Dorothy Pearl Braxton AM (née Mason; 1 August 1927 – 3 September 2014) was the first female journalist from New Zealand to visit Antarctica.
This was during wartime when paper was in short supply, but Dorothy managed to persuade the Southland Daily News to donate the newsprint from their allocation.
[2] At high school, Dorothy was told by the careers advisers that it was too hard for a girl to break into the male-dominated world of journalism.
[3] Dorothy could remember scrambling around the rocks of Bluff Hill as a child, feeling “the wind blowing on my face straight from the South Pole” and imagining she was on the polar plateau "struggling with huskies and sledges".
For ten years, she wrote annually to the Admiral in charge of the United States Naval Support Force, Antarctica, asking if she could have visiting privileges, but she was always turned down, often on the grounds that there were no facilities available for women.
Geoffrey W. Markham, the Superintendent, said, “Taking a woman down to Scott Base, where we haven’t facilities for them anyway, would be just like opening Pandora’s box.
Finally, in February 1968, she found a way around “the petticoat ban on women journalists working in the Antarctic”,[10] thanks to Lars-Eric Lindblad, who had organised two tourist cruises to the Ross Sea and offered her a berth on board the Magga Dan.
[15] Dorothy continued to work as a journalist in Australia and in 1991, she travelled to the Arctic, fulfilling a long-held desire to “go north and reach as close to 77° 52' north as I could get to match the 77° 52' south I had achieved on the voyage south on the Magga Dan” and to find out “how the Arctic differed from the Antarctic and what were the similarities.”[10] She wrote about her trip in The Canberra Times, concluding that “both ends of the world are wild, remote and beautiful.