OATES.  Nobody move, don’t move. I’m just going outside. I may be some time.
    So Douglas Stewart put it in the only memorable line in any of his plays, in this case his radio play: Fire on the Snow. However, as Captain Scott’s diary tells us, that was what Oates really said. It was probably the most boring version of an exciting historic event I ever read, until I encountered the same man’s poetic talky version of the siege at Glenrowan.     
    Apart from Shakespeare, Stewart’s were the only plays that they were game to attempt at Moorabbin Tech. Try to imagine how Chekov might have gone down. I suppose Australia had to serve its apprenticeship in creation of theatre. I hope he is forgotten soon.
    Robert Falcon Scott, one of the great fools of the British Empire, perished in his failed attempt to become the first man to reach the South Pole. After the play by Douglas Stewart and the film with John Mills, apparently I had still not had enough of the subject for there is this slim volume, Scott of the Antarctic, by Webster Smith, which I know I read. Then, of course, the tale was told in the School Paper and retold in the School Reader... He’s possibly the greatest runner-up in history. Never did so many lose so much for so little.
    That the whole matter of Antarctic exploration focused on Scott was simply yet another example of British cultural domination of the time. These Australian schoolteachers wanted Australian schoolkids to be in awe of Scott—who failed and died—because he was British, and ignore Frank Hurley, for instance, who went along with both Shackleton and Mawson and took those remarkable photographs—of Shackleton’s ship being crushed by the ice, or the one of the man leaning on the wind at 45 degrees in which several men had to hold Hurley and his camera down while he took the picture in the blizzard.
    Nor were they interested in Mawson, British born but raised in Australia, who led an Australian expedition, and whose story of survival is utterly astounding. Mawson survived, Scott did not - that was the difference.
    And of course, for them, there was no reason at all to mention Amundsen, who got to the pole first. Maybe they thought he was cheating because he was so much more familiar at living with ice and snow and impossible adventures, being a Norseman with a Viking heritage at his back.