll get it. I'll get a good deal out of this, and unless I've really stuff it up, it should sell pretty well.
And be therapeutic for you almost in the process.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. So the person I wrote the book for the first draft, I wrote for myself, and I love to just write
the story, to get the story down. Of whether or not it works commercially became a secondary element to because you have the public publisher who Affirm Press did a great job and was so easy to work with and gave me so much freedom or autonomy for an unknown author, which was great as well, But in so many ways they wanted it to be like Jack Ryan goes to entire Yeah.
And you're like, yeah, I'll play into that or whatever.
Yeah, I'm like sure, And that's why you can see elements in the book that it has a bit of that, but it has to be commercially successful as well.
Yeah, And it was true. Some of those operations, like the evacuating medical evacuation. I was like, that's a movie.
Oh yeah, that was one of the moments because people do that when you decide to write the book. I'm like, yeah, we did the medical evacuation on Christmas twenty twenty, using the Chinese and American programs to help us there. And that was like a two week operation, working around the clock right on the on Christmas for a Christmas miracles and it had everything. It's got helicopters, it's got tension, it's got drama, it's got medical problems.
And like international cooperation. I was like, oh my god.
Briefing the Chinese pilots was so much fun because we had to do it under COVID protocols as well, so I've laminated like giant meteorological charts and all these like photos that normally would use a PowerPoint in the briefing room, but we had to do it outside with masters, so outside like minus ten degrees. Luck, it wasn't that windy, but briefing these pilots using like hand signals and broken English, and it was just like, this is the coolest aviation briefing ever in.
The history of humanity.
All the most ridiculous. It was just it was so and the Chinese pilots were freaking unreal and spoke great, pretty good. Well, they spoke a lot better English than I did Mandarin, for one, And that was just this cool moment. And then watching that helicopter take off and take the team up to the runway that that'd spend a week in land building the runway before we could
even evacuate the patient. But watching that helicopter fly off kind of into the sunset was one of the moments I'm like, jeez, this is getting pretty movie, yesque, yeah, this is getting there. And then and then later on, like as I get another spoiler alert, and then there's a photo of it in the book anyway, and it's mentioned in the forward. But so halfway home, the whole thing's over.
Like day five hundred and twenty eight or something like that, fifth of April ten fifty eight in the morning, the ship has a catastrophic explosion.
This is a fire on your rescue ship.
Yeah, we just like everyone there in the ship, disabled, rocking side to side in the Southern Ocean, standing there with life jackets on, ready to abandon ship. And we stood there for kind of hours while they fought the fire, got it under control, and then eventually six hours later got the ship restarted on one engine and then toned
to fremantle. And I'm like in that moment, standing in the forecastle of the ship, ready like next to the lifeboats, ready to abandon ship, but everyone around you just looking into the distance, like thousand yards stairs just going in every direction of just like just like like this is how it ends. We have to abandon ship, Like you're kidding me. I'm like, this is definitely going to get me a book deal.
And James Cameron should make movie, just saying.
Well, I kind of want because I've had a couple of meetings that started to get towards okay, how do I TV actually do? Yeah, well, I'd want to get like Tykle with t and Chris hanswith Tiger.
That'd be amazing, I know.
I just don't know how I'm about to get them.
We're actually friends with the Hamsweth so we can, well, we can make the imagine being like I want Chris Hamsweth to play me.
Well I do, and I've said that and he just does and people just laugh at me. I'm like, I really love it. Who else would do it?
You definitely have some humor and drama injected into it exactly.
I think other classics of people are like, oh maybe Sam Worthington. I'm like, maybe if we can't get a Hemsworth.
I bet young knew at done true. Never thought you'd be picking Hollywood stars to actually maybe play you in a in a like epic, a Hollywood epic about the adventure.
No, but why not? I mean why not? Dream? This is the same with the book deal. There was there was people that said, I know books, no one reads it anymore than the like you'll be you're such a wanker, like what like you know, like it's so funny. You probably get this with podcasting and other and the stuff, you know, like people like the haters or the trolls. It's the worst part of our society. But Jesus hard to ignore.
Oh yeah, Tall Poppy in Australia's Wow, it's.
Rough And I've had a few people kind of go hard on it and they're like, oh, I how did why did you think you had the right to write that book. I'm like, what's the true story mate? Like, and it actually happened. It happened, and it was vetted by a number of My team helped with fact checking stuff and making sure I didn't over state different things or like got that right, got that checked by the experts, checked, the logs checked, my diaries checked foight, like it's it's
as accurate as it can be. And they're like, oh, you know I've done more than you. I don't have a book. And I'm like, we'll go right, well, I'm not stopping you, and and that sort of Look there they are one percent and we've sold nearly fourteen thousand copies.
You're a bestseller.
Yeah, bestseller. It was the top in the top ten best selling Australian autobiographies last year. That's amazing, which is just incredible. And and so you go, okay, and one guy was like, you were a wenker.
He's the loudest though they're always the loudest.
Other thirteen thousand people I do the reading reviews and getting fan mail and stuff. It is, that's pretty cool. But I find that. But yet, when so anyone out there listening that that does want to write a book or do something that someone's telling you not to do, forget about them and speak to someone that's done it because every author I spoke to said nothing other than like best thing you'll ever do. Like they were super supportive.
That was super helpful with like who to speak to and how to structure things, and then same with like do we go down the path of trying to get a movie deal out of it? And that, and yeah, there's some people like, oh, you're such a wanker for thinking that. I'm like, yeah, but why not? Like it's sold enough copies, it's a great true story and you
can just see it. You're like, yeah, why not. I mean it might take twenty years or thirties, I'll never get done and just another project, but you go give it a shot.
Why not?
I think that's something again, Like I'd never written a book before, and I thought, maybe get a ghost write. I'm like, no, I'll just learn how to write a book. So probably like there's a how to write a book book behind you, behind me there somewhere, and how to author. Yeah. It was a fun process to go, Okay, Well, I'll just reread like my ten favorite books that are adventury kind, like things like inter Thinner, Yeah to zero and these
sorts of bings. Go Okay, I'll read them and look at them through the lens of how they structured, yeah, the photo bit in the middle and all that stuff, and then start writing and then just get better and better. And some of the early drafts are terrible. I think my brother, who is really helpful, his feedback of the first draft, He's like, well, it's a good story, you just haven't told it.
Well, you're just telling it shit. Yeah, I mean honest advice is very so good.
And then the best I love this story. So there's a thank you in the back of the book. I haven't been able to track he Daniel a thank you in the book to someone, to a girl called Coco who worked at the office works right near my house. Because every this process of writing where every Friday I'd print out the current draft or the chapters that I've been working on, and then i'd review it, read petted over the weekend, and then we got back to Monday
morning I'd start rewriting. And so every week I was in there dropping off, you know, behind masks, behind plastic screens, dropping off the books. But then one day she kind of goes, is this you or like behind my own I'm like, this is this your own book. I'm like yeah, she's like I was. I was like, do you mind if I print my own copy and or have a read And I'm like yeah, one hundred percent. So she and I'm like, but give me, give me some feedback.
She's like, yeah, for sure. And she was the first person to read the book that didn't know me, which was really cool. But then Roman's great book report on what was good was what didn't work or how to so lovely of her and it was so good. So yeah, she gets she got to thank you in the the book and has a very early raw draft of it as well, and that was something. And I'm like, oh,
that's that's cool. If the random office works photocopy of it, loves it, loves it, who would see a lot of I'm sure they see a lot of mediocre books that they have to print. So that was that was kind of a cool story. But so again, that's sort of to people that if you're worried about then't just go and learn learn about it, think about it, and then back yourself in to go and any Again, this kind of comes back with my law of physics quote, like
anything that humans do is a learned skill. No one was born knowing how to do all the things we know how to do the learned skills. NASA only takes like twenty four months to train astronauts. You know, they obviously that with degrees and shit, but their core astronauts training is like, what do you need to.
Be an astronaut? Degrees and shit?
Yeah, degrees and shit. Yeah some of them. I mean, these overachievers just calm down with some of their stuff.
But dear astronauts, calm down. Calm down, it says the ex defense diplomat Antarctic Expedition leader author speaker.
Hey yeah, but I just have an arts degree.
Oh yeah, true. But you also I did find one other fun fact when you were like, I don't have any awards, and like, didn't you win like some silver medal for like performed skydiving in Dubai.
Yeah, that was a skyliven compatation.
It's like Australian Defense Medal diving skyd.
I could see that twelve skyd off Dubai freestyle.
But I mean, you are a wonderful, wonderful example, and I love that you brought up that whole haters controlling thing that no matter what you do, even if it's the coolest story ever, Like, there will always be the small percentage of people who just resent your success, and they're always the loudest, They're always the ones that are
impossible to ignore. But if you let them dictate your decisions, then literally the fifteen thousand and that's only the people you know who bought the book let alone, who it was passed on to it, Like every copy gets read, you know, a million times, and if you had let one person who was loud dictate that that you would have deprived all of those people of the story that
they wanted to hear. And like it's it's absolutely fascinating, and I think we are too controlled by what other people think listen to the loudest voice is not the most important ones and miss out on so many opportunities that way. Whereas it's become your career. Now you're on the speaking circuit, you have a book, you've got the potential for a movie which would absolutely blow the big
screen away. Like I think it's just it's almost a sign that you've made it when someone is invested enough in what you're doing to be a hater, Like that's all you have to think of it as is, pat myself on the back. I'm going to hate I'm made.
That is a great way to look at it, Like, wow, I've got trolls and haters. You're like made it, I'm famous.
Yeah, yeah, Like that's how I see it. I'm like, the minute I had someone who was passionate enough to express their dislike, I was like, shit, man, that's impact. Negative impact, but it's still impact.
I love the one that when you're flying to Hobart, like Mona the Gallery, they've got all their billboards, they just have all the bad reviews. Yes.
Yeah, you're never going to please everyone anyway, that's not the point. I feel like, if you stood for everything, you'd stood for nothing. So well, I have already taken up so much of your time and I could talk to you. I mean, obviously we could talk for hours. This is like our third hour of just chatting shit about life. But I will let you get on with the rest of your day. But where can people find
the book? Where can people find you if they want to engage you for leadership speaking, because I know that's something you're incredibly good at. Where can they find you?
Yeah? So the books five hundred and thirty seven days of winter. It's in all good bookstores around the Australian newsales and a lot of the airport bookstores. It seems to be very well stopped there. Those otherwise online through book Topia or whoever you like to use there or a lot of little community libraries. Anytime I stuff up a signature, I put one in a community library. I stuff up a lot of signatures for someone that wrote a book.
Is there one in the Davis Library, Davistation Library, they.
Are in the Australian at tytic state. I don't know that there's a few. And there's one on the ship that was supposed to bring me home amazing, so they are down if you're on an attactic station, grab a copy. Otherwise for speaking, Yeah, through my website www dot david off dot com, or through Saxton Speakers who do a
great job book me out and everything. And yeah, and I'd love to love to come and chat to companies and schools and different community groups about anything from either just telling the story of orders like to run an antatic station during a pandemic, or around my mental health strategies,
leadership experiences. Leadership training for junior leaders is probably one of my favorite workshops to run is to get out there with people that want to start their leadership journey and they don't quite know where it's going to take them, and that's that's always great to get some young minds and all right, careful what you wish for?
Well, I'll include the direct links to all of that in the show notes for anyone who's interested, which I'm sure will be everyone we've already had. Literally it was like a teaser and people like, who is he?
Where can I.
Get his book? God, this is very exciting, so I will share all that. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I wish we could do like a full Joe Ragan five hour episode because I would have just kept chatting, but I'll make sure everyone gets their copy of the book instead. And good luck this summer. Wish I was coming with you, going to be.
It's going to be good chaos, I think this summer. But now, thanks so much for Amian. I was cracked out. I could chat to you for hours as well, So best to like with it with the podcast and what's in your future as well.
Thank you Jeers, what a man, what an adventure. I highly recommend you read David's book, and as mentioned, I'll pop the direct link with his speaking links and website as well into the show notes. Please do show him some love for squeezing us he into his busy schedule before he heads back down south. I think even in a couple of days, by sharing the episode and tagging
at five hundred and thirty seven days of Winter. If you enjoyed listening along In the meantime, I hope you're all having an amazing week and are seizing your yay.
What think? Yeah,