‘Hey Fin, I heard you’re coming to the ice with us. I’m ringing to fill you in on a couple of things. I’ve been nominated by some of the blokes.’

He tells me our ship’s to be the first into the ice after winter, the only ship to crack its way so far south so soon into the season in mid-September. No-one else is as mad as the Aussies. He says we’ll be carrying nine tonnes of freeze-dried food on board just in case the ship gets bogged. It’s happened before. The baby’s being taken to hospital. And the babysitter.

‘A journalist, eh?’

‘Yeah, a journalist.’

‘You know, there’s a bit of a rule among us old timers. It’s called Blame the Journo. If anything goes wrong, we blame the journo. Just thought I better let you know.’

He chuckles. I swallow his chuckle in mine.

‘One last thing. Are you married? A couple of the blokes wanted me to ask. They’ve heard you on the radio.’

I tell him I’m not married. I hang up, smiling.

Sarey my mate tosses it in, walks out two minutes before the 8 a.m. flagship bulletin. She’s never going near the newsroom again. Says she’s going to get a life. Won’t even come back to fill out release forms. She wants a postcard from Antarctica. Lots of ice.

‘A JAFO, people will call you.’

Ben Linton, four days before departure. He works at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He’s been to Antarctica three times before and says he has ice in his veins and he can’t dig it out. He gives me an Antarctic briefing from a journo’s perspective. He’s bearded. His hair is ice-white. He stares at my miniskirt. At my pink jacket made out of an old chenille bedspread. It’s meant to be ironic. I can tell he doesn’t get it.

‘Here comes another bloody JAFO they’ll say, and no-one’ll tell you what it means.’

‘What is it?’

‘Just Another Fucking Observer.’

‘Oh, great.’

I look at the radio newsroom buzzing around us, the rows of computer terminals, the video monitors, the police scanners, the journalists working the phones.

‘Do they really hate us that much, Ben?’

He considers. A smile cracks his stern face into a boy’s.

‘Yeah, they do.’

Lovely. I’m the only journo on this expedition.

Ben strides away past the row of ageing subeditors, intent and turtled at their computer screens, and throws back at me, over a line of concentrating heads, ‘Everyone who goes down there comes back a different person. It changes your life.’

‘Mate, I’ll see if you recognise me at the other end,’ I yell back.