State Library and Tasmanian Archives Blog

An Antarctic homage: 30 years since the sinking of Nella Dan

Tasmania has hosted many of the most important ships that have ventured to Antarctica. In December 1987 one of these ships, the Nella Dan, ended its journey when it ran aground at Buckles Bay, Macquarie Island.

Nella Dan was a Danish ice breaker built in 1961 for the J. Lauritzen Company, with input from the Australian Antarctic Division. It was named after Nel Law, the wife of the director of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE). Nel was the first Australian woman to travel to Antarctica. The Nella Dan made 125 voyages to the Arctic and Antarctic between 1961 and 1987.

The little red ship was on a re-supply visit to Macquarie Island when bad weather pushed it onto the rocks. The crew and passengers were all seen safely off the ship. After efforts to salvage equipment and remove oil that would pose an environmental threat, the ship was towed out to deep water and scuttled.

Parks and Wildlife tried to contain the oil spill, and a file of reports in TAHO details their efforts to protect this fragile island.  Over several days the rangers on Macquarie Island monitored the effects of oil washing in over the beaches on the plant and animal life of the coastline.

Efforts were made to remove oil from the ship before it could leak into the water. Crews pumped oil back to tanks on Macquarie Island, and a lot of the damaging waste was removed. Although the incident still produced a moderate oil spill, favourable winds washed most of it out to sea, and damage was limited to the inhabitants of the rock pools along a stretch of coast. Birds and other larger animals were closely watched, particularly those that picked off the dead fish and molluscs washed onto the beach. Luckily they were largely unaffected.

Nella Dan was much loved by her former crews, and has been honoured by several memorials. She was replaced by the Aurora Australis, that great orange ship that is such a regular visitor to Hobart’s port.

Hobart as an Antarctic port

One of the first Antarctic ships to use Tasmania’s ports was Captain John Biscoe’s brig Tula, which landed in Hobart after circumnavigating Antarctica in 1832. Interest increased in the area with the growing industries of sealing and whaling. Expeditions were launched with the mixed motivations of money, science and the glory of discovery.

As tribute to the Nella Dan, we’ve put together a gallery of some of the most important ships in the history of Antarctic discovery.

Further reading: 

If you’re interested in any of the stories of these ships that left Hobart for the Great South, have a look at these accounts of their exploits. If you’d like to know more generally about Antarctic exploration, scroll to the bottom of the page for more great books.

Amundsen, Roald, The South Pole : an account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition in the Fram, 1910-1909. (Edinburgh : Birlinn, 2002) 

Bernacchi, Louis Charles, To the South Polar regions : expedition of 1898-1900. Facsimile ed. (Denton, Eng. : Bluntisham Books ; Erskine Press, 1991.)

Butler, Rowan, Breaking the ice (Sutherland, N.S.W. : Albatross Books, 1988)

Dumont d’Urville, Jules-Sébastien-César, An account in two volumes of two voyages to the south seas by Captain (later Rear-Admiral) Jules S-C Dumont D’Urville of the French Navy to Australia, New Zealand, Oceania 1826-1829 in the corvette Astrolabe and to the Straits of Magellan, Chile, Oceania, South East Asia, Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand and Torres Strait 1837-1840 in the corvettes Astrolabe and Zelee. trans. and ed. Helen Rosenman. (Carlton, Vic. : Melbourne University Press, 1987.)

Mawson, Douglas, Mawson’s Antarctic diaries. Fred Jacka & Eleanor Jacka, eds. North Sydney, Australia : Allen & Unwin, 1991

Mawson, Douglas, The home of the blizzard : an Australian hero’s classic tale of Antarctic discovery and adventure. Kent Town : Wakefield Press, 1996.

Ross, James Clark. A voyage of discovery and research in the Southern and Antarctic regions, during the years 1839-43. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Antarctic Exploration (general)

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The worst journey in the world. (London : Vintage, 2010)

Fiennes, Ranulph. Cold : extreme adventures at the lowest temperatures on Earth. (London : Simon & Schuster, 2013) 

Herbert, Kari, and Huw Lewis-Jones. In search of the South Pole. London : Conway, 2011.

Hurley, Frank. South with Endurance : Shackleton‘s Antarctic expedition 1914-1917 : the photographs of Frank Hurley. (London : Bloomsbury, 2001)

Jones, Max, The last great quest : Captain Scott’s Antarctic sacrifice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Larson, Edward J. An empire of ice : Scott, Shackleton, and the heroic age of Antarctic science. (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 2011.)

Leane, Elizabeth. Antarctica in fiction : imaginative narratives of the far south. (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2012) 

Leane, Elizabeth, South Pole, (London : Reaktion Books Ltd, 2016).

Shackleton, Ernest Henry, South : the story of shackleton’s last expedition, 1914-1917. London : Century, 1991.