On the same coast, somewhere, were his other men...What had they found? Where were they? His own party was lodged in the chilled breath of this vast polar wilderness where he wrote: 'The winds have a force so tterrific as to eclipse anything previously known in the world. We have found the kingdom of blizzards. We have come to an accursed land.' Sir Douglas Mawson's epic and tragic journey across 600 miles of unknown Antarctic wasteland has been described by Sir Edmund Hillary as 'the greatest story of lone survival in Antarctic exploration'. This Accursed Land tells the story of how Mawson declined to join Scott's ill-fated British expedition in order to lead the Australasian party and his three man team which set out to explore the far eastern coastline of the Antarctic continent. The loss of one of his men and most of his supplies turned a hazardous trek into a nightmare. Mawson and his colleague, Mertz, were trapped 320 miles from base with only nine days' food and nothing for the dogs. They lived on the journey back by slaughtering their starving animals and eating what is now known to have been poisoned meat.
Mawson's ultimate and lone struggle for survival after Mertz's descent into madness - starving, poisoned, exhausted, and indescribably cold - is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of exploration. When he arrived back his weight had reduced from fifteen stone to eight stone.