Antarctic adventurer’s memory honoured, 55 years on
Members of the ANARE Club have paid tribute to a Murray Bridge resident who lost his life on Macquarie Island in 1971.
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Almost 1100 kilometres south of New Zealand, halfway down to the Antarctic Circle, a rocky island juts out of the Southern Ocean: Macquarie Island.
Its biggest settlement its an outpost inhabited by a few dozen researchers, and is surrounded by steep, windswept hills including – about 800 metres to the north – a crag named Tottan Head.
Here, high above the wave-smashed rocks, a man from Murray Bridge lost his life.
Brenton Sellick was a meteorologist, and a young hot-shot one at that.
He’d been a bright high school student and talented athlete in Murray Bridge before shooting off to university in Melbourne at the age of 17.
Within a year of his graduation he had joined an expedition headed to the far-flung research station.
He would be working on an upper atmosphere physics program, monitoring weather and gathering data that would later show the depletion of the ozone layer and the effects of climate change.
But in a small team, you have to take on all sorts of jobs, and so he joined biologist Knowles Kerry on a hike up to Tottam Head to monitor the island’s albatross population on January 2, 1971.
In the recollection of Ron Hann, an electronics expert who was also on the island at the time, a tuft of grass gave way beneath Mr Sellick’s feet, causing him to fall to his death.
A French Antarctic expedition aboard the MS Thala Dan diverted its course to retrieve his body, which was transported back to Australia in a “beautiful” wooden coffin the station’s carpenter crafted out of wooden crates.
The coffin was the same one that would ultimately be lowered into a grave at the Murray Bridge Cemetery, on Adelaide Road: his final resting place.
Fifty-five years passed.
Then, on January 2 of this year, the cemetery received a visit.
Mr Hann – now a national council member with the ANARE Club, for participants in Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions – came to Murray Bridge to lay a few flowers on his old mate’s grave, and to meet his brother Peter and sister Carolynn.
They wound up talking for hours.
“The ANARE Club was formed in 1951, in the early stages of Antarctic exploration, so it will have its 75th anniversary this year, and this is the sort of thing we try to organise,” Mr Hann said.
It had been amazing to catch up and hear some stories from the Macquarie Island of the early 1970s, said Peter Sellick, still a Murraylands resident.
His brother had been full of excitement before he left, Peter Sellick recalled.
“He was a little fellow who’d had a bit of disability with his ears and stuff like that, and he was very meticulous with what he did,” he said.
“He never let things stand in his way – he got on with the job.”
Mr Knowles, the biologist who was with Mr Sellick at the time of his death, visited the family when he got back to Australia to express his condolences in person, and to help them find closure after their tragic loss.
There is a plaque on Macquarie Island commemorating Mr Sellick, too, placed there when the crew of the MV Nella Dan visited later in 1971.
Brenton Sellick’s stay had been all too brief, but he left his mark on that remote, rocky outcrop in the Southern Ocean.
- More information: For a virtual tour of Macquarie Island, visit skyavenue.com.au; for the ANARE Club, visit www.anareclub.org.
