Solid gold creativity

News in The Age that David Mearns, the UK-based shipwreck hunter, plans to search for the Endurance, the ship crushed by ice and abandoned by Ernest Shackleton and his men on their Antarctic expedition in 1915. 

Readers of this blog may remember my wonder and torment when reading Shackleton’s account of the expedition (click here and here).  It’s left me in permanent awe of his name and everything associated with it.

Mearns has previously discovered the wrecks of the British battleship, HMS Hood, the German cruiser, Kormoran and just last week, the Australian hospital ship, Centaur, torpedoed by the Japanese off the coast of Queensland in 1943. 

While the Endurance is beneath the ice cap somewhere, and ”it’s 3000 metres deep beneath ice caps,” Mearns says he’s more confident about the Endurance project “than anything else I’ve done.”  It also happens to be, as he says,

… the absolute ultimate challenge in shipwreck hunting.

All he needs, according to the article, is ” … a wealthy benefactor with a cool $US10 million.”

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The Age Weekend Edition also featured a profile of Lucy Feagins, the blogger behind The Design Files, a very handy local site.  As well as holding down a day job, Lucy prepares a lavish post every working day. Her dedication and hard work must be enormous.  

And courtesy of Lucy’s site, I just discovered the knitwear designer that Melbourne — the logical home of knitwear design excellence –has long deserved.  Her name’s Nikki Gabriel and this is one of her beautiful designs below.

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Image: Nikki Gabriel’s knitwear (The Design Files)