Dianne Whelan
Works by Dianne Whelan:
From ABC BookWorld, "In 2007, photographer, writer and filmmaker Dianne Whelan of Garden Bay was the first woman to accompany the Canadian Rangers--the regiment responsible for providing a military presence in isolated Canadian communities--on a 2,000-kilometre journey by snowmobile on the northwestern coast of Ellesmere Island. Their trip took them from Resolute to the Canadian Forces Station Alert and en route they planted a Canadian flag at Ward Hunt Island. The group became the first to reach that location since American explorer Robert E. Peary in 1906. Her NFB documentary film about her experiences, This Land, was released along with her memoir, This Vanishing Land (Caitlin, 2012).
In 2010, Whelan went to Base Camp on Mount Everest where she interviewed climbers, doctors and Sherpas, who had all lived there for weeks, sometimes months, awaiting a window in the weather to summit the world's highest mountain. Some knew there was a good chance they wouldn't survive the journey and that the mountain is infamously littered with hundreds of bodies of those who failed to complete the grueling and dangerous climb. It is not just life that is at peril and Whelan also writes about the human impact on Everest and the unsettling effects of climate change. The melting glacier, which loses more than four inches a day, reveals evidence of man's hubris with each new body uncovered by the receding ice."
She appeared at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts in 2014.