If a journey starts with the first step, then a blog must start with the first word. So my Antarctic Blog has officially started!

I am now an employee of the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) of the Department of the Environment and Energy. Who would have thought I would ever work for the government. Actually who thought I would ever get a real job. I have a 15 month contract which started in early December 2016 in Hobart, Tasmania. My journey to become an Antarctic Expeditioner started a year earlier back in December 2015 when I applied online for a job as a plumber through the AAD website. It was a rollercoaster of a ride which took about 10 months. Wow. Tell me more. Okay.

The application processes starts off with an online application which took me two and a half days to complete. It was only about 27 questions but I was recommended to add as much info as I could. And I did. I submitted the form in January 2016 and while the official line is that it may take months, from other sources I was told if I didn’t hear back by March then I’d probably missed out. March came and then almost went when I received a phone call to say I had been selected to go to the ‘Selection Centre’ in Adelaide in May.

Selection Centres are basically a 2 day (big brother house) group interview process for small groups of 16 people. They have about 2500 applicants for about 300 jobs in Antarctica each year. This includes all the different jobs on the four Australian Bases. Of this number, about half the jobs are usually filled by people who have worked down in Antarctica before. So that cuts the jobs down to about 150. Only 10% of the 2500 applicants make it in to the Selection Centre process. In my group there were two other plumbers plus a mix of tradies, techs (insert a serial comma here if you need to!) and management hopefuls. Another 30% are culled at the Selection Centre. Don’t call us. We’ll call you. They flew me from Broome to Adelaide and back, fed me, accommodated me and the process was full on and interesting and nice people, so I was happy just to get that far.

In June I was told I’d made it through to the next level and that I had to participate in various medical, physical and psych tests. Of course everyone assumed I’d fly through the medical and physical and fail the psych but it ended up the other way around. In what seemed like a career ending blow I found out that one of the tests came back positive. They take a lot of blood and test for heaps of things and apparently I had latent tuberculosis. Besides not knowing that I had it, I also wasn’t sure what that meant, except for the fact I was sure that they wouldn’t want to send someone with TB to Antarctica! After lots of anxiety and disappointment I got a call from Polar Med in Hobart who asked me to do a few more tests and told me that my condition wasn’t terminal and that it was fairly common in people my age and best of all that it would not hinder my progression in the process to head south.

In July I had almost given up on hearing from them when I received an email saying that I had been chosen as a reserve. I rang up to find that I was reserve plumber number 4 and that if 4 of the chosen plumbers decided to pull out or got sick then I was in. A little disheartening, but good to know I was the sort of person they wanted. I also found out that 20 plumbers who had been before had applied for the 13 plumbing jobs available and that no new people were getting jobs this year. It sounded like there were seven 12 month jobs and six 6 month jobs on offer most years. To make me feel better I was told that it was highly unusual to get so many people reapply and that in a normal year they offer first round picks to the top six new people and that would have included me. They also said if I hadn’t heard by the end of September then I probably wasn’t going next year. But maybe the year after?

In early October I decided to give them a call so they could officially tell me I wasn’t going next year and was told I’d moved up to number 1 on the reserve list and that someone was looking shaky and that they’d give me a call. I asked for the shaky persons contact details so that I could pop around and take them out but being a government institution they weren’t very obliging. After an anxious week or so I got a call to say shaky had pulled the pin and would I be interested in a 12 month stint at Mawson Base in Antarctica. I decided to make them sweat a bit and waited quite a few milliseconds before I said I’d take the job.

They sent me up the contract and paperwork so I’d have something to do for a week or two and they organised me a flight to Hobart about 6 weeks later. Then the panic set in. I had so much to do before I flew out. Turns out it was just the right amount of time though as I made it to Broome Airport early enough to grab a beer and hear them call out my name from the departure gate.