Shackleton brings Brazilian podcasters to Athy

The global reach of Ernest Shackleton was highlighted in Athy last week when two Brazilian podcasters came to visit. 

Alexandre Deusjute (narrator and producer) and Ana Mendes (scriptwriter) from the aptly-named Antarticast podcast undertook their first trip to Ireland specifically to visit Athy and its hinterland.

“It’s thrilling. It’s a dream come true,” Ana said when asked how it felt to be following in Shackleton’s footsteps. “I love Shackleton, since I was 16.”

"It’s difficult to believe we’re here now!” Alexandre added.

The couple were met in Emily Square by the highly knowledgeable Kevin Kenny of the Shackleton Museum, who gave them the low down on the building’s former lives (including as a market house, courthouse, fire station and library), and of course its current major redevelopment.

While it’s a building site for the time being and inaccessible, the museum’s artefacts are temporarily housed elsewhere and the duo got an opportunity to view some of the exhibits, including family photos of Shackleton.

They were subsequently brought to Kilkea House, where Shackleton was born in February 1874, and the Quaker burial ground in nearby Ballitore, where the explorer’s ancestors are buried. His father Henry was a descendant of Abraham Shackleton, founder of the famous Quaker school in Ballitore in the 18th century. 

During the agricultural depression in the late 1870s, the Shackletons moved from Kilkea to Dublin and in 1884 to London. Shackleton died aboard Quest in 1922 off the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, on his fourth journey to the Antarctic. Just seven years before, he had captured the attention of the world when he enabled the survival of all 27 members of his crew after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

Their mutual interest in Shackleton, incidentally, is how Alexandre and Ana became a couple. The former had created a podcast to follow the Endurance22 Expedition, which located the wreck of Shackleton’s ship Endurance in March 2022. Ana started to follow Alexandre’s podcast and, two years later, their relationship started and they fell in love!

Kevin told the Kildare Nationalist that Shackleton is probably the best-known Irish name worldwide. 

“South America was huge for him – Uruguay, Chile, Argentina all got actively involved in trying to rescue his Endurance crew. And actually, he was working there soon afterwards, in the [First World] war... he was trying to counter German propaganda in South America. He was sent there because he was so popular ... On the Quest expedition, on his final expedition, he stopped off at Rio de Janeiro and there had to be a lot of repairs done to the ship and whatever else. But he spent nearly a month there ... got a great reception.”