When Nicholas Johnson arrived at Antarctica's McMurdo Station in the late '90s, he expected pristine wilderness and adventure. Instead, he found bureaucracy and boredom.

So he began anonymously documenting his experiences in a satirical newsletter, Big Dead Place, that he secretly distributed around the station.

"Big Dead Place became the WikiLeaks of Antarctica," said Darryn Schneider, an Australian physicist who worked at McMurdo at the time.

"It would just appear in the galley on the table. It looked just like The Onion.

"This newsletter helped to take the edge off this culture that I wasn't expecting."

Nick Johnson at work in the McMurdo waste management team. ( Supplied: Kathy Blumm )

McMurdo Station is considered the logistical hub of Antarctica. At its peak in summer, it's a community of 1,200 people.

Dr Schneider says because of Antarctica's extreme geographical isolation, living and working there can be extremely challenging.

"It's this self-contained thing, nothing gets in or out," he said.

You might assume the station is filled with scientists conducting ground-breaking research, but it consists largely of crew working in operational positions.

The station is operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). A support contractor is appointed to house, employ and manage the people there.

In the late '90s, a major American defence company, Raytheon, had the contract.

"Raytheon management was very institutional," Dr Schneider said.

"It's like they're running a prison, except with scientists."

The origins of Big Dead Place

For six months over winter there are no flights in or out of McMurdo Station. ( Supplied: Jason Anthony )

Johnson got his first job at McMurdo Station in 1999, working as a dishwasher. It wasn't long before he began writing his newsletter.

This is how he described his job in Big Dead Place:

I worked Midrats (midnight ration) as a DA (Dining Attendant) in the Galley. We washed dishes, scrubbed pots, vacuumed the dining area, scouted for spray bottles of disinfectant to wipe the tables and mixed Bug Juice (industrial strength kool-aid). Most of us on the Midrats crew were fingees (F***ing New Guys). The Galley might as well have been in Nebraska. Stainless steel, hot water, the smells of baking chicken and boiling potatoes and butterscotch, all to a repetitious soundtrack of Foreigner and The Eagles. I often forgot where I was, until I went outside in the cold and wind to dump cardboard or food waste in the dumpsters off the dock.

But it wasn't the mundane work that came as a surprise to Johnson—it was the bizarrely bureaucratic culture of McMurdo. He wrote:

I have never heard one person say that the most difficult thing about Antarctica is working outside, or being cold. I have never heard one person imply that Antarctica's tough physical environment would be the main reason not to return. I have never heard of one returnee who finally quit because it's the world's highest, driest, coldest, or whatever. People leave because of the bullshit.

Johnson died by suicide in 2012, so he can't expand on what the "bullshit" was.

But some of his former workmates offered some insight.

"You're stuck there, you're institutionalised, you've agreed to do this contract, we're not bad people but we have to deal with this mediocre management," said Kathy Blumm, who spent 36 months working at McMurdo in the late '90s and early 2000s.

She says most people's perceptions of working in Antarctica don't match the reality.

"Everybody thinks you go down there and it's this beautiful, pristine place and that we're all scientists down there," Ms Blumm said.

"In actuality a large part are tradies or basic logistics that need to support the science."

She and Johnson became close friends while working together on the waste management team.

Thanks to his presence, she remembers the time fondly.

McMurdo was described as a hive of creative and eccentric individuals. (Johnson top left and bottom centre) ( Supplied: Sue Long )

"It was a monotonous job, so to have someone with such an intelligent mind and wry humour to keep us entertained throughout the day was a pleasure," she said.

Working six-day weeks collecting and sorting the station's rubbish, Ms Blumm says, felt more like working on a mine site.

"[It's like] a dirty old mining town in Alaska, with a frozen sea, smell of diesel and lots of sounds of large heavy equipment driving around," she said.

McMurdo Station is the logistical hub of Antarctica. ( Supplied: Jason Anthony )

While Ms Blumm says the opportunity to spend time in such a unique location was difficult to pass up, what was challenging was that the majority of Raytheon management was based in Denver — a long way from the realities of Antarctica.

"We're in this harsh cold environment doing day-to-day jobs dictated by people that are in a completely different environment, that just can't conceptualise what we're doing or how we're doing it," she said.

"It just defies logic on a certain level, and you just have to reach for humour at that point."

And that's exactly what Johnson did with Big Dead Place.

He satirised many things that took place on the station, including the time some female crew hung up a shower curtain for extra privacy in the bathroom while men visited the nearby co-ed sauna.

A manager confiscated the shower curtain because it was considered unauthorised.

Big Dead Place responded with an article titled "NSF Seizes Unauthorised Shower Curtain".

A specially trained agent of NSF Station Services invaded Hotel California on Tuesday, apprehending and seizing an unauthorised shower curtain. The shower curtain, which behaved in a hostile manner when questioned by authorities, has been menacing residents of the dorms for weeks. "It got so bad I was scared to go to the bathroom," said one terrified resident. "I never knew what that shower curtain was doing there or where it had come from. It scared me. It just hung there like it owned the place. I'm glad it's over now". NSF officials, who had been searching for the shower curtain for questioning in its involvement with a string of vapor barrier related activities, refused to disclose the exact nature of the crimes committed by the crafty shower partition. "We can't say what happened, or what was wrong with the shower curtain," said NSF rep Jack Bewsher. "But we can say it was our duty to apprehend the suspect before certain disaster struck. The NSF is committed to enhancing the quality of life for USAP participants."

Johnson wrote under a pseudonym but eventually built a website and published the content online, and only revealed to his closest friends at McMurdo that he was the author.

Far from a pristine environment, McMurdo station is often compared to a mining camp. ( Supplied: Jason Anthony )

"People were desperately trying to figure out who this was, the NSF was trying to work out who was doing this newsletter that would show up in the galley," Dr Schneider recalled.

There was an element of risk involved in publishing such controversial content, but Ms Blumm says by his very nature, Johnson couldn't help himself.

"He knew he was putting himself out there doing it but he knew he had such great content and such a great story to share that it was a no brainer," Ms Blumm said.

Big Dead Place, the book

In 2005, a year after returning from Antarctica, Johnson published a book based on the newsletter and blog.

It was also named Big Dead Place—but this time he wrote under his own name.

After finishing his final stint in Antarctica, Johnson spent many months writing Big Dead Place in Christchurch. ( Supplied: Jason Anthony )

The book was met with relative success—rave reviews and even talk of developing the idea into a TV series.

Sue Long worked alongside Johnson at McMurdo in 2000 and believes Big Dead Place portrays a very different and accurate version of Antarctica.

"I feel like Nicholas did something special, in that everything that I had read about Antarctica was about heroics and exploration and Nicholas really told about the humanistic, quirky part ," Ms Long said.

It is difficult to assess the impact Big Dead Place has had on the culture of McMurdo Station, but Ms Blumm says for those who have worked down there and read the book, it generally garners one of two responses.

McMurdo Station consists largely of crew working in operational positions. ( Supplied: Jason Anthony )

"Some people hate it, because they want to dream it to be stunning and pristine, and others think it's pretty funny and interesting," she says.

Ms Blumm says what her experience of working in Antarctica clearly articulated is that regardless of where you are in the world, bureaucracy exists.

"It's just this odd dichotomy where you have this beautiful place but this same old mundane bureaucratic bullshit going on," she said.

"Anywhere you go it's going to be there, and that's the funny part of it."

The ABC contacted the National Science Foundation and Raytheon for comment. The NSF declined to comment and Raytheon failed to respond.