The Katoomba Suicide Club

Sometime in 1929, 40 year old New South Wales doctor Eric Payten Dark began scrambling on the multicoloured sandstone cliffs at Narrow Neck in the Blue Mountains. He first climbed on the cliffs and waterfalls of the Shoalhaven River almost 20 years earlier while still a medical student at Sydney University. Dark saw a photograph of Mt Lindesay on the Queensland-New South Wales border in an atlas in 1911 and, like Lyle Vidler 15 years later, became fascinated with the idea of climbing it. He eventually reached the summit in 1913, making what was probably the first solo ascent. At the same time he climbed Mt Barney. Dark fought in World War I and returned from his experience, affected by Mustard gas and ‘deeply disturbed by the brutality and stupidity of trench warfare’. This experience no doubt had a profound affect on his developing socialist ideas. In 1922, he married his second wife Eleanor, destined to become one of Australia’s great historical novelists. The couple moved to the Blue Mountains in 1923. It is unclear what attracted Dark back to climbing but living amongst some of the most spectacular clifflines in Australia must have had an influence. By 1929, he had found climbing companions in writer Eric Lowe and a youthful Osmar White, as he recalled:

Lowe and I were 40, Eleanor more than a decade younger, and Osmar in his early 20s. We began with easy climbs on the Second and Third Sisters and the Orphan Rock. The more we climbed the more we liked it; so one evening, around a fire in our sitting room, we decided to form a club which we called the Blue Mountaineers. We adopted as our theme tune a fascinating little phrase from Petrushka, which was whistled as we walked to a climb.

This was the first rockclimbing club in New South Wales—the Sydney Bush Walkers had formed two years earlier in 1927—and included some local police. At that time, Eric Dark was unaware of climbing activities north of the New South Wales border nor of the association of climbers that had formed around Bert Salmon from 1926. The Blue Mountaineers included his two regular climbing partners as well as his wife, Eleanor, editor of the Blue Mountains Echo, Frank Walford, and Paddy and ‘Shrimp’ Carson. From the beginning, the Blue Mountaineers used rope and rudimentary belaying techniques—32 mm yacht manila or heavy sash-cord for their belays. They also used what they called their ‘unethical instrument’ to place belays in the galleries of Castle Point and on one pitch of the 1st Sister. It was ‘a two metre long ice axe with a deeply curved pick and a notch to hold the rope where the shaft entered the head’. They also experimented with some heavy locally-made pitons but abandoned them early on as impracticable. Eric Dark opposed the use of ironmongery and followed the doctrine of former English rockclimber Albert Mummery—that a rope should never be used as an aid for climbing but solely as a precautionary measure.