The photo that changed me: a love letter from the Arctic

I’m standing alone on an Arctic ice floe. In that moment I decide to get married.

I step onto the ice, and it shifts beneath me. All around me, wide rafts of it jostle and nudge one another. The wind, unchecked all the way from the North Pole, whips at the sliver of my face not covered by hat and scarf and hood.

I’m at almost 80 degrees North. Behind me, too far away, the sharp mountains of Spitsbergen bare their teeth at the clouds. In front of me, there is only ocean, cloud and ice. The small boat that delivered me here pulls away, leaving me all alone on the ice floe. In awe at the endless horizon and shaking from clambering onto the ice, I fall to my knees. I point my body north.

In April 2023, I travelled to Svalbard as part of an artists’ residency called The Arctic Circle, on board the tall ship Antigua. I would be sharing space with four guides, eight crew and 30 other writers and artists, exploring the west coast of Spitsbergen: the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago. The majority of Svalbard is uninhabited – unless you count birds, seals, walrus, reindeer and, of course, polar bears – and this feeling of wilderness also translates to communication infrastructure. For the two weeks aboard the Antigua, I would be completely out of contact with the rest of the world.

I had been obsessed with polar regions ever since I was a child, scrolling through streams of Arctic photography, watching Frozen Planet on repeat, and imagining how it would feel to visit parts of the world where, even now, so few other people get to travel. A few years before, I had travelled to Antarctica to research my second novel, The Edge of Solitude. I knew I wanted to write about the Arctic as well, so when the opportunity arose with The Arctic Circle, I jumped at the chance. I was single at the time of applying, and the prospect of being away from home comforts like wifi was more exciting than daunting.

By the time the residency eventually came around, I had been with my then-partner (now-wife) for about 18 months. This two-week voyage would be the longest we had ever gone without speaking to one another.

Suddenly, the Arctic adventure was tinged with sadness, and with worry: what if being out-of-contact for so long was unbearable? Worse, what if it wasn’t, and the relationship crumbled as a result?

We had been together long enough for the relationship to feel serious, but a brief enough time to still feel like we were figuring things out. While marriage had been idly mentioned (usually in the guise of, “this food we’re currently eating is so good that, if we ever get married, we should serve it at our wedding”), it certainly wasn’t a priority for us. We were more focused on travel, adventure and looking for a house.

Besides, for me, marriage had always seemed like something other people did. Despite having campaigned for equal marriage rights when I lived in Australia as a student, I’d never even been to a same-sex wedding – much less thought about planning one of my own.

Flash forward to Svalbard, April 2023. During the Arctic Circle residency, I joined snowshoe hikes along frozen rivers, sailed uncharted territory at the edge of a retreating glacier, and swam (admittedly never more than a few strokes) off the side of the ship in ice-littered bays. At Dahlbreen, we watched the glacier calve and send up a tidal wave onto the small island where we stood. At Sarstangen, I walked in the turquoise and blue hollows where the ice had melted from below. All through the residency, this vast and often hostile landscape felt temporary: shifting and disappearing. Nothing lasts forever, the landscape seemed to be telling me.

Then suddenly there I was, alone on a disintegrating ice floe, at the furthest point north on the voyage, with nothing but ice and turbulent seas between me and the North Pole. I felt the ice shifting underneath me as other floes jostled at its edges. Soon, this piece of ice would break up, melt and disappear. Nothing lasts forever. In that moment, I felt this colossal need to grab hold of what was important. In that moment, I thought of my partner, and I knew I wanted to marry her.

A few days later, the Antigua docked in Ny-Ålesund, the world’s most northerly civilian settlement. It’s home to multiple research stations and – crucially – the world’s most northerly post office. From here, I sent her a postcard, telling her I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I’m pretty sure she still has it, in a box under the bed.

I arrived home two weeks later, knowing that everything had shifted between us. Neither of us proposed. We didn’t need to – although we did take engagement photos, at a local swim spot we’d visited not long before we first got together, using Haribo rings, and an iPhone propped up on a rock. Instead, we just talked about it together: how we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with one another, and how we wanted to make a commitment to that in public, with friends and family.

We got married less than a year later, just two days before Christmas, in front of a giant Christmas tree, in the church in my bustling hometown – a long way from that distant isolated ice floe, although I carry the moment inside me always.

We’ve yet to visit the Arctic together – though it’s on our bucket list. (I would like the chance to try my hand at polar bear photography, as well as introducing this magnificent icy landscape to my now-wife.) But in the meantime, we live the smaller, everyday adventures. In the face of that shifting, disappearing world, we grasp hold of our life together.