From the vault... July, 1960

Jon Stephenson the 1st Australian to climb to 7000 metres without supplementary oxygen

Jon Stephenson began his passion for the outdoors as a founding member of the University of Queensland Bush Walking Club (UQBWC) in 1949. He applied his scientific bent to research and exploration on his beloved Mount Barney (his PhD thesis), the Antarctic and the Himalayas amongst other iconic destinations. With colleague Ken Blaiklock, Jon became the first to drive a dog team to the South Pole since Raold Amundsen in 1911. He later published a book documenting his Antarctic exploration - Crevasse Roulette: the first trans-Antarctic crossing 1957-1958.

My reason for revisiting Jon's extraordinary 1960 achievement in the Himalayas was triggered by a recent catch-up with two of his longtime pioneering colleagues, Peter Barnes, 95, and Alan Frost, 89. They shared countless climbing experiences from 1949, including a long list of first ascents around southeast Queensland. Although Peter's outdoor exploits have been slowed by impaired vision, his passion for the outdoors remains unbridled. Alan is active and still regularly climbs Mount Barney, almost always up his favourite ascent route, Logan's Ridge (around 150 ascents so far). 

Peter passed on to me a letter and photographs Jon had sent to him in 2010, documenting Jon's attempt to climb K12 (7428 metres) in the Karakoram mountains whilst on a scientific expedition there over a three-month period in mid-1960. Jon had organised the expedition - the Saltoro Expedition 1960 - with another UQBWC protege, Keith Miller who, three years earlier, had travelled in the area with the doyen of Himalayan exploration, Eric Shipton, and a group of students from Imperial College in London. As Jon observed, 'Keith thought it would be a good idea to climb the mountain K12'. 

Keith Miller contemplates a vertical granite wall on the Grachmo Glacier,
close to the base camp used by the Saltoro expedition to the Karakoram in 1960. Photo: Jon Stephenson

With two other colleagues, David Haffner and Jim Hurley, they flew into Skardu in the Kashmir region and trekked into the Karakoram with 100 porters and a Pakistani liaison officer. Sadly, Keith became ill on the expedition and was forced to go home early. He later distinguished himself in further Karakoram exploration and in Arctic scientific endeavour for which he was awarded a Royal Geographical Society medal. 

Sunset on K12 with the ascent route up the right hand skyline. Photo: Jon Stephenson

On 5 July, Jon was snowbound in a tent, high on the slopes of K12 with a Balti porter, Mohammed Choo, the only one willing to accompany him on his summit attempt. They had climbed through an icefall and up a 'straightforward' ridge, setting up a campsite on the crown of the rock ridge about one-third of the way up the mountain. The next morning, they continued, traversing above a line of huge ice cliffs. It was relatively easy going up moderate snow slopes towards a ridge which led to the summit. It was then that Choo became ill. Despite climbing without supplementary oxygen, Jon was in good condition and decided to climb on alone, leaving Choo to recover on a ledge cut out of the snow slope. Jon takes up the story:

"There was nothing to stop me except my own condition. Approaching the isolated rocks above the higher ridge promontory, about 10 per cent below the summit, I simply could not proceed, except with great slowness and deep shortage of breath. I might eventually have reached the summit, but would have spent the night out. Besides, I had to descend to see how Choo was faring. So I descended, much more easily, joined him, and climbed down to our tent without falling over the ice cliffs! The descent to the saddle was without incident the next morning...for a few years I harboured an ambition to make a return expedition. Fortunately this idea went away. It needed money!"

Looking across an ocean of summits towards the highest, K2, from the north ridge of K12. Jon wrote that he could see the curvature of the earth from his vantage point. Photo: Jon Stephenson

Looking north from K12 to the towering Saltoro Kangri (7742 metres) above the Bilafond (Butterfly) Glacier, used by the expedition team to access its tributary, the Grachmo Glacier. Photo: Jon Stephenson.

Jon Stephenson had climbed to 7000 metres and with no supplementary oxygen - the first Australian to do so. It was 6 July, 1960, the same day that an American duo, George Irving Bell and Willi Unsoeld, made the first ascent of nearby Masherbrum (7821 metres). 

Jon later established the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in North Queensland and worked there as Professor of Geology 1970-1995. He was amongst the first to warn of the dangers of climate change based on his extensive scientific exploration and research over decades. He died aged 80 in Townsville on 24 May,  2011.

Many thanks to Peter Barnes for this historic material.

About The Living Rock...

 The Dugandan -- 1998

(from left) Bryden Cais, Greg Sheard, Ian Thomas, Paula McCall (partly obscured), unknown, Celia and Chris Thompson, Wendy Steele (at end of table), Scott Stewart, Trish Hindmarsh, Keith Harper, Carola Henley and Ted Cais. Photo: Michael Meadows

THIS JOURNEY into Australian rockclimbing history began (above) on a warm Winter's afternoon in 1998 at the Dugandan Hotel, near Boonah. I was sitting around a table on the veranda of the pub with a group of friends, climbers, young and old. My school friends Greg Sheard and Ian Thomas were there as was Ted Cais with his son, Bryden. Ted and Bryden were visiting for another stint of climbing at nearby Frog Buttress from Ted's new home in the United States. Greg tossed a copy of Rick White's original climbing guide to the crag onto the table and the young climbers present pored over it as if it was the Holy Grail. It was clear that they valued this moment and the apparently insignificant, hand-stapled collection of words and images. It may have been at that moment that I realised that it was far more than a rockclimbing guide: it represented a historical moment in the origins of climbing in Queensland -- and beyond.

A defining feature of many of the crags that have become so attractive to climbers in Queensland and elsewhere in Australia is the presence of vegetation in multifarious forms — from the smallest algae and lichen to tenacious shrubs and even large trees. This ‘living rock’ is a central feature of Queensland climbing, particularly on the low-angled cliffs where Queensland climbing culture was invented. It is ‘living rock’ in another sense as well, defining the relationship between climbers and the vertical world we temporarily inhabit.

 
Mountaineer and former Italian Vice-Consul in Brisbane in the early postwar period, Felice Benuzzi, identified an element of this ‘Australian-ness’ in his vivid descriptions of climbing and the environment in the Glass House Mountains, north of the city. Felice had contacted the inimitable ‘spiritual father’ of Queensland climbing, Bert Salmon, who took the diplomat on several ascents in southeast Queensland in 1952. Following a climb up Caves Route on Tibrogargan, Felice and Bert were walking back to their car through a forest of Eucalypts. Oblivious to 60,000 years of Indigenous culture, the Italian diplomat mused on the Australian environment:

The huge smooth trunks of the trees don’t recall images of cathedrals or columns of ancient temples, even though the colour could perhaps evoke something like marble and travertine. The thought repudiates such comparisons. They just don’t hold up. They’re out of key in this world that seems lacking in history. Yet Bertie, who was born and who has lived here, doesn’t seem to feel this sense of vacuum, of emptiness; this lack of something that is so difficult to express. I don’t dare to confess to him my thoughts for fear of offending him. He loves this forest; he loves this Australia with a devotion of a son.

This particularly Eurocentric attitude was commonplace in 1950s Australia and yet it lingers today. Every aspect of landscape was inscribed into Indigenous cultures eons before First Nations people ‘discovered’ Europeans. Some have suggested that it is this unique, rich cultural heritage that should influence how we ‘imagine’ our own idea of climbing in Australia. It is anything but the ‘sense of vacuum’ that Felice Benuzzi described albeit this parallel world remains largely invisible to most non-Indigenous Australians. 

In the early 1990s, an influential figure in Australian rockclimbing history, John Ewbank, evoked the spiritual relationship between people and landscape by drawing on Indigenous concepts. He argued that the elements that make a particular location ‘sacred’ for Indigenous people — ritual, belief and tradition — should also be central to understanding Australian rockclimbing culture. While acknowledging the clear differences in interpretation and meaning between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cosmologies, he suggests an analogy: that the act of climbing can be seen as ‘turning a piece of rock into a sacred site’ and ‘it is then that we superimpose special values on it, even if these values are comprehensible only to other climbers’. He concludes:

I think it is becoming increasingly important for climbers to see cliffs and mountains within the context of a broader landscape and to realise that these outcrops, these ‘bones of the planet’ are already sacred, just as they are to many people other than climbers. 

Sadly, ignorance and/or denial of a history of Indigenous custodianship of places that include climbing destinations has skewed recent public debate around access to crags. The ‘loudest voices’ seem to ignore the undeniable Indigenous heritage that has resulted in these places being preserved for our enjoyment. For some, it seems, less a century of regular climbing activity can override 60,000 years of Indigenous history. 

But apart from a lack of engagement with this philosophical question, a majority of climbers who have railed against restrictions on access to ‘their’ crags do not seem to understand that it is Australian law that they are now challenging. The 1992 High Court Mabo decision effectively destroyed the legal fiction that Australia was an empty land — terra nullius — at the time of European invasion in 1788. The High Court decision — ratified in 1993 by the Australian Parliament — set up a framework for Indigenous land to be returned to the original custodians — in effect, a cohort of an estimated 250 different ‘countries’ (with 500 separate languages) at the time of European invasion. Despite popular media misrepresentations of the Native Title Act as some sort of ‘land grab’, the legislation was designed primarily to protect non-Indigenous property rights. In fact, the ‘land grab’ occurred at the time of European invasion and settlement.

Native Title claims are limited to vacant Crown land, waterways, and parks and reserves — and it is the latter that has created conflict with some members of the climbing community because it is where most climbing cliffs are found. It has taken decades, in some cases, for Indigenous people whose communities and economic structures were disrupted and destroyed by European invasion and settlement, to gather sufficient evidence to make a Native Title claim over a particular country — or what’s left of it. Once a claim is proven, under Australian law, the identified Traditional Owners have the right to maintain and protect sites, to use the land for hunting or ceremony, camp and live there, share in any proceeds generated by development of the land, and to have a say in land management and development.

This historical and legal context seems largely absent from the online climbing community discussions in recent years. What most don’t seem to understand that it is not ‘our’ land — it is Aboriginal land and the 1993 Native Title Act has inscribed that into Australian law. We have been trespassing — albeit for many, unwittingly — on Aboriginal land from the time the first Europeans began seeking out the heights. But the world has changed and as climbers, we must change with it and respect the rights of the Traditional Owners — and Australian law. 

Interestingly, there have been several instances of climbing cliffs developed on private land around the country — at least two in Queensland alone — where the owners have subsequently closed them down, refusing all access, mainly because of bad behaviour (loud voices, swearing, gates left open etc). Strangely, there have been no public outcries by climbers about these imposed restrictions to ‘save our summits’. Why not? Because we acknowledge private land ownership laws. Similarly, restrictions on climbing to iconic summits like Uluru and Balls Pyramid have largely been accepted — so why don’t we afford the same degree of respect and acceptance to Native Title holders who now have the same legal rights under the Native Title Act? 

On another level, sport climbing and its associated activities — placing bolts and the use of chalk — seems to have done a very good job of attracting unwanted attention by leaving permanent and semi-permanent markers on the landscape. To non-climbers — and the handful of those who have eschewed the use of these climbing ‘aids’ outdoors — it is evidence of disrespect, little different from defacing scenic areas with graffiti. Is this how climbers demonstrate ‘care’ for the environment? I have often wondered whether we would be even dealing with such issues now if the use of bolts and chalk — I am hopeful that wisdom, knowledge and good sense will prevail and that climbers and Traditional Owners will reach a compromise through genuine negotiation rather than confrontation or litigation to enable us all to share this amazing country by respecting these priceless resources. It is precisely this unique cultural heritage that sets Australian climbing culture apart from the rest of the world. So why not enlist Traditional Owners or their representatives to share creation stories of the places we visit; involve local Indigenous communities in existing (or new) climbing education and training activities and in the business structures that profit from access to these special areas; or incorporate local Indigenous cultures into climbing guides? 

We can do do better than we have done thus far. A lot better.