The sad tale of an Antarctic expeditioner
Sidney Jeffries was the wireless officer at Cape Denison during the second year of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1913 under the command of Douglas Mawson.
In July of 1913, as Antarctica neared midwinter and the isolation of Antarctica started to weigh heavily, wireless operator Jeffryes began to present symptoms of paranoia to his fellow expeditioners, none of whom knew how to receive or transmit messages in Morse code.
Mawson began to encourage another expedition member, airman Frank Bickerton, to learn Morse code as quickly as possible as a precaution.
Although Jefftreys seemed to be improving, in September he experienced a psychotic break and began transmitting a message, through Macquarie Island, to Australia where he accused his fellow expeditioners of conspiring to murder him. After this, Mawson relieved Jeffryes of his duties.
He would eventually return to Australia in February of 1914 but after boarding a train to return to his home in Queensland, he left the train at Stawell, stripped his clothing and wandered naked through the bush for 12 days living on insects.
He was reported to the police who admitted him to the Ararat mental hospital, where he remained for the next 28 years until his death in 1942, aged 58. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
But now, 76 years after his death, he finally has a marked grave. A plinth for his grave with his name and details of his Antarctic adventure was provided by the Mawson’s Huts Foundation and installed on October 16, 2018.
Jeffryes’ meticulous records of wireless reception quality during his time at Cape Dennison combined with other observations of variables such as magnetic readings, auroral intensity, and St Elmo’s Fire identified, perhaps for the first time, how low frequency radio wave propagation was affected by Antarctic conditions.
In August 2010, the Australian Antarctic Division honoured Jeffryes for his pioneering winter service by naming a previously unnamed glacier after him, the Jeffryes Glacier.