The writer and historian Meredith Hooper, who has died aged 86, had a particular affinity for Antarctica, the continent across the Southern Ocean from her native South Australia. It was expressed most effectively in her book The Ferocious Summer (2007), an examination of the impact of climate change on Adélie penguins.
By observing both the animals and the field researchers studying them, she provided an account of the human endeavour behind climate science. It unsentimentally rejected the anthropomorphism that often surrounds penguins, arguing that what truly distinguishes them is their extraordinary adaptation to a harsh environment.
A book for children, A for Antarctica: Facts and Stories from the Frozen South (1991), had prompted an invitation from the Australian Antarctic Division to spend the summer of 1994-95 on the continent. Hooper returned twice more with American researchers through the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, deepening her understanding of both scientific fieldwork and the realities of life on the ice.
Working with original sources – journals, diaries and archival material – she was drawn to overlooked stories of Antarctic exploration. The Longest Winter: Scott’s Other Heroes (2010) recounted the ordeal of Robert Scott’s “northern” party – six men stranded through the Antarctic winter of 1912 in a hand-dug ice cave – a tale long overshadowed by the south pole tragedy.
Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition of 1914-17 gave rise to a number of projects. For younger readers she reworked the original accounts into Ice Trap! (2000). For the Royal Geographical Society exhibition and book Enduring Eye (2015) she reconstructed the story from the original diaries and journals, alongside new ultra-high-resolution scans of photographs taken by Frank Hurley.
The Radio 4 drama Beyond Endurance (2015) drew on the diaries to tell how Shackleton (Dominic West) suffered the loss of his expedition’s ship to the ice. Before that on Radio 4 came Kathleen and Con (2013), exploring the romance revealed by letters between Scott (Sam West) and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce (Emilia Fox).
Hooper’s more than 50 books began with Land of the Free (1968), an incisive account of US history. Story of Australia (1974) and History of Australia (1988) displayed a fascination with first encounters between people and landscape.
She had a particular eye for explorers – not always heroic figures, but fallible people in extraordinary settings, their journeys marked by improvisation, suffering and miscalculation. In Doctor Hunger and Captain Thirst (1982) she captured the precariousness of early journeys into Australia’s interior, again drawing on archival material.
Kangaroo Route (1985) traced the development of long-haul flight between Britain and Australia, while Cleared for Take-off (1986), for younger readers, looked behind the passenger cabin to the operational world of international aviation. She researched the subject practically: on flights between Britain and Australia she spent hours in the cockpit with Qantas pilots, questioning them about navigation, weather systems and long-distance flying. Crews occasionally offered her and her husband their bunks.
Among her other books for children, The Pebble in My Pocket (1996) introduces geological time through the life of a single stone; River Story (2000) runs from source to sea; Everyday Inventions (1972) explains the origins of familiar objects; and The Journal of Watkin Stench (1985) retells Australian history through the imagined perspective of a ship’s rat. The skill throughout lay in shaping apparently simple narratives out of close observation.
Born in Adelaide, Meredith grew up in the north of the city with her siblings Janet and Andrew, and went to Wilderness school. Her parents, Jean (nee Champion) and Cliff Rooney, a headteacher and geologist, fostered her curiosity. She often accompanied her father on trips into the outback, and remembered him explaining that the rocks beneath their feet were once seabed 800m years earlier. Those lessons in “reading” landscape later informed books such as The Island That Moved (2004), which traced New Zealand’s tectonic journey across deep time. Childhood illnesses, including scarlet fever, polio and rheumatic fever, confined her to bed for long periods, during which she read voraciously and developed her self-reliance.
Graduating from the University of Adelaide with first-class honours in history, in 1961 she won a scholarship to Oxford University, where she undertook a BPhil in imperial and Commonwealth history, first at Lady Margaret Hall and then at Nuffield College.
At Oxford she met Richard Hooper, a broadcaster and communications specialist. They married in 1964 and settled in north London, raising three children, Rachel, Tom and Ben. When Meredith discovered a promising unproduced play, she drew it to the attention of Tom, a film director, and he adapted it as The King’s Speech.
She held visiting scholarships at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and the Scott Polar Research Institute, and served as a trustee of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT) and the International Polar Foundation. Her awards included the Antarctica Service Medal from the US Congress (2004).
Work that she did with the UKAHT helped me, as its chief executive, to see how Antarctica could be opened up to readers – not as myth or metaphor, but as a real, fragile and astonishing place. She had a steady conviction that curiosity, pursued with care, can reshape our understanding of the planet we share.
She is survived by Richard, her three children and eight grandchildren.
