Introduction

On almost any evening in the centre of the Queensland capital, Brisbane, rockclimbers gather at Kangaroo Point cliffs to scale a floodlit 25 metre high cliff overlooking the Brisbane River. This level of activity is a relatively recent phenomenon in the long history of climbing in Queensland. It is only in the past decade or so that rockclimbing has become attractive and accessible to almost anyone across the country. The number of female climbers in Australia has been growing steadily and only now is approaching the proportions who regularly climbed on the crags of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales throughout the 1930s. The arrival of the European phenomena of first, sport, then gym climbing have been catalysts for the spectacular increase in the numbers of climbers—particularly women—now tackling the hardest of an estimated 35,000 recorded climbing routes in Australia.