A Step Too Far

By Peter Bland

Peter Bland's life has always been about overcoming challenges and taking that extra step, but sometimes it's a step too far. Like the time he stepped from his tent during and unsupported crossing of the Antarctic peninsula and was swept away by an avalanche ending up unconscious and near death 40 metres down a crevasse. Or the time he dived under a stricken yacht adrift among icebergs in the Southern Ocean on a voyage to the South Magnetic Pole - without a wetsuit and with the external air temperature minus 60 degrees Celsius - in order to free a rope that was wrapped around the propeller. Or how a year after major heart surgery to repair a massive aneurysm he dragged a sled 650 kilometres across the Arctic to become the first Australian to have reached both magnetic poles.

 

A Step Too Far is Peter's story. It is a tale of gripping adventure and survival in some of the planet's most inhospitable regions, as well as a profound insight into what drives a person to take such risks in the search for new adrenalin highs, and the strains and stresses it places on those who love them. A Step Too Far is an exciting and utterly absorbing study of a great Australian adventurer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Bland
• Release date: Jun 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227067463

Book preview

FOREWORD

USUALLY WE READ OF heroes without the stories behind them and their families, and the consequences of their actions. Peter Bland tells it all.

Great heroes like him face adversity with courage and a certain conviction. They accept the doctrine that ‘no great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty’ or, as Kipling put it, ‘to take your chance in the thick of a rush’.

Peter’s adventures have been on a daunting if not epic scale. To my mind, he is really a Homeric figure. Understand that Captain Cook predicted that no man would ever venture to a land he believed lay to the south, yet the first reported sighting in 1820 started a fascination with the Antarctic that has since been unbridled. The heroics and dramas of the Mawson and Shackleton expeditions, plus the experiences of Scott, Amundsen, Herbert, Wilkes and others, partly explain why those of this day are drawn to it.

Our adventurer confides that Antarctica ‘exercises an excessive hold’ on those wishing to test their powers of endurance. Mawson’s return to Commonwealth Bay is a powerful illustration, but of course our modern day adventurer had no idea that he would also become involved in a saga of survival which had echoes of Mawson’s experience. So the boy from the land of droughts and flooding rains set his plans for a second time to tackle the ice continent of glaciers and forbidding crevasses where men have perished without trace. It’s a continent the size of Australia and Europe combined.

Peter’s family was always afraid of his fearlessness and was concerned that he had no sense of his own mortality. However, challenging himself in harsh and hostile environments is some- thing he loves to do, with an inner spirit fashioned by Anzac histories and stories of Australian pioneers. They provided him with models of achievement and determination. Undaunted after two bouts of major heart surgery, the adrenalin rush continued.

In studying the man, we have this extraordinary catalogue of actions and adventures: windsurfing, trekking, shearing, sailing, fencing and paragliding. Conquering the two poles, sailing the oceans and traversing the Antarctic, we experience by word his perilous drama and desperate rescue, which he survived because of the stoic qualities within him and within his associates. Along with all of this, he communicates the romance of facing the elements and being off the beaten track at places like Gizo, Crookhaven, Horta, Guadeloupe, Canouan and Charcot Bay.

It’s a graphic account that leaves us in awe.

Tony Charlton AM OAM

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

Chapter One THE GREAT WHITE CHAOS

Chapter Two INTO THE ABYSS

Chapter Three SCARRED FOR LIFE

Chapter Four A DATE WITH ENDURANCE

Chapter Five WHEN NO MEANS YES

Chapter Six ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

Chapter Seven NEXT STOP JAPAN

Chapter Eight ONE BELOW ZERO

Chapter Nine AUSSIE HEART HERO

Chapter Ten BREAKING FREE

Chapter Eleven THE RESCUE

Chapter Twelve THE AFTERMATH

Postscript A MOTHER’S PRIDE AND HEARTACHE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR A LIFE AND RESCUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter One THE GREAT WHITE CHAOS

SLEEPING IN CAN SOMETIMES disrupt a day’s arrangements in unforeseeable ways, but for Peter Bland on 29 December 2000 it sparked a chain of consequences that were to prove almost catastrophic. He prided himself on planning and logistics, but the final month’s preparation for his two-man crossing of the Antarctic peninsula with his old Melbourne schoolfriend Jay Watson had been fraught with difficulty. There are two parts to an Antarctic campaign – raising the cash and putting in place the support team, and crossing the ice and braving the blizzards. In some cases facing the bankers was harder than facing the elements, and so it proved on this trip. A month before he was due to depart his main sponsor, a Melbourne commercial real estate agent, withdrew their $60,000 backing, forcing him back to square one. He was selling potential sponsors the message that he and Watson intended to become the first people to do the crossing unassisted. The British explorer Sir Wally Herbert had crossed the peninsula supported by a team of dogs in 1957, but for environmental reasons dogs had been banned from the great white land since the international Antarctic agreement of 1991. Now Bland and Watson planned to write themselves into the region’s history books by walking across the peninsula unaccompanied, hauling behind them kayaks doubling up as sleds, which would carry all their food and equipment.

The more people suggested to 32-year-old Bland that he shouldn’t be doing the trip, the more determined he became. People said he was mad to go, after having major heart surgery as a child of eight and again when he was 28. He couldn’t see what they were making such a fuss about. He was in good company. Sir Ernest Shackleton, the great British Antarctic explorer, fought to overcome heart problems all his life, refusing for most of the time to be examined by doctors. In fact, it was a heart attack that ended Shackleton’s life – in South Georgia Island, close to Antarctica, when he was only 48.

For Bland and Watson to visit Antarctica they had to obtain a permit from Australia’s Antarctic Division of the Department of Heritage and Environment, based in Hobart. A senior policy officer from the division, Martin Betts, had expressed concerns about the proposed expedition to Watson. Betts was worried about the insurance aspect; what if one of the pair had an accident, and they needed to be airlifted out? Who would pay for it?

Bland and Watson had been warned, but there was no stopping them. Bland had looked into insurance and had heard that it would cost $350,000 to insure the pair of them – a sum that was way beyond his financial means. Instead, he and Watson had organised their own insurance – a back-up support crew aboard the yacht Tooluka, skippered by Gippsland fisherman and Antarctic adventurer Roger Wallis, who would sail along the Antarctic coast, as close as possible to where Bland and Watson were trekking. In an emergency, Bland could contact the crew with his high-frequency radio, and they could arrange to get help to an injured person.

In Hobart, Betts and the government’s Antarctic division were increasingly worried about the number of adventurers now sailing down to Antarctica to chase a new piece of history by becoming the first person to travel this particular route, or live for an entire year on that particular part of the Antarctic continent. Like the Himalayan peak of Everest with its competing teams of climbers, Antarctica had become the last great frontier for adventurers fuelled by ambition to confront nature at her most wild. Even as Bland prepared to leave Melbourne for Antarctica, a team of New Zealanders was making ready to paddle in kayaks along the north coast of the Antarctic continent.

Betts had 35 years’ experience of working in and on Antarctica, and he advised on all non-government trips. It was his job to weigh up whether proposed trips were feasible, and had sufficient back-up. The government couldn’t ban people from going, other than for environmental reasons, but it could offer advice, taking into account that Australia had a duty to be a responsible Antarctic citizen as a signatory to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty protecting the white wilderness. As Betts puts it: ‘We didn’t want to foist on other countries the responsibility for dealing with the consequences of a trip made by Australians.’ Bland and Watson were aware of the obvious perils of wind-chill factors which could drop to minus 60 degrees Celsius; winds that could gust at 200 kilometres per hour, and blizzards that could reduce visibility to a metre. With justification, it has been called ‘the great white chaos’.

Then there was the terrain they planned to cover. ‘What Peter and Jay were proposing to do was pretty tough,’ Betts recalls. A narrow, high plateau runs down the middle of the Antarctic peninsula, like a giant spine, and Bland and Watson had to climb up onto that plateau and get down off it again to reach the coast, where Tooluka would be waiting for them. The only person to have ever achieved that was Sir Wally Herbert in 1957. Bland and Watson knew they would face frequent white-outs and cloud, and that getting down from the plateau involved considerable difficulty. Either side of the plateau there are large drops with crevasses.

Betts set out his position in the Antarctic Non-Government Activity News on 25 October 2000, two months before Bland and Watson were due to leave. He predicted that the two adventurers faced ‘challenging conditions and a tight timetable if they are to complete their proposed trek in the four weeks scheduled’.

Betts explained that on the plateau, at around 1800 metres above sea level, Bland and Watson would spend most of their time enveloped in cloud and that they would have to contend with frequent, long-lasting periods of poor visibility, white- out, strong winds and snow. Therefore they would rely heavily on satellite-derived information to determine their position as they travelled southwards. The US-operated global positioning system (GPS) could provide their location to within twenty or even ten metres, which was a critical factor given some of the terrain along the route.

Betts wrote: ‘The plateau along which they will traverse ranges between two and ten kilometres in width, the wider areas being named, from north to south, the Detroit, Herbert, Foster and Forbidden Plateaus. Each plateau is connected to the other by very narrow, exposed ridges, two of which have been given the descriptive names ‘The Catwalk’ and ‘The Wall’, as they are less than 100 metres in width and have steep drops on either side. Navigation in the vicinity of those features will need to be precise, particularly if poor visibility prevails.

‘The western and eastern flanks of each of the plateau areas are also marked by steep drops and there are few places where land parties can travel between the plateau and sea level, although even those that exist do not offer straightforward routes. A long ridge runs from Foster Plateau down the Recluse Peninsula to Portal Point at the northern end of Charlotte Bay and, while not easy, it is the only known route that the pair can realistically use to descend to sea level in that area.’

None of this was news to Bland and Watson. Watson and Wallis had both emailed Betts details of the trip and its likely environmental impact. Bland and Watson were under no illusions about where they were heading and they had planned accordingly. This was the ice continent, full of glaciers and gaping, plunging crevasses, formed where the ice plates crack and split. Sometimes the fall down these crevasses appeared bottomless; at other times simply the distance from the top of a city skyscraper to the bottom. Sometimes they gaped as wide as a river mouth, at others they were only a metre across, and concealed by falling snow. The unsuspecting climber, if not alert to the perils ahead, could easily step onto one of these snow bridges and suddenly find himself dropping into the abyss.

That was what happened 88 years before to Belgrave Ninnis, a young English officer accompanying Sir Douglas Mawson on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1912. The party was based at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay, and from there Mawson sent out six expeditionary groups. Mawson himself led one such group containing Ninnis and Swiss explorer Xavier Mertz. Heading eastwards from Cape Denison, Ninnis suddenly dropped into a crevasse with his sled and team of dogs, and most of the party’s provisions. Mawson moved gingerly to the edge of the crevasse, and looked down to see one of the dogs whimpering on an ice ledge 50 metres beneath him. But of Ninnis, the other dogs, or the food and equipment there was no sign. Ninnis had been swallowed by the crevasse. For hours Mawson and Mertz knelt beside the edge of the hole, yelling Ninnis’s name, but no reply ever came. He had disappeared without trace.

Once Mawson had abandoned hope for Ninnis, he read the burial service and set a return course for Commonwealth Bay. Rations were eked out because so much food had been lost in the crevasse, and eventually he and Mertz reached the point where, to survive, they had to kill the Greenland sled dogs for meat. Mertz by now was rapidly deteriorating, though whether it was from the effects of prolonged exposure, or vitamin A poisoning caused by eating the dogs’ livers, has never been conclusively established. Eventually, after suffering fits, stomach problems, and with the skin peeling off his legs, he could endure no more. Mawson was left alone. Somehow he kept going, though his hair and beard was falling out and his skin was ulcerating. At times he had to crawl because walking was too painful with the skin falling off his feet. Once he fell into a crevasse, hauled himself out with a rope, but then fell back in. Momentarily he pondered giving in and allowing himself to fall to his death at the bottom of the crevasse, but he feared he would not die outright and be left suffering. Again he summoned up his remaining reserves of willpower and energy, and pulled himself out of the crevasse. So exhausted was he by the effort that he blacked out and nearly froze in the snow.

On 29 January 1913, almost six weeks after Ninnis had died in the crevasse, Mawson came upon a cairn of snow covering a supply of food left by a search party out looking for him, and which had left the spot only hours earlier. The search party also left directions to a snow cave used as a staging post by the expedition. Blizzards kept him stuck in the cave for a week, but on 8 February he decided to make one final attempt to descend to the hut at Commonwealth Bay. Staggering in at half the bodyweight he had been when he started the expedition, he was met by six joyful members of the expedition who had been left behind to wait when the main party sailed back to Australia. They radioed for the ship to return to pick Mawson up, but the winds were too strong to allow the boat back to shore and Mawson was left to recuperate in Antarctica for another year.

The young and independent Commonwealth of Australia was only twelve years old, and it was looking for myths and legends to secure its identity. The Gallipoli campaign was still two years away. In returning safely to the hut at Common- wealth Bay after the death of Ninnis and Mertz, Mawson provided a legend of endurance and an inspiration to future Australian explorers. Australia was a pioneering country, built on endurance, and it had a new pioneering hero. Now that Australians had settled their own continent and charted all its coasts and valleys, the country’s explorers were drawn to the last great undiscovered realm on earth – Antarctica. It exercised an obsessive hold on those wishing to test their own powers of endurance.

Peter Bland was one of those. Since his early teens he proudly displayed Mawson’s classic tome on Antarctica, Home of the Blizzards, on his bedroom bookshelf. His father John, a Victorian County Court judge, kept repeating to him the story of Mawson’s return to Commonwealth Bay as an inspiring example of persistence.

His father, an iron-willed character who impressed determination upon his three children, had died in 1999, but Bland still found himself having to live up to his dead father’s expectations; still having to prove to him that he was a worthy son. When his father was still alive they had been like the old and the young bull, locking horns on how the farm outside Melbourne should be run, neither giving an inch.

Nor did Bland give an inch when the pleas and advice came in late 2000 not to go to Antarctica with Watson. The pair of them had been planning this for months, and he did not intend to lose face at this late stage because of the loss of his principal sponsor. He listened to the words of care and caution from those around him, like Betts, his mother, Jane, and wife, Julia, but in the end he chose to disregard their warnings. He had spent $45,000 chartering the yacht, and too much preparation had already gone into the trip to bail out now. And, anyway, as a statement of personal belief, he used to say to friends: ‘What’s the point of being alive if you don’t live?’ His mother agonised about him losing his life. She had done all she could to dissuade him from going. She had already lost a baby daughter, Jennifer, through a cot death and Peter, the youngest of her three children, had twice had major heart surgery. In 1998, a year after that second lot of heart surgery, he was trekking to the North Magnetic Pole. No-one had ever been able to tell him what to do, though his father had tried.

Jane Bland had managed to hang on to her sanity after losing Jennifer, but questioned her ability to withstand the loss of a second child. She knew that emotional arguments would carry no weight with her son, so she tried to use more rational ones: that he had a responsibility to his job as marketing manager of the Multiple Sclerosis Society in Melbourne; he was needed to manage the family’s 340-hectare property north of Melbourne; and he was no longer young, carefree and single, but married, with a young daughter, and he had a financial responsibility to his daughter and to his wife, Julia. She was proud of his achievements, but afraid of his fearless- ness and the fact that he had no sense of his own mortality. ‘Pete cannot abide negative energy. He has a real dislike of it. He doesn’t want other people’s doubts to contaminate him. It’s rather like having a dream and wanting to avoid other people destroying it or pulling it down.’ Despite his mother’s urgings, Peter hadn’t even made a will before leaving. He couldn’t see why people kept saying how dangerous it was; as far as he was concerned, you were just as likely to be knocked over by a car crossing the road in Melbourne.

‘I listened when they said I was mad to go to Antarctica, but I backed my own judgement. I had timed the trip for what would be a quiet time for the MS Society, and I had put a good team around me to manage the business in my absence. My mother’s arguments had no emotional impact on me. I’d met my obligations to my wife. The farm was being managed responsibly and I’d secured a worker to look after it while I was away. I refused to regard the farm as a yoke around my neck. Whether Julia accepted what I was doing, or it was something she admired, I don’t know.’

Julia, with a ten-month-old daughter, Olivia, and an unrenovated, uncompleted home, was not totally happy about her husband going off on another of his adventures but she knew the man she had married back in 1997. Their first date had been a six-hour horseback ride up Mount Macedon in the rain. The fact that he was unusual was part of his attraction, as well as his geniality, his limitless self-confidence, which some people took as cockiness, and his bright blue eyes. She knew Pete was driven to achieve, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The one thing she’d asked him was to make sure the trip didn’t leave them up to their necks in debt again, which had happened after his 1998 trip, when he became the first Australian to reach the North Magnetic Pole. It was 90 years after Mawson had become the first Australian to the South Magnetic Pole in 1908.

It now looked, with his primary sponsor withdrawing their sponsorship only two weeks before the start of the trip, as if the very thing that Julia feared most – crippling financial debt – might happen. Her husband shared the concern and went into action to save the expedition. What he could offer any potential sponsor was the publicity stemming from the trip, and the documentary he planned to make. A month earlier he had attended the Melbourne wedding of his friend Stephen Buxton, son of property developer Michael Buxton. A passion- ate yachtsman, Michael Buxton had expressed keen interest in the proposed trip to Antarctica and Bland remembered that as he desperately sought a new financial backer, with the trip due to begin in little more than a week. Stephen Buxton spoke to his father, who invited Bland to a Christmas barbecue at which he could talk about the project. When he arrived, Bland was greeted by Michael and his brother, Andrew, and by Paul McDonald, general manager of their development company, MAB. Michael Buxton told Bland: ‘You’ve got ten minutes. Shoot.’ ‘Now, have I got a deal for you,’ said Bland, smiling cheekily and winding up for his full bells and whistles marketing spiel. By the end of the ten minutes he had won a promise of $30,000 from the Buxtons. Bland gave an undertaking that if he did not have a documentary of the journey completed within twelve months he would pay back half the sponsor- ship. As soon as he left the barbecue he went into action to have the MAB logo of the Buxtons’ company attached to all of his Antarctic gear.

With the budget now cut by $30,000, he set about the final arrangements, trying to reduce costs where he could. He and Watson bought a cheaper kayak than they had planned, and borrowed a second one from Watson’s friend Eric Phillips, who had previously used the craft to cross Greenland. They only picked up the new kayak the day before they were due to leave Melbourne for Buenos Aires, en route to Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America.

The last day in Melbourne was chaotic, checking they had everything, making last-minute arrangements and packing the two kayaks with equipment. Bland and Watson had done a sponsorship deal with Qantas, giving them a reduction on their return air fares to Buenos Aires, and $1000-worth of excess baggage on the flight out. It didn’t strike them until the eve of departure, when they were packing the kayaks, that they would have so much equipment in the boats that they would far exceed their excess weight allowance.

They woke at 6 am for the 8 am Melbourne to Sydney domestic flight which would give them the connection to Buenos Aires. It was a 30-minute car ride from the farm to Tullamarine, and they arrived about 45 minutes before the flight departure. The other four team members, who were going to sail on the support boat, Tooluka, while Watson and Bland made their crossing of the peninsula, were there to meet them, excited at the prospect of the trip and only slightly concerned at Bland and Watson’s late arrival at the airport. That concern mounted to alarm when the pair of adventurers tried to check in the kayaks. The Qantas staff said they were way over weight, and the kayaks would have to travel separately as freight. Bland and Watson were told to take the kayaks over to the freight terminal.

Checking their watches, they rushed to the lift to take them down to ground level, where they hitched a ride in a ute to the freight office. Bland signed a blank cheque to pay for the boats to be shipped, and asked Qantas to fill the cheque in when they knew how much the freight would be. (It turned out to be $2700.)

By now, the Sydney flight was being called, and the other four members made their way inside the aircraft and stowed their bags in the overhead lockers. Then they sat anxiously counting the minutes before the cabin doors closed and the flight lifted off to Sydney. The stewards were just making their final preparations for take-off when Bland and Watson appeared down the aisle, breathing heavily after rushing back from the freight terminal. There had just been time for Bland to give Julia and Olivia a rushed, unsentimental farewell.

The aircraft climbed and then set a course north for Sydney. As it did so, Bland momentarily stopped breathing. He’d left his passport in his jacket in the security x-ray machine at Tullamarine. Now what? Not one to panic, he called the steward, explaining the situation, and how the six of them had a Qantas flight to Buenos Aires to catch in three hours’ time. The steward, apparently used to such inflight crises, dis- appeared into the cockpit to ask the pilot to phone back to Tullamarine and ask the Qantas staff there to see if they could find the jacket and passport. The call came back from Tullamarine: the passport had been found by the security staff, and Qantas would send it on the next flight up to Sydney.

The party, comprising Bland, Jay Watson and his school- teacher brother Andy, bushwalker and Esso geologist Nigel Collins, artist and boxer-short designer Mitchell McAuley, and geographer and adventurer John Kelsall, gave a collective sigh of relief. They were to be joined in South America by young Melbourne businesswoman Philippa Devine, who was at that moment completing the Murray Marathon, paddling the 404 kilometres from Yarrawonga to Swan Hill in a two-woman kayak. Each of the five had paid $8000 to sail on Tooluka in Antarctica, and they hadn’t expected such drama so early in the trip – long before they reached the four-metre swell going round Cape Horn on their way to Antarctica, let alone seen icebergs the size of Manhattan skyscrapers. McAuley, in particular, felt it was an ominous start. Nothing had gone right so far – the original sponsorship had fallen through; the business with the kayaks at the airport; and now the passport being left behind.

Everything seemed to be in a rush. But McAuley was impressed with how calm and joking