Vale Cecily Fearnley 1925-2022
The photograph (below) of local pioneering climber-bushwalker, Cecily Fearnley, was recently sent to me by a family friend and with permission, I'm posting it here. A passionate and award-winning environmentalist and museum artist, Cecily was founding vice-president of the Brisbane Bush Walkers in 1949. She passed away in January, 2022, just before her 97th birthday. I had the good fortune of meeting Cecily -- known as 'Noosa's natural living treasure' -- in 2016 at the Noosa Library when she attended a presentation I gave on local climbing history, based on my research for The living rock. I recall that she was the first to arrive and the last to leave that day and we spent time talking about her various ascents in the Glass House Mountains in the 1950s and 1960s. While it is sad that another of our pioneering women has moved on, the environmental legacy she has helped to create will remain.
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Cecily Fearnley climbing in the Glass House Mountains ca. 1950 (Photo: Fearnley family) |
Online acknowledgements and tributes to Cecily Fearnley:
Australian Encyclopedia for Science and Innovation
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History's forgotten female mountaineers...
And while on the topic of women on the heights, I've just finished reading a wonderfully illuminating study by British researcher Clare Roche on the hidden and largely ignored history of female climbers in the Alps at the end of the 19th century. As I discovered myself in researching the history of rockclimbing in Australia, women played a far more central role here -- particularly in southeast Queensland -- than had previously been acknowledged. It underlines the general sidelining or ignorance of women's achievements across a broad spectrum of society, a process that largely continues today despite the best efforts of some to challenge male dominance. The evidence for this is overwhelming for anyone who cares to look beyond the status quo (largely controlled by men) and this well-written and accessible account of women exploring the Alps is another excellent example. It takes us beyond the endless array of mountaineering publications that largely replicate each other in terms of a lack of acknowledgement of the role played by women in the development of European mountaineering.
Who knew about the number of first ascents in the Alps by women, on occasion in advance of men? Who has heard of the pioneering female mountaineers who explored the heights at a time when Victorian era women were defined as -- and assumed to be -- 'the weaker sex'? For those with an academic and/or theoretical bent, there is much in this thesis in relation to women's agency and how middle-class Victorian women redefined perceptions of the female body through their engagement with the mountains. The overall historical narrative is uplifting and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this fascinating and under-acknowledged aspect of mountaineering history.
Link to a PDF of Dr Clare Roche's thesis
