A view over Davis. The station has 120 people in summer but that number falls to 18 in winter. Credit:Lloyd Fletcher When he had completed his PhD research, he was asked to return to Antarctica as a consultant in 1989. He was then given a job developing a marine mammal program for the Southern Ocean. He does not know how many times he has "gone south", as they say at the AAD, but it is "probably over 30". In his time off, he used to take "busman's holidays on tourist ships as a guide," he says, "to get to parts of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic I hadn't seen". He eventually became the Division's chief scientist, and was appointed as director last year. Antarctica is not meant for human habitation. On Davis Station in winter, the temperature bottoms out at -40°C and the mean average of sunshine hours during July is zero. But it can sometimes be easier to live on the continent than to come home. "It takes you a while to settle back," says Gales, "because you've moved from this padded life where you don't have to make 99 per cent of the decisions you do in the real world: you're not handling currency, there's fabulous food cooked all the time, you're not having to shop or do the normal things that take up your daily life. You can become somewhat institutionalised, and for some people that's part of the attraction: it's quite uncomplicated. "You see regulars who are down, and within a year they're back down wintering, and they bank up six or seven or eight winters. Some of them are just fabulous for it, other ones you just think, 'You really haven't adjusted back.' In my view, it's always good to have a few years before you winter again." Do expeditioners go mad?

There’s no chance of getting lost at Davis, the most southerly of the Australian Antarctic Division’s three permanently occupied stations. Credit:Michael Goldstein/Australian Antarctic Division "Not mad, but … eccentric," says Gales. "People who wish to go and live in a highly remote place for a year of life are probably not, you know…" He searches for the right word and begins again. "Not everyone wants to do that," he says diplomatically. "It doesn't take much of an excuse for people to dress up in frocks." Old Antarctic hands say going south changes people, in ways they find hard to put into words. The friendships made on isolated stations can last a lifetime, while relationships built in Australia might simply melt away. "We ask all of our expeditioners at the application stage to have a really good conversation with their partner about whether their relationship can manage a period of separation," says AAD psychologist Maree Riley. "We know that if a relationship is not in a good place when they go, it's not likely to improve while they're away." Noel Tennant standing outside entrance to Mawson's Main Hut. Credit:Noel Tennant/Australian Antarctic Division "It cost me my first wife," says aviation ground support supervisor Micky Loedeman. "I came back from Casey one year and she said, 'That's it for you, you're done.' And so, unfortunately, she had to go."

Loedeman has been south almost every year since 1996. He first applied to work in the Antarctic in 1988, when he took (very) early retirement at the end of an 11-year career as a fitter and turner with Australia Post. While the AAD's statutory role – supporting the Antarctic Treaty System and enhancing Australia's standing among the growing number of treaty signatories – calls for scientific research into matters ranging from conservation through to meteorology and bird life to climate change, a large number of tradies are needed to support the scientific community. Nick Gales at Wilkins Aerodrome, near Casey Station. Credit:AUSTRALIAN ANTARCTIC DIVISION In my view, it’s always good to have a few years before you winter again. Carpenters and plumbers live among biologists and chemists. Applicants for every position are required to be fit, healthy, hard-working, able to cope with and contribute to life in a small, remote community, and possess "good social skills and a pride in one's appearance and maintenance of socially accepted standards of hygiene". Loedeman went through intensive engineering training in Tasmania, and a week of field training in Bronte Park in the Tasmanian highlands, where expeditioners practised abseiling, crevasse rescue and cold-weather survival. He first travelled to Antarctica as a married man with two children at home. When the job cost him his marriage, he met his second wife, microbial ecologist Shane Powell, on station.

Dr Shane Powell nears Antartica. Credit:Micky Loedeman/Australian Antarctic Division "Peyton Place has got nothing on this place," says Loedeman. "If you're in the mess looking at someone for any longer than 10 seconds, the job's on. You bump into each other in the corridor and they're going, 'Oh yeah, I know what's going on there.' So, if you think you can hide that stuff, you can't. If it is on, pretty much everybody knows it's on." Loedeman and Powell returned to the Antarctic as a married couple in the summer of 2006-07. They had their own room on station, "but it's difficult when you're with someone," says Powell, "because there are so many people who aren't with their partners or their families that I felt a responsibility to not flaunt the fact I had my partner there. It's difficult emotionally. Other people are missing loved ones. You feel like you're in a work environment. I wouldn't walk down the corridors at work holding hands with my partner, either, so doing it in Antarctica where you are at work 24/7 doesn't seem quite right. There are also more prosaic considerations. "You can't have arguments on station," says Loedeman. "Everybody can hear you, for a start. The walls are paper-thin. So if we had an argument, we would go out to the red shed and we'd walk along the back of the red shed, over the valley and across the hill behind us." They'd shout at each other and then "it'd all be done and dusted in about 15 minutes". Powell isn't so sure. "Fifteen minutes is a bit optimistic," she says. A couple's agonies can be a single person's amusement. "There's no television out there," says Loedeman, "so people take an interest. Quite often we'd just walk to the wharf, about one kay away from the station, sit down there and just watch the penguins. If we wanted a weekend away, at Casey there's a whole heap of field huts in various places up and down the coast. We would just jump on the quads and go away for a weekend."

When they returned home from their summer together, Loedeman took a full-time position at AAD headquarters, and continued to make shorter trips down south, but Powell went to the University of Tasmania as a research fellow. She has mixed feelings about her last trip to the Antarctic. "Once I was there as somebody who was in a relationship, some of the men were just not interested in talking to me," she says, "because I was clearly off-limits." But the stresses ran deeper than that. "Living under the microscope, living in a fishbowl, it became quite exhausting trying to be positive all the time," says Powell, "trying to be happy and get along with people all the time. It's difficult." Powell and Loedeman have agreed that Loedeman will not go south for more than three months at a stretch, and Powell had adjusted to life as the stay-at-home partner. "We don't have kids," she says, "so there are some things that make it easier for me compared to other people. Often when people say, 'How are you going? You must be missing him?' I go, 'Well, actually, at least I get to watch what I want on television, and the cat's really happy because she gets half the bed to herself.' "I know where he is, I know what he's doing, I know he's happy most of the time, so I'm not that worried. I miss him, but I miss him the same as when he goes to visit his family in Queensland, or I go away to a conference for a week." Old Antarctic hands say the passage of time smooths over the more jagged edges of memory and they often remember their seasons down south as among the best days of their lives. "If something's going on in the season, it's bigger than Ben-Hur," says psychologist Maree Riley. "It's centre of everybody's mind. But when they're returning home, they've come out of the bubble and they're back into the real world, and things that were really significant are not such a big problem now.

"Things that cause the most angst on station are things like people not shutting doors quietly, not wiping your crumbs off the bread board, people not washing up their coffee cup, really little things that in general life are not an issue. "Often people don't realise that they might have a habit that's annoying other people: at home they might always leave their coffee cup on the table and nobody says anything to them." It's the larger impressions that remain clear, such as the warmth of the companionship. Riley visited Davis in 2006 and 2007. "When a psych comes on, everybody tends to run away," she says. "But the community was really inclusive and you were welcomed into that community and you were part of an elite group, to some extent, having had that opportunity and experience." The other side to the closeness with people in the community is the distance from those outside. "I lost my grandmother the first year I was down on station," says Lauren Wise, a remediation chemist. "So for me, it was, 'How do I cope with this?' I wanted to escape from everything. Whereas back here I would have had people around me. "I did have people around me on station – it was just in a different way. People were, like, 'Do you need anything?' I'm like, 'No, I'm okay. I'll just work.' Here I wouldn't have thrown myself straight back into work." Wise could not get home for the funeral. "I didn't go to see the grave for another two or three years," she says, "and that was when it started to hit."

There is danger and death in the Antarctic. In 1963, an expeditioner slipped on sea ice in Mawson and later died. In 1972, a radio operator died at a Mawson field hut, from perforated stomach ulcers, peritonitis and blood poisoning. A carpenter died on a tobogganing accident in 1974, and tobogganing is now banned by the AAD. In 1985, a building foreman was killed in an explosion and an archaeologist fell to his death from a cliff. Most recently, Canadian helicopter pilot David Wood, an AAD contractor, was trapped for more than two hours after he fell 20 metres down a crevasse, and later died on Davis Station. Although the expeditioners are determinedly safety-conscious, it is not the hazards of Antarctic life that obsess them – it's the food. Noel Tennant is station support officer (catering) at the AAD. From the Hobart headquarters, Tennant supplies food to the stations, recruits the chefs, provides briefings and training before they go south, and offers moral and technical support while they are on station. He has worked as a chef on Macquarie Island, and spent a summer and a winter on Davis. ' While there might be more than 100 people on station during summer, the number can fall to 15 in the cold. "If you're cooking for 15 people, that's just like a big dinner party each night," says Tennant. "So it becomes far more intimate. You're cooking for people that you know really well. You're spending all day, every day with them. They're almost extended family." He pauses. "Almost." "You get to know people's tastes extremely well," he says, "so you're able to adapt your catering very specifically. You can cook people steak that's actually how they like it. It's by far the best job satisfaction that I've had as a chef. Hands down." Tennant says bacon is the single most popular food with the tradies and most of the men on station, although chocolate is also a favourite. Expeditioners eat well, with generous allocations of fillet steak, crayfish and prawns.

"The station becomes your whole life," says Tennant. "It absorbs your whole world. People will concentrate on these small things: 'What? We're running out of Nutella!' Yeah, but there's 30 other things there that you can put on your toast. 'Yeah, but we're running out of Nutella!' You never tell them you're running out." What's the least popular item? "Frozen Brussels sprouts," says Tennant, immediately. "That's mentioned fairly regularly. Every year they keep saying, 'Send less Brussels sprouts.' It's hard to send less than one. The biggest celebration on the Antarctic calendar is the Midwinter Dinner, held in June on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The Midwinter Dinner is "often the meal on which most chefs are judged on and remembered for – and usually fondly", says Tennant. The dinner used to be a fairly simple affair but these days it can be almost dégustation-style. In between courses are "various bits of 'entertainment' ", says Tennant, "for want of a better term". "A production of Cinderella is a pretty traditional thing to do," he says. "Why they chose that, I don't know. There were no women around so, of course, you pick a play that centres around women." Cross-dressing has a long, sometimes ignoble history in the Antarctic. "We've had guys who didn't look particularly attractive as guys," says Tennant, "and when they dress up as women they get even worse." Old Antarctic hands say life is changing down south. There is a bar on every station and expeditioners once enjoyed a beer ration, but that went the same way as the now barely conceivable cigarette ration. Today, drinkers must pay for every glass, and each community makes its own home brew, largely as a social activity. "The quality varies a bit," says Tennant, diplomatically, "but on the whole it's a good product."

When he first went south, "People would sit down at mealtimes and actually have a conversation. After dinner, people would sit at the bar not to drink but to socialise. We're starting to see a bit of an erosion of this now. For better or for worse, we now have wireless networks on station, and people are starting to walk around with smartphones. And everyone complains now about how slow the internet is. You're in Antarctica, for goodness sake! Who cares whether you can get on Facebook? But they do." However, going south is still an intensively social experience. "You don't get lonely," says Tennant, "because one of the things you crave is your own space after a while. You never really get the chance to get bored. The first time I went, I took all sorts of hobbies and things. I thought, 'Well, in my spare time I'll do a bit of this …' Spare time is one of those things you come to crave. There's always something happening. There's always people to socialise with." Some things remain the same for every generation of expeditioners: the sense of transcendence, and the learning of new ways of seeing – both practically and philosophically. "You tend to lose scale," says Tennant. "You can see mountains 50 kilometres away and they look like they're five kilometres away. At Davis Station, particularly during the summer months, if you want to go off station, if you want to go anywhere, you tend to walk – the sea ice will melt and break up – and you'll see landmarks and think, 'Oh, that's five minutes' away,' and after half an hour it feels like you're not any closer. There are no trees. Generally speaking, there's not a lot of animals. All those things conspire to take away that normal sense of scale." "It's very hard to explain to people what it's like down there," says Loedeman. "You can show them 1000 pictures and as much video as you like, but until they're actually standing in it, and immersed in it, they're never going to get it. You'll never breathe cleaner air. You'll never drink cleaner water. You start to notice things and see things differently.

'"On my first visit to a penguin colony, I sat down, and they were all running around going nuts. How do you tell one from the other? One of the scientists said, 'Sit. Just sit – for half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour. And just watch.' All these things start to pop out. They're all individuals, and you start noticing the way they move and interact with one another is different from one penguin to another." In the end, the most obvious features can be the most surprising. "You never get sick of looking at ice," says Tennant. "It's the weirdest thing. I'd only ever seen snow from a distance before I went down the first time, then you see an extraordinary array of features, shapes, even colours: mostly blue, but depending on the weather conditions, the atmospheric conditions, temperature …" His voice trails off, as he imagines different kinds of ice. "You never get sick of going out and looking at it again," he says. "And taking more photos of penguins."