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January 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda ABOARD THE AURORA AUSTRALIS, Southern Ocean, Jan 7 AAP – One hundred years ago on Sunday, Australian scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson and his fellow expeditioners made the first landfall on the Antarctic continent directly south of Australia.
On January 8, 1912, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition members came ashore from the steam yacht Aurora at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay.
They were the first people to set foot on the stretch of land between Cape Adare and Gaussberg, setting the scene for Australia’s later territorial claims on the icy continent and its ongoing scientific involvement there.
The Australian Antarctic Division icebreaker Aurora Australis is on its way to Commonwealth Bay with a commemorative team to mark the centenary of Mawson’s 1911-14 expedition.
The Adelaide-based geologist and his men landed in sunny weather but were only able to take ashore one boatload of supplies before a blizzard set in and they were forced back to the ship.
On January 11 they landed again and despite further bad weather, Mawson determined that he and a small team should camp ashore for the first time on the night of January 12.
Australian National University historian Tom Griffiths, who is aboard the Aurora Australis, said Mawson and his men soon realised they had landed in one of the windiest places on the planet at sea level, with harsh katabatic winds regularly blowing at speed off the polar plateau.
Professor Griffiths told AAP that just as Australians remember the landing of troops at Gallipoli in 1915 as a critical moment in Australian identity, Mawson’s landing at Cape Denison should also be remembered.
“Let’s think of this other landing we’re celebrating the centenary of that took place a few years earlier, a landing in our own region, a landing with the Australian flag and very much a sense that this was an act of a new nation with new-found nationalism following federation.”
Mawson and his men went on to build two wooden huts at Cape Denison that remain standing to this day.
The land party overwintered in the huts after the Aurora left for Australia and when the sun returned, teams left on sledges to explore the new land.
Mawson was the lone survivor of the far eastern sledging journey after young British army officer Belgrave Ninnis fell down a crevasse and Swiss expeditioner Xavier Mertz succumbed to exhaustion and food poisoning on the gruelling return journey to the huts.
Mawson made it back to the huts after an epic lone journey in appalling conditions and had to spend another winter on the ice with a relief party after missing the Aurora by only hours.
Australian Antarctic Division Director Tony Fleming, who is also on the Aurora Australis, says Mawson was a key figure of “the heroic age of exploration” who put science at the centre of Antarctica’s future.
A commemorative party plans to lay a time capsule and raise the Australian flag near Mawson’s wooden huts at Cape Denison next week to mark the explorer’s groundbreaking expedition.
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