Dark-eyed beauty Paquita Delprat, 17, first noticed the dashing Douglas Mawson, 27, at a function in Adelaide in 1909. By the end of 1910 they were engaged to be married.
The only cloud on the horizon was Douglas’s impending expedition to Antarctica. He expected to be away for fifteen months, but they did not count on the disastrous trek from which he staggered
back, alone and close to death, to find that the waiting Aurora had given up and steamed away only hours earlier. Douglas was stranded for another full year, and the lovers’ endurance was
stretched to the limit.
Long months intervened between ships to and from Antarctica. Letters from Douglas arrived in two batches, delivered twenty-two months apart. The longer the lovers were apart, the more doubt,
anxiety and despair crept into their correspondence, and the reader senses the growing strain on both sides.
Touchingly, Douglas kept Paquita’s letters all his life. Nancy Flannery first saw them in 1991 among the papers his Estate had entrusted to the University of Adelaide, and was intrigued to
glimpse the emotional life of the austere explorer scientist. Six years later, she found Douglas’s letters to Paquita among private family papers, thus completing both sides of this romantic
story.
