Save The Huts: "Once lost, they are gone forever."

There is no doubt that in an ideal world the historic sites of Antarctica, and in particular, its Heroic Age huts, would be preserved. There is also no doubt that there has been considerable debate, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, about how such historic Antarctic buildings should be conserved. The various proposed options for preserving the huts have included:

• minimal intervention;
• dismantling and repatriation to a museum;
• re-cladding with new timber or other barriers etc. to exclude the elements;
• and covering buildings with a dome.

Some of these options have been given more practical consideration than others and the currently adopted solutions for the Ross Sea Huts, in particular, are the relatively standard solutions applied to historic buildings outside of the Antarctic by conservation architecture companies. Unfortunately, these are not standard buildings and the solution has missed the very essence of what it is that everyone wishes to see conserved; indeed, it is worse than that. The current Heritage Management Plans for the Ross Sea Huts destroy their very essence.

The Antarctic Heritage Trusts (AHT) and the New Zealand Government (in particular) have been putting pressure upon the Antarctic (and wider) community to support the current Heritage Management Plans without question - and to stump up the cash to implement them. They wish to give the impression that the Antarctic community is united in its support for their work on the ‘preservation’ of the ‘Heroic Age’ huts of the Antarctic, in particular their work on the Ross Sea Huts of Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton. The list of the 'great and the good' supporting the project is extensive.

Many Antarcticans do not support the current plans, however. Indeed, few people, even amongst our senior polar figures, have read the ‘Conservation Plans’, have knowledge of the issues, nor much knowledge of what they are purporting to support; nor have they thought out the serious consequences of supporting the action proposed. Supportive action arising from such ignorance and from the confusion of language employed by the Antarctic Heritage Trust in its media campaigns is widespread. Many people are surprised by what is happening, once they think more widely about it.

This issue is not one which is restricted to the huts of Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton. The hut of the Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson is equally imperilled by the very authorities charged with its care, as are the Heroic Age huts of the Antarctic Peninsula. One of the huts of the expedition of the Swede, Otto Nordenskjold, has been utterly destroyed as a meaningful historic site through being replaced with a replica. Other hut sites will soon be similarly degraded. Intervention by governments, heritage trusts and others mean that only a handful of Antarctica’s Heroic Age Monuments remain in an authentic state - that is, as left by the explorers.

However, it is the huts of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Scott that are of most immediate concern, for they are the focus of a determined fund-raising campaign, which, if successful, will destroy their unique existence as historic time capsules.

Saving the Huts, sounds very grand and romantic. It emotes some of the greatest epics of human exploration history - which is why it is a popular media campaign. However, the current Conservation Plan runs far beyond the basic maintenance of the huts to 'keep them going for as long as possible'; which was a strategy that the Antarctic Heritage Trust traditionally pursued and was widely supported. From early in this Millennium, the Trust completely changed its conservation strategy. Instead of basic maintenance, they aim to keep the huts going 'in perpetuity' with aggressive intervention and replication. The resulting project flies in the face of both logic and common sense and can not achieve its declared ends, for it destroys the very essence of the objects it seeks to conserve.

The problem is, of course, a form of Plutarch’s old philosophical conundrum Theseus’s Ship - but it really isn’t a conundrum at all in this case. Everyone agrees that the historic huts are only of interest because of who put them there - they are the time capsules left by our great explorers: it is what makes them sublime; they are of no intrinsic value otherwise.

It follows therefore, that "Saving the Huts" is a fundamental category error. What is important is not the physical huts but their provenance. The day that you can no longer say that Scott or Shackleton's men put 'that' there is the day that the huts are destroyed as surely as if the elements themselves destroyed them. That day is nearly upon us, for the brutal truth is that the moment you aggressively intervene in a ‘time capsule’ it ceases to be one and the reason for its conservation evaporates.

Whilst the Trust once campaigned for the preservation of the huts with the slogan that "once gone they can never be replaced" (an obvious truth) the Trust is now campaigning for the opposite and embarking on an aggressive strategy of re-building and replication. The Trust now simply states that the huts should 'invoke' the feeling of the heroic age, not that they should be 'of' it. Ironically, their language unconsciously recognises that they are destroying the historic essence of the huts.

As part of this ‘invoking’ process, the Antarctic Heritage Trust is re-interpreting the huts to make them 'more authentic' and in doing so removing some of the important historical layering of the sites as ‘insignificant’. The effect is to ‘museumise’ the sites, sanitising their authenticity with academic hyperbole and dubious history. The published plans include:

• replacing deteriorated and 'missing' original artefacts with replicas;

• rebuilding parts of the huts which have been gone for nearly a century;

• introducing nearly 1000 replicated 'historic' packing cases in order to achieve this;

In short, the execution of these plans lead inexorably to the building of very expensive replica huts, devoid of their historic connections and destroys the powerful connected meaning of the huts more surely than even the elements would have done. It may be partial reconstruction now - but in time it will of necessity, be total.

This turns the huts into a forgery - an 'invoking' mockery of themselves - for every visitor believing that they are seeing 'Scott's' or 'Shackleton's' hut will be seeing an Antarctic Heritage Trust reconstruction. Captain Oates will no longer have put that hay bale there - it was the Antarctic Heritage Trust; Shackleton will no longer have hammered that roof into place - it was the Antarctic Heritage Trust.

It is hard to conceive of a greater act of vandalism to these sites. The only way that the huts could have been preserved as the time capsules which everyone so valued, was to enclose them in a protective outer-building and leave them alone - a strategy dismissed without detailed analysis. So the huts are in the process of being lost by one means or another; it is just that one means of loss is far more expensive than the others - and far more dishonest - and it is the means currently being undertaken.

It is for this project that the Antarctic Heritage Trust is campaigning to persuade you to send them money to 'preserve our Antarctic Heritage'; you should be asking some very tough questions as to whether spending your money on this project is worthwhile.

* The History of The Huts is Being Censored for You. If you were lucky enough to visit the Antarctic huts, would you want to walk into an untouched time capsule and touch the face of history; or into a hut, set out for you by Museum experts - that is nevertheless being marketed to you by your tourist company and the Antarctic Heritage Trust as a time capsule? If you think that the tin was put there by Shackleton and really has contents in it any more, think again; if you think that Edward Wilson put that Emperor Penguin there whilst Captain Scott looked on, think again. The long and the short of it is that once the Trust has completed its plans, you will not be walking into a time capsule but a creation of the Trust based upon distorted history - you are being duped.

*The Elements Will Destroy the Huts. Even if you think that expensive replica huts in the Antarctic are worthwhile, you should ask yourself, ‘can the huts of Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton be saved'? Regardless of human efforts, the elements will eventually destroy the Antarctic huts; it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. They are on low lying beaches in a period of rising sea levels, in a violent climate undergoing unpredictable changes and on the fringes of an active volcano, facts to which their management plans make astonishingly little reference. Sooner or later, they will be lost unavoidably to these elements.

* The use of the huts is being changed. If you think that these projects are being carried out by experts and so somehow therefore, it must be ok; have you asked yourself who the experts are who are carrying out this project? Surely, one should always be suspicious of any enterprise where the experts giving advice upon which important decisions are made are the same companies and individuals that profit from its execution. Of course, the advice was ‘peer reviewed’ - but peer review means reviewed by someone else in the same business of making money from conservation architecture - not someone in the business of asking fundamental questions of the process itself. So the question is, who profits from this project? The historic huts of the Antarctic are rapidly being turned from sublime historic time capsules into a playground for money-making heritage professionals and tourist companies. Do you really want to support this?

* Our Polar heritage needs your support; but have you wondered whether your donation in support of our Antarctic Heritage could be better spent? Beyond the damage caused to the huts, the Antarctic Heritage Trust huts appeal has further serious consequences by diverting badly needed funds from sound polar heritage projects. You may find it surprising to know that the Antarctic huts are in no sense the legacy of our great Antarctic explorers and they are most certainly not their memorials; they are simply their old huts. Their legacy and their memorials are found elsewhere in the historic and scientific institutions which carry on their work. If you want to support our Antarctic Heritage your money would be better spent here, in support of achievable polar heritage objectives. The AHT appeals to the supposed fact that future generations will not ‘forgive us’ if we let the huts go - whilst destroying them in the very act of their intervention. How much more unconscionable to ‘save’ the huts at the expense of our polar heritage elsewhere.

* You should always judge an organisation by its actions not its verbiage. The Antarctic Heritage Trust wants you to believe that your donation will help to preserve the historic huts as the time capsules of Scott and Shackleton - but its current conservation plans cannot achieve this. Its’ campaign literature and media campaign for the Ross Sea Huts are disingenuous to the point of misrepresentation. Its’ actions in the field of polar heritage raise an even more fundamental question: does the Antarctic Heritage Trust really believe in supporting our Polar heritage? Did you know that the Antarctic Heritage Trust sanctioned the selling of historic Antarctic material at Christie’s to raise itself money to spend on the huts?

*The Antarctic Treaty is failing to protect our historic polar monuments. The huts of the heroic age explorers of the Antarctic are amongst the most threatened buildings in the world. Threatened by the elements, for sure - but being utterly destroyed by the very organisations that claim their care. The damage being done to the historic huts of Antarctica is now so severe that those organisations and governments responsible should be being prosecuted under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty. Unfortunately, the governments responsible run the Treaty and set their own rules.

*Simply Irrational. Despite the damning case against supporting the Huts appeal, this website occasionally receives notes from Heritage Trust supporters suggesting that despite logic or merit we should support the AHT campaign regardless. That, of course, is up to you; you will be in good company. Sir Edmund Hillary has lost any pretence to sound judgement. As he recently appealed in support of the ‘conservation’ of the hut at Cape Royds, he suggested that the ghost of Sir Ernest Shackleton had appeared to him in the hut, “welcoming” him to it with arms outstretched. We suspect that the ghost was actually imploring Sir Edmund to leave it in peace - but he was too deaf to hear.