I busy myself with interviews. There are early morning satellite connections to Australia for crosses into current affairs programs. I’ve got commitments with radio stations across Australia, doing live-to-air chats on the satellite phone. The line costs nine dollars a minute but the stations don’t seem to care. The listeners, they tell me, are hungry for Antarctica. I speak to the program producers before going to air and dictate the questions the announcers will ask me. My answers are rough on a notepad in front of me. The challenge is to always sound fresh when up to ten different stations are getting the same yarn. The more serious current affairs programs get me to fax detailed introductions and questions and rough outlines of what my spontaneous sounding answers are going to be.

And there are news stories. Two paragraph intros and thirty-second voice reports, summing up the various scientific projects on the voyage. I file my work early because the big morning bulletins are the most listened to ones of the day and I want my stories in them.

I rise and watch dawn skies that look like they’re veiled in thin muslin. I do my work and then drink cups of tea with Captain Crane on the bridge and he tells me about his daughters and his wife and his home in Broome and we stare at the many shades of white around us. Max is often up early too. He tells me the Inuit have forty words for white and I begin to see them all. Max asks me why I’ve been avoiding him lately. I tell him I haven’t, I’ve just been busy.

At night I listen on my tape recorder to the voices I’ve collected. They’re for documentary specials I’ll package up on my return. The recordings are never captured cleanly, there’s always the hum of the ship’s engine under them. I read the people in their voices. In Max’s voice there’s sharpness, a keen curiosity. It’s someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. In Jim, there’s bluff, something that warns me away, something that doesn’t like women. In Mark, a wanting to please. In Blanca, a fear of her accent. In Andrea, shyness. In Meg, wariness, a lack of confidence. In Jack, a wanting the journalist to go away and leave him alone. In the voice asking the questions, a little girl. I sound ten years younger than I am. It’s not my real voice. It’s how I operate. Playing naive and ingenuous, charming people into dropping their guard. The voice is light and high, playacting, and I can hardly bear to listen to it. I snap the tape recorder off and suddenly the sounds of the ship in the night are loud and boomy and raucous about me.