Where space dreams and cross dressing intersect

It's that time of year in Brisbane when you can never be sure how cold it might get during the night, so it's not unusual that you can fall asleep under a quilt only to wake up too hot later.

I think it was this that led to last nights dream, in which I had arrived at a small lunar base with my own accommodation, which was actually just like a largish canvas tent, only airtight. But when I put it up (inside the existing base, so I was not in a spacesuit) I found there were lots of small pin prick hole in the fly, and I had to try to tape them up, while complaining about poor quality control at NASA.

Once satisfied with the tent, I was sitting inside it reading a book about the incredible extended isolation that the first Antarctic explorers often suffered, particularly those who had to wait out a winter. It suddenly occurred to me that this was not a good book to bring to the Moon, where I was going to be confined to my tent for about 7 months. The dream soon morphed away into something else (I was in Seattle and an elderly women seemed to think the government was controlling the weather, and then there was some sort of parody of Sex and the City going on, from which I was eventually saved by waking up feeling crushed under too many blankets.)

As it happens, I have been reading some stuff about Antarctic expeditions, but really, I would know better than to take it to the Moon in real life. One of the books (which I got in Hobart, which tends to have a lot of titles on Antarctica) is this:

Herbert Dyce Murphy inspired Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair; he appears as a woman in one of E. Phillips Fox's best-known paintings; he prevented Douglas Mawson's Antarctic expedition from imploding.

Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer tells the story of one man's fascinating double life - a gentleman adventurer who also dressed in drag to spy for British Military Intelligence in pre-World War I Europe.

In 1911 Murphy sailed to the Antarctic with the Mawson expedition for a gruelling exploration of the frozen continent, a trip of terrible hardship which claimed lives - probably unnecessarily - as this controversial view of Mawson demonstrates.

We all love a story of cross dressing explorers, don't we?

It's not a bad read so far, although the author does seem almost too keen to make it clear that her relative did not enjoy being a pre War spy in drag. He certainly had an adventurous life, even apart from the lady spy period, which was fairly short anyway.

I must try to adjust the bedcovers better tonight.