As Australia moves north, away from its southern roots, it’s easy to forget that it was once part of a greater southern land, ages ago in the distant past. The breakup of Gondwana, Australia’s ancestral home changed the present in ways we can still see, feel and understand. The Earth has the climate it does because of the fridge in the south - if Antarctica was ice free, the world would be a very different place. For Australia it has been 80 million years of movement, heading north. Antarctica, the stay at home member of the southern family, was isolated from its brothers and sisters as they started to wander the globe. And in its isolation it sat, surrounded by an encircling ocean, growing colder, colder and colder. Sail west at 40 degrees south and you could keep going until to you return to where you started. A merry-go-round of sea and salt, wind and waves. The white of the continent cools the air and drives weather systems that echo around the world. Many ocean currents have their birth in the cold waters of the Antarctic; the push of cold saline waters drives the water around the world. So, how is the white continent linked to the red one? Hobart - the southern-most of the state capitals – no further from the coast of Antarctica than it is from Fremantle. And the waters of the Southern Ocean lap along the south coast of Australia. Sitting near the end of this southern boundary is Melbourne, the largest city in the world on an east/west shoreline. Our weather is pushed by pressure systems born in the Antarctic boundary zone. They bring cold in the winter and refreshing cool in the summer.
Then a sharp turn, and the climbing began in earnest. Mud splashes, the singing hiss of wet roads, the tyre rumble of unmade roads. And then by the side of the road were the remains of snow ploughed piles, and my kids had seen the snow. But this snow was nothing like the pictures, dark and angular, thick with road surface stones and dirt. It was melting in ways that were both angular and curved at the same time. Strange snow sculptures. Soon patches of snow sat back from the road's edge and nestled in the crooks of tree branches. Icing the trees and ferns like sugar cakes, the faint sparkle of winter decoration. This was the snow we had come to see.