THIS WORK CHANGES EVERY SECOND DAY AT 12 NOON

Mahon report, Mt Erebus

Above is a movie poster from one of the Mutiny on the Bounty movies. There are five. I wanted to find some way to say that Hollywood fictions are just that - Hollywood fictions. This poster actually talks about the truth. If you look at the image, you will see it features two men. That is a gross distortion of the HMS Bounty saga. The women played a huge role, and particularly in the culture established afterwards on Pitcairn Island. For example, Pitcairn was the first country to give women the vote, in 1838. In that year laws were drawn up, and women were not excluded from voting. This is not just a single curiosity, but part of a pattern in the culture. Consequently, it is a distortion to pretend the Bounty story is only about male heroes.

So I was thinking about snow, and the memorable phrase from the air accident inspector for the Erebus disaster came to mind - 'an orchestrated litany of lies.' Movies are of course, orchestrated, in both the musical and plot direction senses. A litany of lies is a fairly good approximation of fabricating additional events and stories based on real events, and that made Mr Mahon's comment a way of saying something about the Hollywood view of Bounty events. Next stage.