I’m still packing at three on the morning I depart for Hobart to catch the boat. The plane from Sydney leaves at six-thirty, I haven’t yet slept, there’s no time. In the weeks before departure my mind’s been crammed with busyness, there are lists and purchases and bills, requests and research and farewells. I haven’t stopped.

‘You’re always running,’ my father says to me earlier that evening when he phones farewell and I can’t talk for long because another farewell dinner’s already begun.

‘You’re never doing nothing, are you, darling?’

‘No, I guess not.’

I think back to the galloping days of preparation. I can’t remember them too well.

My father pauses over the line.

‘Have you seen the full moon? It’s a beauty tonight.’

His voice is soaked in stillness. He’s ringing from his house by the lake three hours south by car. I haven’t seen the moon. I never do; it never reaches into my city. I live in the most populated square-kilometre in Australia. It’s a suburb of bedsits in tall buildings and half loaves of bread in the delis.

The Antarctic Division’s sent several booklets in the mail. One’s called Separation. It’s about coping with being isolated from your partner. It talks, with great care, about how to make the situation work. It doesn’t apply to me. The last bloke I slept with used to hold onto my hair as the alarm went off for work. My head would snap back as I willed myself out of bed and sleep. The last bloke I slept with used to ask, all the time, why I was always so tired. The last bloke was eleven months ago.

I’ve made the taxi driver’s day. As we drive to Sydney airport his enthusiasm makes me feel famous. There’s something innocent about it that pushes a smile through my tiredness.

‘Wow, Antarctica, wow.’

The taxi driver thumps the wheel. I won’t be surprised if he starts radioing all his taxi mates in his excitement.

‘You know I read in the Reader’s Digest that this bloke down there ate two pounds of butter a day because of its fat. It’s so cold down there it burns all the fat.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep. My wife lived in Alaska for two years. She never felt better or happier.’

There’s no irony in his voice.

‘You know, if there’s a car broken down on the side of the road up there and you drive past it without stopping, and the person dies, you can be charged with murder.’ He thumps the wheel again. ‘Are you really going to the South Pole or are you joking?’

‘No, not the South Pole. Antarctica, the continent. Not the spot in the middle of it.’

‘Oh Antarctica, South Pole—same thing. Don’t you have to get your appendix out for that?’