One of the reasons I love oral history and preserving personal memoirs is that when you hear the voice telling you the story the emotion almost transports you there. Here you are listening to a fantastic story by someone who is actually there.
I came across Oral Historian Suzanne Mulligan's site and was amazed by the number and breadth of the stories she has collected. Susanne is an oral historian based in Brisbane Australia.
In this exert Suzanne has captures the story of Charlie Gibbs. He was a member of a party formed by the Australian Government to rescue an American aviator, Lincoln Ellsworth, and his pilot, Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, when their plane was forced down through lack of fuel in Antarctica in December 1935.
We experienced the cold soon after leaving Dunedin, New Zealand which happened to be our last port of call to take on and top up our tanks of fresh water and oil for the ship itself and ensure supply of fresh vegetables. The duration of our expedition was completely unknown, except that if we had to withdraw from the expedition, due to its apparent inability to find the aviators, by a certain date we would then have been locked into the ice and we would have then had to survive on our available cargo."
Visit Suzanne's blog to read the transcript of Charlie Gibbs' story.
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