The sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, about 170 kilometres long and up to 30 kilometres wide, lies at the southern end of the Atlantic Ocean, about 2000 kilometres east of Cape Horn. Its icy mountain spine rises nearly 3000 metres out of the ocean, like a misplaced section of the Alps. The island lies well within the cold waters bounded by the Antarctic Polar Front, and more than half of its area is permanently covered by ice and snow.

Although South Georgia was visited with increasing frequency after its discovery by Captain Cook in 1775, and was for a long time a busy base for the sealing and whaling industries, a properly surveyed map of the island was not published until 1958. That map resulted from a series of small privately-organised expeditions – the South Georgia Surveys – initiated and led by Duncan Carse.

In Putting South Georgia on the map, a book printed and published in Western Australia in 2011, Alec Trendall, who served as geologist with the South Georgia Surveys of 1951-52 and 1953-54, tells for the first time the full story of Carse's expeditions to South Georgia in the 1950s.