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Marie Darby was the first New Zealand woman to visit the Antarctic mainland. In January 1968, she travelled on the first tourist vessel to the Ross Sea area, the Magga Dan, and visited Scott Base with other staff and tourists. She prepared a check list of sub-Antarctic birds for the information of tourists on board and later wrote an article on summer seabirds to be seen between New Zealand and McMurdo Sound. Mt Darby in Antarctica is named after her

Early life and education
Marie Darby studied at Victoria University of Wellington and graduated with a BSc. She completed an honours and a master's degree at the University of Canterbury, specialising in ichthyology. At the time of her trip south, she was working as a marine zoologist at Canterbury Museum, but she had spent a year at the Portobello marine biological station and had taken part in several study trips in Cook Strait. She was also an Honorary Ranger.

She married John Darby, a zoologist and biological photographer for the University of Canterbury. John Darby was working at the penguin colony at Cape Bird, 60 miles north of Scott Base, from December 1967 to February 1968, so he was already in Antarctica when Marie arrived.

Antarctica
In 1968, the first tourists travelled to the Ross Sea on the Magga Dan. Most of the tourists on the first cruise had flown to New Zealand from the United States. They arrived in Auckland on 4 January 1968 and sailed from Lyttelton on 8 January, calling in at the Chatham Islands on the way south. The Magga Dan ran aground on 22 January near Hut Point at the entrance to Winter Quarters Bay in McMurdo Sound. She was successfully refloated and returned to Bluff on 2 February. The second cruise left from Bluff on 6 February and reached Winter Quarters Bay on 19 February.

One “major novelty” that the voyage brought to Antarctica was “femininity”. Twelve of the first group of 25 tourists were women. Before this, the only women to have visited the Ross Dependency were two American air hostesses on a Pan American flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Sound who spent about three hours on the ground on 15-16 October 1957.

Marie Darby was on board the Magga Dan for both trips as a lecturer employed by Lars Eric Lindblad, of Lindblad Travel Inc, New York, who had organised these two tourist cruises.

After the two expeditions, she wrote a paper on seabirds to be seen between NZ and McMurdo Sound, noting that “During daylight hours, the writer kept as continuous a birdwatch as possible, and recorded sea and air temperatures and weather conditions.” She recorded sightings of 12 species including petrel, wandering albatross, black-browed mollymawk and southern skua. At the end of the paper she “gratefully acknowledge[d] the help of the tourists and expedition staff of the 1968 Antarctic Tourist Expeditions to McMurdo Sound; and the endless assistance given by Capt. F. Bang, the Officers, particularly W. de Lange, and all the seamen on m.s. Magga Dan; during the long bird-watch and weather recording. “