The Sydney Rock Climbing Club is born

From the early 1950s in Australia, outdoors’ organisations seemed to breed overnight, resulting in an era of club-related activity. Long-standing clubs like the Sydney Bush Walkers, founded in 1927, grew stronger as a result of this increasing interest in the outdoors. Towards the end of 1950, 19 year old Russ Kippax travelled north from Sydney in search of adventure. With a friend, he climbed the east face of Mt Warning and Caves Route on Tibrogargan. He had been scrambling on rocks and cliffs around Sydney since he was about 10 and joined the Sydney-based Rucksack Club when he was 16. By the late 1940s, he and his friends had started to use ropes for protection as their scrambling was becoming more serious. In 1950, made their first fully roped traverse of the Three Sisters. Kippax was an avid reader of climbing books but he laughs as he recalls the gear and the techniques he and his climbing partners used then:

I’ve still got my jacket with great score marks across the back. That’s all we had. It wasn’t until much later that we used crabs and things. Paddy Pallin was always a very good friend and I’d go into his shop and say. “There are some things called pitons, can you see what you can find?” And he’d wire off the England and the first lot of pitons I got were a bunch of great massive things that had come from the British army commandos.

With a core of climbers emerging, Kippax formed the Sydney Rockclimbing Club (SRC) but recalls he was far from overwhelmed by numbers initially:

I can count them—eight at the first meeting. But very quickly, people came out of the woodwork everywhere. We put up a notice up in Paddy Pallin’s—it used to be upstairs in George Street in those days right alongside the railway station—and then people…started coming out of the woodwork; people who had climbed in Europe and who were living out here and who saw the notice.

The early climbers put up some remarkable routes in 1951 including climbs on the West Wall of the Three Sisters, Malaita Point, and Narrowneck Bluff. They found a way up the face of King George the following year. The Blue Mountains, with its hundreds of kilometres of sandstone cliffs, was about to claim its place as one of the Australian focal points for the emerging sport of rockclimbing—with a distinctly Australian style.