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Griffith Taylor's Antarctica: science, sentiment, and politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2009

Carolyn Strange
Carolyn Strange*
Affiliation:
Research School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia (carolyn.strange@anu.edu.au)
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Abstract

Griffith Taylor (1880–1963) was a scientific member of the Terra Nova expedition. Although he published initially on his geomorphological, glaciological and meteorological research, conducted between 1910 and 1912, he was also a teacher, lecturer, publicist and later political commentator on Antarctica. Initially a loyal ‘Britisher’ he developed an internationalist perspective on Antarctica without compromising his self-promotional ambitions. Through his professional career in Australia, the US and Canada over the early to mid twentieth century Antarctica's shifting scientific, cultural and political history can be mapped. Just as self-interest permeated the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, so Taylor's ambitions persisted as he fashioned himself into a scientific prophet for peace. Taylor's Antarctica, an amalgam of sentiment and science, rivalry and cooperation, imperialism and internationalism, popular culture and global politics, was the twentieth century's Antarctica.

Type
Research Article
Information
Polar Record , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 65 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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