Lost Girls by Graham Wilson Page A

religiously as
she did not want any babies spoiling her adventures.
    But these
events were only brief encounters, something to meet her physical
needs. Mostly she lived in her mind and dreamed of Viking gods and
goddesses, travelling with them to places where none had ever been
before. She did not know how she would satisfy this wanderlust but
it was there and she would not let it go and settle for an ordinary
life.
    At University
she enrolled for History and Archaeology with a focus on Norse
Studies, but also with a strong interest in natural history, the
plants and animals of the Arctic Kingdom. Then, at University, she
began to read about the great whaling adventures of the Nordic and
Icelandic seamen, covering all the world’s oceans to bring their
bounty home. It was not that she wanted to kill whales, but the
sense of adventure and sailing into danger brought passion to her
soul.
    Instead she
became captured by a modern variant, the need to protect the
masters of the ocean, those magnificent creatures of the deep from
the new commercial marauders. She realised there was nothing
courageous in the new steel sided ships, with explosive harpoons,
which killed with no risk to the sailors. So different from the way
of her distant ancestors of the longboats, when the contest was
something of bravery and equality; where only the most skilled
hunters succeeded and returned. The seas were a fitting graveyard
for those who failed with brave hearts.
    One day, when
her lectures were out, she was wandering aimlessly around the
docks. She saw a Greenpeace ship was here, in Stockholm, taking on
provisions. She struck up a conversation with a crewman on the
gangplank. He told her this boat was seeking to disrupt the
commercial whalers of the modern day, and to protect the world’s
oceans from their depredations. On impulse she enlisted, she was
already a competent sailor of small boats, it was an ongoing
pleasure she had shared with her father in his later years. Her
only regret was the leaving of her father, for whom she kept alive
her mother’s image, but she would live on in his memory as a Viking
queen of old.
    Now she was a
deckhand, unpaid but fed, out for fame and glory as they ran their
campaign to harass and disrupt the whalers of the world. It began
in the Arctic and moved on to the north Pacific, focusing on the
Japanese Scientific Kill. Then it moved to the Antarctic, a place
she fell in love with from her first glimpse of the ice covered
Antarctic Peninsula, teeming with its penguins and seals, and
countless flocks of birds, with its backdrop of ice in all its
myriad colour tones.
    Most of these
boats took on provisions or were based out of Australia or New
Zealand and soon she came to regard these places as a second home.
It was on one of these stopovers, when she had three weeks in Port
Melbourne with nothing in particular to do, that she decided to go
and see the inside of what she had been told was a vast empty
continent. The night train was leaving soon for Adelaide. She
bought a ticket on impulse, the way she had made most decisions in
her life
    Her plan was to
go the whole way across to Perth, then explore around there. She
had heard that Albany, to the south, was a famous whaling town. She
put a post card in the mail to her father, telling of her plans,
while waiting for the train to depart at Southern Cross
Station.
    In Adelaide she
spent a day walking around the town. While it was a nice quaint
city with spacious parklands and attractive old buildings it did
not really excite her. She wanted to see the outback, the real
place out beyond wherever civilisation ended. She found out there
were tours running to the heart of the inland, places with names
like Marree, Coober Pedy and Lake Eyre, largest salt lake in the
world. This seemed a more interesting plan. She decided she was
happy to make her own way without all the tour things added on. A
coach was leaving for Coober Pedy at half past seven tonight, due
in just