Scottish artist Rachel Hazell must have one of the most unusual jobs in the world: postmistress and penguin counter on a remote Antarctic island.
Sitting in the workshop of her three-bedroom apartment in Leith, Edinburgh-based book artist Rachel Hazell is oblivious to the noise drifting up from the pub-lined bus-congested street below. She is methodically hand-stitching the last spine on the diaries she will take on her journey to Antarctica.
“When I told my family that I was going to work as Assistant Postmistress and Penguin Monitor at Port Lockroy, my sisters thought it was a great opportunity,” says Rachel. “My stepfather was concerned that I would lose my mind!” she laughs and chokes as the chocolate Penguin biscuit she has been eating goes down the wrong way.
Port Lockroy is the most popular stopping-off point for tourist vessels cruising the Antarctic Peninsula. On a clear summer day, shards of mountains and a flotilla of icebergs welcome visitors to the glacier-fed bay that surrounds Goudier Island, the temperature hovering around 0°C.
Rachel Morgan of the UKAHT says, “In order to fill this role, we were looking for someone who had complete enthusiasm for Port Lockroy’s history and what it is now about. We needed someone that could live in rudimentary conditions, personable enough to talk to up to 350 tourists a day and yet be able to do repetitive tasks like hand stamping and franking up to 70,000 pieces of mail.”
When not travelling through Scotland, teaching children and adults how to make their own books, self-employed Rachel makes paper-based book-sculptures for exhibition, inspired by her two previous trips to Antarctica. In 2004, she semi-circumnavigated the continent for a month as ‘artist in residence’ for Quark Expeditions. In 2006, as the Arts and Science ‘bridge’ on the Education and Outreach Committee for International Polar Year, Rachel spent a month on the Royal Naval vessel HMS Endurance.
So how does one prepare for five months in a deep freeze with two teammates who are virtual strangers? After obtaining special Foreign Office permission to take the role, Rachel attends a briefing weekend learning how to live in cold, basic conditions and how to cook on a propane camping stove.
On the 15-day ‘commute’ from Buenos Aires to Port Lockroy (aboard the Nordnorge cruise ship) the team study Health and Safety documents and prepare Risk Assessments for working at height (painting the roof and windows on the original hut, Bransfield House) and what to do if the wooden huts burn down. Rachel learns how to count penguins. They all learn how to limit the spread of guano in and around the museum. If the dust is inhaled over long periods of time, penguin poo is toxic.
Read the full story in our February 2008 issue.
