The 1st ascent of East Crookneck

Ron Cox began his epic on a biting, cold winter’s day in June 1959. With Pat Conaghan belaying, he slowly and carefully put into practice double rope and etrier techniques they had read about in books. Using homemade pitons, he managed to climb just 10 metres the first weekend. On the next attempt he reached the first stance, 20 metres above the base. And so it continued for the next three months until Cox decided that a team of three strong climbers would be needed to complete the route in one single push. He asked John Comino to join Conaghan (pictured left) and himself and on 18 September 1959, the three sorted out their gear at the base of the climb. Three hours after starting up the climb, Cox had reached the Eagle’s Eyrie—the second stance. They had decided to bivouac here but it soon became clear that there was room for only two. As Cox and Comino settled in for the night 50 metres above, Conaghan nestled into a cave at the base of the climb directly below, sheltering from the heavy rain squalls that swept across the mountain during the night. It was a late start next day and the three eventually scrambled onto the summit in darkness. Their entry in the log book read: ‘First ascent East Crookneck—8^th attempt—40 pitons, 7 wooden wedges—last man up at 8.30 pm.’ The homemade wooden wedges and pitons Cox had placed deep in the crack remained there for years, protected from the weather by the overhangs. It was the steepest and most difficult climb in Queensland, albeit employing liberal use of aid. Ironically, it reflected the siege tactics that had already begun to emerge on the big walls in Yosemite, as well as offering a prescient glimpse of tactics now de rigueur for the hardest new routes, particularly in sport climbing. It marked the beginning of a new era in Australian climbing, not only for the way in which it was climbed, but for the vision it represented. It was the first sustained use of double rope and aid techniques in Queensland—probably Australia—literally learned from books. Cox and his cohort were interested in the existing climbing routes, but they were more concerned with what lay beyond. From the beginning, it was clear that Cox was drawn more towards mountaineering than rockclimbing and within 12 months of his success on East Crookneck, he was testing these skills—again based on what he had read.

Picture: Ron Cox collection.

Pushing the limits

As Cliff Richard and the Shadows burst upon the popular music scene, university physics student Ron Cox launched a three-month siege on a spectacular crack on the imposing east face of Crookneck in the Glasshouses. In doing so, perhaps inadvertently, he set up a template for the development of the next stage of modern Queensland rockclimbing. Formed in a huge rockfall in 1893, East Crookneck is perhaps the most attractive and purest line of any climb in Queensland. It starts from the base of the mountain, weaving through a series of balancing, truncated trachyte columns to the first stance, nestled at the base of a deep, overhanging chimney. The route continues up, with wide bridging moves needed to negate the effect of the relentless overhangs. A final bell-shaped overhang demands a series of delicate, exposed, balance moves to reach the safety of the second stance. A stone dropped from this point lands about three metres out from the base. Climbers in the early 1950s had nicknamed this stance the Eagles Eyrie and had abseiled down to it—and climbed up from it—several times during their early exploration of the route. From the Eagles Eyrie, a short, easier pitch leads to the shoulder below the summit. Every climber in Queensland had mentally climbed the route but none had actually done it. Bob Waring and Jim Gadaloff had first abseiled down the 70 metre face in October 1950 (pictured above). John Comino had made a half-hearted attempt at climbing the first pitch around 1954 and had earlier abseiled down to the Eagles Eyrie. But the full route—particularly the savagely overhanging middle pitch—had never been climbed. Perhaps that was the challenge Ron Cox needed.

Picture: Bob Waring collection.

First Australian at the South Pole

While his former climbing partners grappled with the heat of a 1956 Queensland summer, Jon Stephenson (pictured) was about to start the journey of a lifetime. He had left for Antarctica from London in November that year, three days after finishing his PhD thesis on the geology of Mt Barney. In December 1957, he set out with colleague Ken Blaiklock to cross Antarctica with a dog team. They reached the South Pole on 19 January 1958.
On his return from Antarctica, Stephenson then led a 3-month expedition in 1960 to the Karakoram in Pakistan. After having collected a range of scientific data, Stephenson contemplated a possible attempt on K12 (7428m). He was awestruck by the surrounds as he explained in a letter to Bert Salmon: ‘This is quite fantastic country and surely the most thrilling in the world. Never have I dreamt of such magnificence on such a scale—it is astounding. Granite rock with spires and needles to rival Chamonix.’ The party set up Camp II and began searching for a route up the ridge, finding a crevasse barring their way—40 metres wide and 30 metres deep. Another Queensland climber on the expedition, Keith Miller, described the scene:

The chasm was spectacular. Never in my life have I seen such a place. Often it was necessary to climb between great slabs of ice as though pot-holing. The skyline silhouetted giant icicles 20 ft. long some 100 ft. above one’s head, just waiting to drop off. Twenty minutes down there was enough to find an escape route out up to the other side and many prayers were offered.

The wind raged for the next three days and they were tentbound. They deciding to retreat to base camp but first, Miller and Stephenson would ‘have a quick look at the ridge and try to reach the summit’. Miller continues:

What an abortive attempt we made. Within five minutes of leaving camp we were swallowed up in cloud. Then came a white-out in which it was impossible to discern the demarcation between ground and atmospheres. At this time we were advancing along a steep ridge when suddenly Stephenson walked over the edge and simultaneously I went through an ice hole. When we extracted ourselves we quickly descended to camp to be greeted by, “That was a quick excursion to the top!”

On the descent, Miller was struck by a block of falling ice and required hospitalization. Stephenson and a porter were the only ones fit enough to make one last summit attempt. But shortly before they were due to leave their high camp, the porter, too, fell ill. Stephenson decided to climb on alone:

The view was just extraordinary—and it kept getting better as you got higher. I couldn’t believe it. You just started to see further and further—you could see that horizon wasn’t flat, it was curved. And there was K2 and the other high peaks I could recognise…I got as far as I could and I sensed that I was going more and more slowly. You get to the point where I was counting my steps and I could only do 20 steps and then I’d have to rest. I could see how far I had to go and I judged that I’d be on the summit at five o’clock that night. In the end I took a round of photographs and had no difficulty in saying, “OK, it’s time to turn around.”

Jon Stephenson had reached 7000 metres—the highest point reached at that time by an Australian without supplementary oxygen. It was a record that would stand for many years. An American team on the summit of Masherbrum (7821m) that day for the first time could almost have waved at him. It was the 6 July 1960. Stephenson subsequently returned to Australia as Professor of Geology at James Cook University and spent years climbing and walking on Hinchinbrook Island in the 1980s and 1990s. He climbed Logan’s Ridge on Mt Barney in 2002, aged 71.

Picture: John Comino collection.

The modern Australian climber, circa 1958

By the mid to late 1950s, climbing down under had become ‘an exhilarating and exciting pastime’, according to the magazine Australian Outdoors. One article described ‘the modern Australian climber’ in these terms:

Climbing is a young man’s game and you will find few climbers over 26. The average age seems to be from 16 to 22 but there are exceptions of course. You start by combining bushwalking with rockclimbing and after 26 you grow out of climbing and stick to bushwalking and mountaineering. Basically, the rock climber’s attitude is somewhat immature; it is a search for danger and glory. It is for the excitement of risking your life on a cliff face and the immeasurable self-satisfaction you feel when you reach a point where above you there is only the sky. Above all, rock climbing is character forming. It develops both individuality and mateship, it pits your physical endurance to the highest test, it makes you feel the utter smallness of man in the face of raw nature and makes you humble. It is the best school your son can attend.

The writer seemed oblivious of the presence or achievements of female climbers in the pantheon of Australia’s climbing history—Freda du Faur, Marie Byles, Dot English, Jean Easton, Muriel Patten—not to mention the international achievements by climbers like Elizabeth Le Blond, Annie Peck, Miriam Underhill, Claude Kogan and Gwen Moffat. But it reflected the postwar domination of male membership of climbing clubs in Australia. Whereas in Queensland, at least, women and men climbed in roughly equal numbers before World War II, from the late 1940s, climbing in Australia had become a noticeably male domain. It would half a century before women would return to climbing in numbers equivalent to those active in the 1930s.

Rumblings and the Rhum Dhu

Formation of the Rhum Dhu group within the Sydney Rockclimbing Club (SRC) in 1958 shook the foundations of the New South Wales climbing and bushwalking establishment. Frustrated with the slow pace of the development of climbing—a national trend at the time—Rhum Dhu was formed by disgruntled climbers with three simple aims: disbanding all forms of organization; drinking; and the opening of new climbing areas. The move almost split the SRC but the dissenters were instrumental in opening up new climbing areas like Medlow Bath, Cahill’s Lookout (the Rhum Dhu area), and Sublime Point. Both directly and indirectly, Rhum Dhu influenced the imposition of a six month moratorium on climbing on existing crags to encourage the search for new routes. In these early years of climbing in New South Wales, there were four accidents and two deaths. This was around the time that climbing began in Western Australian where small, scattered groups of enthusiasts began to explore and climb the crags in the southern half of the state.

Geoff Goadby (left) and Alan Frost inside the amazing Shell Rock on the western shoulder of Beerwah, in the Glasshouse Mountains, following their second ascent with Peter Barnes of the West Chimney route, 20 October 1956, a month or so after Alan Frost's first ascent of the route with Dave MacGibbon.

Picture: Peter Barnes collection.

The West Beerwah chimney

Bert Salmon had discovered a huge hollow boulder, perched precariously above Beerwah’s western cliffs in the Glasshouses in the 1930s. He had called it Shell Rock and it had been a popular destination for him and his cohort before World War II. Jon Stephenson ‘re-discovered’ it around 1949 with Clarrie Bell who called it ‘Draper’s Sanctuary’ after he found the name ‘Draper’ carved on the rock inside the cave. It became a popular destination again with the early 1950s climbers. All visits to Shell Rock had been from above: a 150 metre climb or abseil down from the western shoulder of Beerwah. And everyone who climbed around inside the huge shell would have peered down the steep chimney leading up into it from below. Peter Barnes (pictured) recalls: ‘We used to regard it for many, many years as Johnno’s Chimney—Johnno Comino—because he’d been looking at it and wanting to do it for many years and just had never got down to it.’ The climb up West Beerwah starts from the bottom of the western cliffs and meanders for two or three rope lengths over easy rock and through low scrub to where the slope steepens. Two more pitches and you are in a huge chimney that splits the headwall leading to the western shoulder. The next pitch is a steep 50 metre struggle over an awkward bulge, then up a series of cracks, mostly filled with dirt and small trees, reaching the sanctuary of the amazing Shell Rock. The climb to the western shoulder is up a clean 10 metre corner, followed by scrub-bashing to the top. Another who had peered down the exit chimney from the safety of Shell Rock was Alan Frost—and he decided to do something about it. Alan Frost and Peter Barnes were two extraordinarily fit young climbers who blitzed their way around the crags in the southeast since they began climbing at Kangaroo Point in the early 1950s. For some reason, Frost ended up making the first ascent of the route with a relatively inexperienced Dave MacGibbon. Barnes recalls the time, too:

I don’t know how it happened—but he teamed up with David MacGibbon who later became Senator MacGibbon. MacGibbon didn’t do much climbing but liked the thought of climbing. I’d taken him up south Crooky, north Crooky, Minto Crags. I didn’t know he’d done any more climbing than that but the next thing I heard was that he and Alan Frost had done the west chimney of Beerwah and David MacGibbon with him. Alan Frost said it was the most frightening experience of his life so he reckoned it should be done properly. So the boys better go and give it another nudge. He and I and Geoff Goadby screamed up there one day and had a great time.

Both Alan Frost and Peter Barnes are still actively walking and climbing in southeast Queensland and beyond.

Picture: Peter Barnes collection.

Buildings and bridges

From the late 1920s, climbing cultures had emerged in Queensland and New South Wales, but even back then, not all the activity was directed at local crags. Climbers’ attention turned to other obvious challenges—buildings and bridges—and night ascents of various structures around Brisbane and Sydney were commonplace. Climbers here were doing no more than following a long-established international tradition.

The 'Queensland mountaineer'

In 1935, climber-journalist Nora Dimes was a regular contributor to local newspapers, describing climbing activity and local climbers. In one article, she described the ‘Queensland mountaineer’:

He is one whose soul is blent of heights and depths, and in extreme cases his admiration of the tallest and newest buildings in town is confined to the possible hand or footholds on the façade.

Post-war climbers are no different and virtually every major climbable building in the country has fallen, usually under cover of darkness. Brisbane climber Neill Lamb recalls enthusiastic support from ‘accomplices’ Bernice Noonan and Margaret Hammond in the 1950s:

I remember we used to go out and climb the Story Bridge—we’d shoot up after dark. And one day we’d made our own flag and we’d called ourselves The Abominables and so we had this flag sewn up—this great big Abominable Snowman—and we had a lot of fun. We climbed up the bridge and we had a bottle of champagne and we sat on top and put the bloody flag up on the flagpole. Of course, we were all back there next morning at first light to see if the flag was still there.

Another young Brisbane climber, Graham Baines, once spent two days hitch-hiking to Sydney in the mid-1950s specially to climb the Harbour Bridge. He was caught and questioned by police but let off with a warning. He even compiled a 1950s climbing guide to Brisbane’s bridges—including five different routes on the Story Bridge. Amongst his ‘conquests’ were the Glen Innes Town Hall and the Brisbane GPO Clock Tower. He once planned to abseil down the side of the Brisbane City Hall Tower, sticking large footprints on the side as he went. He hid in the bell tower one night with 60 metres of rope wound around his body, under his clothing, but at the last minute, had a change of heart, and gave himself up to the cleaners next morning. The tradition of climbing almost any upright object has continued with Brisbane’s Story Bridge (pictured) and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in particular, having had hundreds of ascents by climbers—always at night to avoid unnecessary attention—and long before either destination became a destination for guided tours.

Politics and police

In the mid-1960s, one of the most popular movies doing the rounds of Australian climbing clubs was a film of top French Alpinists Gaston Rebuffat and Rene Desmaison climbing the Eiffel Tower with gendarmes in hot pursuit! Back in Brisbane in 1968 and 1969, several large politically-inspired signs mysteriously appeared on the sheer face of the MMI Building, at that time, the tallest in Brisbane. It required some ingenuity to devise a belay for Greg Sheard as he gingerly traversed out across a vertical face on small, friable holds to place them. We used a length of wood, cut so we could wedge it in a chimney that runs up beside the face. One of the signs declared ‘QLD—Joh’s police state’, a reference to the then Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his government’s draconian laws prohibiting public assembly. As it turned out, that particular sign was placed directly opposite the windows of a popular commercial radio station and although its presence was discussed openly on air, the content of the sign remained a mystery to listeners, such was the paranoia that existed in the Sunshine State at that time. Another popular climbing destination was a church tower at Toowong before the challenge of climbing as many buildings in Brisbane as possible—again at night—took over. There were some close calls with police and security guards but no-one was ever arrested. During the 1980s and 1990s, police scrutiny of climbing activities around the city has increased and several local climbers have been arrested and fined for trespass following various activities on the city’s bridges. But the challenge remains.

Picture: Hugh Pechey collection.

Reptile

Climber Mike Woodrow on the first pitch of the steep, spectacular route, Reptile, on the Funnel in The Steamers shortly after the first ascent by Bill Peascod, Donn Groom and Neill Lamb in 1956. They named it following 'an incident with a goanna'. The creative route entails climbing 30 metres up a steep rhyolite wall before squeezing through a hole, to be confronted by a steep vertical wall (pictured) with a 50 metre drop below. On the first ascent, their abseil ropes jammed and it took Lamb two days to eventually free them.

Picture: Neill Lamb collection.

The 1st ascent of Boonoo Boonoo Falls

By 1956, climbing was expanding around Australia with activity in Bungonia Gorge, the Wolgan and Capertee Valleys, Lithgow, Frenchman’s Cap, Federation Peak, and the Glasshouses. Kippax returned to the Breadknife in the Warrumbungles climbing the North Arete with Dave Rootes, Jeff Field and Peter Harvey. That year, the first traverse of The Breadknife was done. Further north, Bill Peascod joined with local climbers Donn Groom, Neill Lamb and L Upfold to put up two new routes on the big south face of Beerwah in the Glasshouses—Pilgrim’s Progress and Mopoke Slabs. While Peascod’s influence on local climbing culture in Queensland was clear, several strong local climbers had emerged. Neill Lamb joined with Julie Henry and Frank Theos, starting the year by climbing the 180 metre high Boonoo Boonoo Falls—calling it the Belvedere Route. Lamb recalls the experience:

I remember when we climbed up the side of Boonoo Boonoo Falls, which had never been done, we just did that on the spur of the moment. It wasn’t a hard climb. The waterfall was thundering down one side of you and the holds were just there and the situation was just magnificant. You’re just there in some of these positions and the goose pimples come out…

The 1st ascent of Prometheus II

Neill Lamb, 19, and Graham Baines, 18, joined up with Julie Henry, 38, Bill Peascod, 36, and his young son, Allan to climb an exposed new route on the east face of Tibrogargan, across the top of Cave Four. Baines was climbing last, this time, and recalls events when he reached a stance below a corner above the cave:

I had a clear view of Neill on the wall above, grappling with almost non-existent holds, his toenails curled over and clinging to rugosities on the rock face. He drove in a piton, to which he attached a carabiner to serve as a running belay. This gave him a slight feeling of security but he still could not progress and returned to the stance where Bill was belaying him. Bill moved out across the face to have a go at it. He had the same trouble as Neill and after a long battle, he, too, returned to the belay stance where he rested and thought things over. As yet undefeated, Bill gave it another go and, after poising precariously on the skyline for about ten minutes, he traversed to the left and disappeared from view. The rope moved forward spasmodically and we knew that he was getting somewhere. We heard a piton being driven in. Then a shout. Bill had mastered the pitch.

Lamb followed and it was clear that Peascod’s son, Allan, would not be able to climb it so Peascod lowered some ropes and slings and the young boy was trussed up in a bosun’s chair and literally hauled up the pitch. Julie Henry was next and she soon ran into trouble and was ‘winched’ from above by Lamb and Peascod.

Picture: Neill Lamb on the 1st ascent of Boonoo Boonoo Falls, 1956. Neill Lamb collection.

A leap of Faith

In 1955 in Queensland, Bill Peascod played a key role in influencing a new approach to climbing. Some called it 'a new ethos', seeing climbing as being in tune with the environment rather than seeing it in terms of 'conquering'. Peascod inspired a teenage Neill Lamb to seek out new routes where few had been before and they climbed a new route on the east face of Tibrogargan, calling it Faith. The route started to the left of Caves Route and picked its way up through a series of overhangs. The first attempt by Lamb, Peascod, Hugh Pechey and Julie Henry, early in the year, turned into an epic, with the trio benighted and having to abseil off in the dark. On 21 May, they returned and completed the climb.

Picture: Bill Peascod on the first ascent, Neill Lamb collection.

Bill Peascod addressing a climbing training session at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, 1955, with an impressive array of carabiners and pitons.

Picture: Neill Lamb collection.

The Tigers' rule

Bill Peascod emigrated to Australia in 1952 but climbing was far from his mind at the time. From 1938, he had put up numerous new routes in the Lake District with partner Bill Beck. His most famous route is Eagle Front, ‘500 feet of exploration up and across and again up the face of the biggest mountain cliff in England’. Peascod considered himself and a contemporary, one of a new breed of British climber, not drawn from the middle classes. He recalled: ‘I had come onto the scene before [Joe] Brown and the Rock and Ice, remember. [Jim] Birkett and I—the quarryman and the miner—we were the first of the working class climbers.’ In those days, it was virtually impossible to make a living from climbing and disillusioned with the bleak future ahead of him in England, Peascod emigrated. He would spend 28 years in Australia, developing his skills as an artist. Peascod was from the school of climbing where any form of belaying was unreliable. He and his generation operated on a simple principle known as the Tiger’s Rule: ‘The rule was simple. Never fall off and I never did; well, hardly ever did,’ he recalled when in his early 60s. By then—1982—he felt climbing had become ‘sort of pasteurised’.

The Warrumbungles

Within two years of his arrival in Australia, Peascod’s passion for climbing re-surfaced. He started a rockclimbing group in Woollongong around 1954, using cliffs at Bulli, and he heard about the Sydney Rockclimbing Club. Sydney Rockclimbing Club co-founder Russ Kippax recalls he had just returned from 12 months’ climbing in New Zealand:

Somehow I got in contact with Bill Peascod or he got in contact with me—I forget now how exactly that happened. I’d heard about the Warrumbungles and suggested that we go and have a climb there. We spent a week up there; knocked off all the climbs. Well, Dark and his crowd had already been onto Split Rock [Crater Bluff], of course, but we put up two climbs on that, one of which is now totally forgotten and the other is almost forgotten, although I believe they’re now
repeating it, so that’s quite good. And of course, the Breadknife was totally unclaimed at that time and a couple of other climbs roundabout we tried and a few we failed on. We had a good week; it was a marvellous week.

One of the first climbs they tried was on Tonduron: up the nose and without protection—it was doomed. Kippax continues: ‘Bill was leading and he said: “Well at the moment I’m standing on an inverted pyramid of rocks, loose rocks, clutching onto a clump of grass, my left foot is waving in the air and my right hand is thrutching around—I’m coming down.”’ They eventually climbed a corner to the top and then moved across to Crater Bluff, making an attempt on what is known today as Cornerstone Rib:

We tried to get up this rib but we couldn’t get any pro; we couldn’t make a belay so we came down and went up over here which is now called Vintage Rib. Fairly early in the piece, Bill said, “I’m a crack and chimney man and by looking at you, you’re a wall man,” which I was, so he took all the cracks and chimneys—in some of them you could just lift out the handholds—and I took the walls.

Following their success on Crater Bluff in August, they returned the following month and turned their attention to The Breadknife, as yet unclimbed. Peascod led the first pitch, belayed Kippax to the first stance and he led through to the top—making the first ascent of the South Arete. Peascod climbed with his own makeshift harness—a single strand of rope around his waist linked by a carabiner to a shoulder loop. He always wore a trademark white floppy washing hat. Peascod brought with him a rarity in Australia at that time—a pair of Pierre Allain friction boots or PAs. On one particularly sodden ascent he made in England in 1942, Peascod famously took off his socks and put them on over his boots to negotiate some slippery rock—possibly the first use of that technique in postwar England. After his Warrumbungles’ experience with Peascod, Kippax drifted away from rockclimbing and into caving, returning to the crags in the early 1960s.

Picture: Bill Peascod on 1st ascent of the Breadknife. Russ Kippax collection.

Climbing with 'the spiritual father'

The following edited account was published in the Italian Alpine Club journal, Lo Scarpone, in 1953. It is written by the former Italian Consul in Brisbane, Felice Benuzzi, a climber and author, who here describes his climbs in the Glasshouses with Bert Salmon in 1950. The translantion is by Dr Claire Kennedy of Griffith University.

Sea travellers who leave Brisbane with its flowering gardens, and Moreton Bay, infested with sharks, and turn north once at sea will see rising out of the mainland on the left a series of 10 very strange peaks, each one separate from the other. Captain Cook, who was the first European to see them about 200 years ago, called them the Glass House Mountains because they brought to his mind the outlines of glass houses in Yorkshire. I have never visited the glass factories in Yorkshire and I don’t know why they have such a curious form. These peaks that burst into the sky from the plain—one here, one there, as if by a very peculiar caprice on nature’s part—are different in form and height but none is higher than 500 metres. Beerwah, the highest and the easiest, has a pyramid shape with a rounded-off peak like a kind of crooked beret and vaguely resembles the Antelao.

‘Pity’, says Bertie, ‘that it’s not 2000 metres higher. What a beautiful mountain we would have close to the city. And up there, wouldn’t a little glacier be at home?’

‘I agree’, I answer, ‘but what would the pineapple growers have to say about having a glacier flowing under their feet. They’d have to change their trade.’

As the car travels along the road through a monotonous forest of eucalypts, we can see the other peaks. The nearest one is Tibrogargan—massive and round with red-brown rock in the first rays of the Spring sunshine. And further on, the absurd Coonowrin or Crookneck, that rises up from a conical base to look like the bell tower in the Campanile di Val Montanaia in the Dolomites. Bertie knows all these mountains like his own pockets. He’s been coming here for 30 years, off and on, in good weather and bad, and has explored all the faces. He’s bivouacked under the sheer cliffs and has taken up hundreds of young climbers in south Queensland who see him as an expert and lovable guide—a kind of spiritual father.

‘How is it,’ he said to me when I met him, ‘that you’ve been in Brisbane for almost a year and with your passion for mountains you haven’t yet been on the Glass House Mountains?’

‘I was waiting to go there with Bertie Salmon,’ I replied. ‘And now here we are.’

[…]

We arrive at the face of the virgin east wall of Crookneck that from close-up, looks like the petrified spray of a giant fountain. The layers fanning out reinfoirce this impression. It’s not stuff for our teeth—at least not today. The shadows are longer when we start climbing the usual route from the south. Spiny bushes sting our hands and the rock is crumbly. Bertie suggests a more interesting and direct variant where I realise very quickly that I am out of condition. The last time I touched rock was a year and a half ago at the rockclimbing school at Fountainbleu. ‘Damn old age!’ I stammer in Italian. In anger, I throw away into the empty air the holds that come off in my hand one by one. Bertie laughs and I have to draw on all of my national pride to keep up with the agile and thin Australian 50-year-old. The wall of the so-called variant is no higher than 25 metres and soon we are again on the usual route that takes us easily to the crest, free of vegetation, and onto the summit marked by a trigonometric structure visible from below.

The sun setting in a cloudless sky illuminates an enchanted panorama of nearby peaks with their strange Aboriginal names with meanings unknown even to Bertie—Tibrogargan, Beerwah, Ngungun, Tunbubudula Twins, Ewan, Miketeebumulgrai. Who knows? Maybe the Aborigines had legends and traditions linked to these mountains? But who would know them? They stand on a vast plain, covered by dense forest, interrupted here and there by cultivations of pineapples and the distant Pacific, now the colour of lead. Bertie extracts the summit log book from its cover and passes it to me. I open it curiously. What do these mountains say to those who were born and who grew up in this land?

On the first page there’s a memoir of the first climber, Henry Mikalsen in 1910, and a newspaper cutting of the time that describes that victory, that climb, in ingenuous and picturesque words. In the following pages I find the signature of my companion at least 20 times. Many are nocturnal ascents by the light of the moon via the usual route from the south; not many climbs from the west; and those from the north you can count on one hand. At least there are not those political references that abound in our summit log books and refuge books. There’s no ‘viva o morte’ [‘long live…’ or ‘death to…’]. Blessed Australia! But the usual stupidities confirm for me that humanity in the antipodes is not so different from those in the Alps or the Apennines. ‘We are the three musketeers’, write three young people. ‘If you want trouble, come to us!’ And their signatures and addresses follow. Two young immigrants apologise if they’re not yet able to express themselves in English and describe their enthusiasm in moving tones of German. No Italian names.

The sun is close to setting as we descend by the north face. Here, according to the summit log book, a solitary climber, thinking he was grasping a piece of jutting rock, instead grabbed the tail of a carpet snake—not a poisonous snake, fortunately, but eight feet long. Only at one point it is a bit delicate and we have to use the rope and after a brief but enjoyable climb we are at the base. The forest is quieter than ever now. The sky has become the purest colour of apricot. From a farm we can hear a woman singing as coming from another world. When we get to the car, in the infinitely clear night sky, the Milky Way blazes like the whoosh of a cold flame.

Alan Frost, Jon Stephenson, Geoff Goadby and Peter Barnes: 1st ascent of Glennies Pulpit in the Fassifern valley, 1954.

The climb was to farewell Stephenson who left to study in London a short time later. Peter Barnes, Geoff Goadby and Jon Stephenson established the first regular climbing routes on the lower cliff at Kangaroo Point in the area around the present day Cox’s Buttress. This core group of climbers were passionate about climbing and their experiences on the peaks of southeast Queensland. It was nothing for them to drop everything and jump on a motorbike and head out to the crags, almost regardless of the time. This extract from Peter Barnes’ diary captures something of the climbing culture that drew these young adventurers together:

Being a most glorious night and a full moon, Peter Marendy and I decided to ‘do’ Crooky. Just before we left at 8 pm, Tom Waters (who had never before had climbed a mountain) decided to come too. Set off on T’s 100 and made Glasshouse at 9.15 pm. Pulled up past Murphy’s and arrived at summit at 10.10 pm. Tom crossed the ledge without any trouble or hesitation at all, both on the way up and down. Scene was as lovely as ever…Saw 2 paddy melons in the track before Murphy’s. Arrived back 12.45 am.

Picture: Peter Barnes collection.

Jon Stephenson takes in the Hinchinbrook Island panorama en route to the 1st ascent of The Thumb on Mt Bowen, January 1953.
Picture: John Comino collection.

Hinchinbrook Is: the 1st ascent of The Thumb, 1953

One of the last sought-after unclimbed summits in Australia in 1952 lay just off the north Queensland coast on Hinchinbrook Island—the Thumb, a granite monolith high on a ridge of the Mt Bowen massif. In August that year, John Bechervaise led a team of schoolboys to the island on an Australian Geographical Society-sponsored trip, reaching 100 metres below the summit. In January 1953, a team from the University of Queensland Bushwalking Club stepped off the train at Ingham with the prize firmly fixed in their eye—Jon Stephenson, John Comino, Geoff Broadbent, Dave Stewart and Ian McLeod (pictured). Taking advantage of the track cut by the Bechervaise expedition, they made fast time and were soon confronted by the last great problem—climbing the cliff leading to the top of the Thumb. John Comino recalls:

I was going to take a flying leap at it but they said, “No! No! Don’t be silly”, or something. And dissuaded me from jumping across. It was about [1.5 metres] away and dropped away to nothing but I reckon I could have taken a running jump…woomph!…and stuck. I suppose that would have been foolish but I was quite confident I could do it, so I expected I would have. They dissuaded me from doing that. So we went around to the left…We must have had a rope because I helped the others up. It was a very open chimney, if that. A bit of muck had to scraped away and some vegetation. I ended up standing on Steve’s [Jon Stephenson’s] shoulders and getting the rubbish scraped away. It was fairly easy but required a little bit of gymnastics.

Once above the first difficult section of the cliff, Comino recalls they could see the summit looming above them in the sweltering tropical sky:

From here there proved to be an easy climb, without packs, to the top of the Thumb, and a cairn was built and capped with a three inch diameter quartz crystal we found lower down the ridge and brought up for just such an occasion. A magnificent view to the south stretched before us, down to Zoe Bay, flanked by its lush green low lying jungle, dissected by clear streams, and bordered by drowned mountain ranges.

And a feeling of exultation on top? ‘Nuh!’ Comino admitted, ‘we just wanted to drink some water!’ Within a few days, they got their wish with the arrival of the ‘wet’ and found themselves wading through swollen creeks as they made their way back to the ferry pick-up point, looking over their shoulders for floating logs with sets of eyes in them.

Picture: John Comino collection.

Victorians make their mark

Southwest Tasmania's Federation Peak was again the focus of climbing activity in 1952 when John Young, Joan King, Brian Wells, Burnie Rymer from the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club (MUMC) climbed what became known as the MUMC Route, probably the hardest and most serious rockclimb in the country at that time. The formation of the MUMC by Thomas Cherry, Graham Laver and Eric Webb in 1944 is regarded by many as the formal start of climbing in Victoria. As the MUMC team grappled with the weather and steep rock on Federation Peak in Tasmania, a member of an Australian Museum expedition to central Australia, N. J. Camps, donned sandshoes for a solo climb-and probably the first European ascent of Uluru, losing four fingernails on one hand as he lunged for a crucial hold. Climbing in Victoria was becoming more popular and the Victorian Climbing Club (VCC) formed by Peter Crohn and John Young in 1952 with members making first ascents of routes in the Grampians that year. In the early years, there was a considerable crossover in membership between the VCC and the MUMC.

Picture: Donn Groom collection.

Reds under the beds

Sometime in the early part of 1951, a special Brisbane Climbing Club meeting was called and Dr Freddie Whitehouse, a respected lecturer in geology from the University of Queensland, was billed as the guest speaker. Whitehouse had already made a name for himself as a climber around southeast Queensland but as soon as he rose to speak, it was clear he had an agenda which had little to do with climbing. This was the era when Federal politics in Australia—as in many other countries—was dominated by anti-communism and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies had done his bit to create an atmosphere of near-paranoia about communist infiltration of Australian institutions—even bedrooms! In this ‘Reds under the beds’ atmosphere, universities came under particular scrutiny because of the likelihood of them becoming a breeding ground for ‘leftish’ and ‘pro-communist’ views. The accounts of Whitehouse’s speech that evening vary considerably but what is consistent in the recollections is that he made explicit links between communism and climbing. His target was the founder of the Brisbane Climbing Club, Kemp Fowler, who had been questioned by customs officers on his arrival in Australia for possession of ‘leftish’ literature. Several climbers from that era have suggested that Whitehouse had close links to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and learned of Fowler’s suspect political affiliations through these. Some have even suggested that Whitehouse was an ASIO agent! Others suggest it was Bert Salmon, a staunch monarchist, who raised the alarm. Whatever the trigger, Whitehouse’s challenge for climbers was to choose to align themselves either with King and Country or with the forces of darkness. Fowler was one of the world experts in radar technology and this may have brought him to the attention of the authorities as well. The present global political climate has some curious parallels with the environment more than 50 years ago. But the aim was to expel Kemp Fowler, a suspected communist. A lively debate ensued and what had become a group of close friends, was suddenly divided. Comino recalls the evening:

The basis of it was, as Freddie [Whitehouse] said, if…the country’s being infiltrated by “Reds” and you’re climbing with someone who’s a communist trying to bring about your downfall somehow or other, then you can’t have complete confidence in the person you’re climbing with…Well, that was the philosophy—that was the tale we were given, anyway.

Following the debate, Kemp Fowler stormed out of the meeting followed by a group of his supporters. It was the last meeting of the Brisbane Climbing Club, barely 12 months after it had started. Although the contrived political situation caused some established friendships to remain tense for years, in the end, climbing was the catalyst that brought people back together again. There must be few, if any, other examples anywhere of a climbing club being effectively shut down because of the political persuasion of its founder. They were heady days indeed.

More ascents in the Steamers

Two weeks after his first ascent in August 1950 of the Mast in the Steamer formation, Bob Waring returned for a third time with the founder of the Brisbane Climbing Club, former New Zealand mountaineer Kemp Fowler. Their goal was the first ascent of the Funnel and he was still chasing the reputed 100 pounds reward. The duo slept in a cave about a hundred metres from a huge flake they intended to climb to the summit. It rained during the night and at 6.00 am on 2 December under an overcast sky, they started their climb. Waring led confidently up to a large ledge at the top of the flake and Fowler came up to belay him on the next pitch. Jon Stephenson later described their route:

The overhang directly above the ledge proved impracticable, and Waring was forced to make an exposed traverse of thirty feet followed by a strenuous sixty feet of vertical work, and thus reached the first belay point on this severe pitch—a small gum tree. This manoeuvre required almost all their one hundred and twenty feet of rope, and took an hour and a half. But the problem was solved, and from a timbered step, a careful scramble, heightened by a close experience
with a falling rock, took them to the flat summit area, more extensive than that of the Mast.

At the time, it would have been amongst the hardest climbing routes in Australia. But Waring was not yet content as one more summit in the Steamer formation remained unclimbed—the Pinnacle. This spire is about half the height of the Mast and is separated from it by a narrow crevice, 30 metres deep. He returned two years later with John Comino and the pair began by climbing a 30 metre pitch (pictured above), unroped, up the north face to the foot of the crevice separating the Pinnacle from the Mast. ‘Thence a traverse, followed by a difficult set of pitches—some verging on the severe—brought the climbers to the last virgin summit.’ Waring recalls an incident in the crevice which almost led to his demise:

A large rock wallaby came bounding along the narrow traverse ledge and landed at high speed directly on my right thigh, almost knocking me off into space, then slammed away again onto some small ledges and disappeared. A second, smaller one, presumably a female, which was following, then arrived from the same direction, but just leaped into the 80 foot drop down into the scrub below. We did not think this was a very good start for the climb.

However, Comino, who was watching the presumed dead animal, was stunned to see it get to its feet after several minutes and bound off, apparently uninjured. Despite his three first ascents of the Steamer formation, Bob Waring and his several companions never received the promised 100 pounds reward.

Picture: John Comino collection.

The Steamers from the air.

The formation is named because of its resemblance to a boat sailing west. From left, the features are the Prow, Funnel, Mast, Pinnacle and Stern.

Picture: Michael Meadows collection.

First ascents in The Steamers

Towards the end of August 1950, Queensland climbers Bob Waring and Jon Stephenson set off to climb the first new route in Queensland since Bert Salmon and Cliff Wilson made the first descent of the West Face of Crookneck in 1934. Their destination was a series of rhyolite outcrops in the Main Range near Killarney, southwest of Brisbane, called The Steamers. Waring had developed a reputation for being equally daring either climbing a cliff face or riding his Norton motorbike. Some years after leaving Queensland, he entered a motorcycle TT race around the Isle of Mann and was shattered when he was forced to withdraw with mechanical problems! But back in Queensland in 1950, there was a new challenge for Waring, as he recalled:

The next challenge arose from the rumours that a prize of a hundred pounds had been offered in the previous century by the Emu creek sawmill for the first ascents of the Steamers, and was never claimed. This encouraged Jon Stephenson and I to plan an assault on the Mast, considered the easier one of the three. A few weeks later, carrying my new 3/4" sisal rope and mounted on my 1941 unsprung Model 18 Norton, we rattled up to Warwick and turned left for Emu Creek. Some hours later, after many creek crossings, mostly of the wet variety, we staggered into an abandoned loggers hut, and the following morning proceeded up to its western end. To make any progress this required throwing our ropes down top of the dense scrub and walking on them, as we approached the rock walls from the shaded south side.

Jon Stephenson remembers Waring as a ‘somewhat radical’ engineering student and takes up the story:

One of his youthful pastimes had been climbing trees, and he had amazing agility on cliffs and seemed to be quite unaware of exposure. No one seemed to have climbed the Steamers, including the Mast and the Funnel. So we went up on Bob's motorbike for 2 days. We swarmed up to the Mast, and Bob (pictured above) proceeded to climb to the top at great speed up the west buttress. I followed and felt concern as I got higher. I had an incident with a loose slab but eventually got to the summit to join Bob. I had a rope and he protected me coming down. I recall we startled a rock wallaby which sprang off to its death. In the afternoon we had a look at the Funnel, using a great rock flake with a chimney behind it, north and west of the huge east buttress. At the top of the flake, Bob started traversing along a ledge to the west and believed he could see a good route ahead around the corner. I’d had enough after my scare on the Mast. I seem to recall urging Bob to make a second visit to protect himself with a companion. We returned to Brisbane on the bike.

Picture: Bob Waring on the summit of The Mast, 1st ascent 1950. Bob Waring collection.

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.

Climbing in the 1950s

The only type of rope readily available as a climbing aid during the 1950s and early 1960s was Australian sisal but it was unreliable in holding a lead fall. It cost about three shillings (about 30 cents) for 10 ft (about 3 metres). Although nylon ropes were adopted as the international standard shortly at this time, it was almost a decade before synthetic rope was readily available in Australia over the counter. Until then, climbers obtained nylon ropes from visitors or ordered them from overseas suppliers at great expense. But underlining all of the advice provided for members was the principle that the leader must not fall. It had influenced climbing in Australia to this point and it would be a decade or more before equipment advances and climbing attitudes shifted to accept the principle that a lead climber can fall safely. In the 1950s, it was simply out of the question. A fall by a lead climber would almost certainly result in serious injury or death.

The Brisbane Climbing Club 1950

In April 1950, the Brisbane Climbing Club was started by climbers in the Brisbane Bush Walkers Club (set up in 1948), and the University of Queensland Bushwalking Club (formed in 1950 by Jon Stephenson and John Comino). It was the first climbing organisation in Queensland since Bert Salmon’s group started it all in 1926 but it was destined to be a short-lived affair. Brisbane Climbing Club outings with new members (pictured above) were very much in the vein of Bert Salmon’s climbs before the war—large groups on well-trodden paths. But individual members would soon change that.

Picture: Peter Barnes collection.

Federation Peak

One of the few remaining unclimbed summits in Australia, Federation Peak in southwest Tasmania, became the focus of postwar attention in the south. As early as 1946, Tasmanian Bill Jackson had attempted to reach the top and on a second attempt in January 1947 with Leo Luckman, got to within 60 metres of the summit. Carrying no rope, they were forced to turn back in bad weather. It was left to a team from Geelong College in Victoria—Bill Elliot, Fred Elliot, and Allan Rogers, led by John Bechervaise—to reach the summit on 27 January 1949 by what is now called the Bechervaise Gully. The team completed their ascent during a spell of perfect weather, climbing a chimney on the southeastern face. Bechervaise described the climb:

For the first one hundred and twenty feet there was a long lead with an awkward step out of a “sentry- box” across a sloping slab, but safety of the party was assured by a “running belay” through a chock-stone wedged deep in a crack. Above this there is the first good stance, after which a slight overhang must be negotiated within sixty feet or so. This is fairly strenuous. After this, the climb becomes much less difficult and a very steep gulch, amply provided with holds, leads, in about four hundred feet, to the summit.

The first woman to climb the peak was Shirley Ward, who led a team to the top the following year. Bechervaise went on to become a distinguished Antarctic explorer, as well as a consultant to the Australian outdoors magazine, Walkabout.

Picture: Len Brazall on a gendarme near the summit of Federation Peak in 1953. Jon Stephenson collection.

Geoff Goadby on the steep, loose east face of Mt Warning in 1949. This was his second ascent of the face with Raoul Mellish and Reg Ballard. Drawing on his yachting experiences, Goadby was instrumental in introducing the use of ropes for climbing in post-war Queensland.

Picture: Raoul Mellish collection.

The Waring ledge

Brisbane-based Bob Waring had climbed Mt Barney several times by 1949 and his friend Jon Stephenson mentioned a possible route to the summit of Leaning Peak along a steeply-sloping ledge which ran out across the top of the 500 metre north face. Waring recalls: ‘I decided to check this out without delay, and was soon there by myself inching along the ledge, initially quite wide, but decreasing to a foot or so directly above the sheer wall down to the distantly whispering creek above the Portals. I was then confronted by a short vertical pitch, with a 15 foot high pile of thick slabs on its right side, appearing solid enough to chimney up against to the summit. I pushed against them with my right hand to confirm this, and had to immediately flatten against the wall as the whole lot collapsed and engulfed me in a large cloud of acrid rock dust as they jack-knifed out into space and spent the next 10 minutes thundering down into the gorge. I then climbed the wall and was on the summit of Leaning Peak, exactly 14 minutes since stepping on to the ledge. Rapelling down about 80 feet to the small saddle, I joined my bushwalking (only) companion waiting there, and we returned to camp.’ Although Raoul Mellish accompanied Waring on the trip to Mt Barney, he believed it would have been ‘madness’ to follow him along the ledge. Following this achievement, Waring gained a reputation for being a bold climber and later repeated the route—known as the Waring Ledge—with John Comino.

Picture: Pat Conaghan collection.

The end of an era

World War II (1939-1945) virtually stopped climbing around the world, apart from specialised mountaineering training given to troops in Europe and the United States. Bert Salmon had dropped out of the climbing scene just before the war with his stubborn rejection of roped climbing, placing limits on what was possible. As he approached 40, Salmon described ‘mountain climbing’—as he called it—as safer than dodging motor cars, crossing the street. Ironically, 40 years later, he was struck by a motor car near his retirement home at The Grange in Brisbane and suffered an injury preventing him from visiting his beloved mountains. He had introduced hundreds of young men and women to climbing in Queensland and was active until the 1960s—the ‘spiritual father’ of Queensland climbing made his last trip up Mt Lindesay on 2 May 1964, his 27th ascent of the mountain! Described by some as arrogant and stubborn, even obnoxious, he was nevertheless a significant figure in the development of the first mass climbing movement in Australia. In 1980, Bert Salmon, aged 80, was still enthusiastic about climbing and the mountains of southeast Queensland, and explained that although he had never used a rope, his teams often carried one to help ‘inadequate’ climbers past difficult points. In his twilight years, he had a change of heart about the use of rope in climbing. ‘I’m older and I see the error of my ways,’ he confessed. ‘Not everyone has the ego that carried me through.’ He died on the 5 May 1982, aged 82.

Picture: Bert Salmon below Crookneck's east face. A. A. Salmon collection.

Between wars

Virtually all of the early mass climbing activity in Australia before World War II was in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales with Bert Salmon and his coterie the instigators. Eric Dark inspired a smaller group of climbers to make first ascents in the Blue Mountains and Warrumbungles and in the late 1920s, two key figures emerged in Tasmania—Fred Smithies and Gustav Weindorfer. Smithies climbed around 80 peaks in the state, adopting the same unroped style as the Queensland cohort. He made the first recorded winter ascent of Cradle Mountain in 1924 and reached the summit of Frenchman’s Cap in 1931. Like his Queensland climber-photographer counterpart, Bert Salmon, Smithies captured many of his exploits on film. Apart from a handful of isolated ascents, climbing was virtually unknown in the rest of the country until after World War II. Anticipating the end of hostilities, the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club formed in 1944—the year that climbing in Victoria formally began. Compared with the standards of climbing in Europe and the United States at the time, activity here was very limited. But it was a period in which Australia was experimenting with its own version of climbing. Eric Dark and his Blue Mountaineers adopted European traditions that accepted the logic of belaying and the safety factor implicit in the use of ropes. Salmon and many of the Queenslanders followed a purist climbing ethic, akin to pioneers like American John Muir in Yosemite and some of the early Lake District climbers in England. It led to different directions in the development of climbing in Queensland and New South Wales. Although mass climbing in Victoria started almost two decades years after activity in Queensland and New South Wales, from the beginning it adopted a ‘modern’ approach in terms of use of ropes and protective equipment like pitons and quickly emerged from its slumber.

Picture: Queensland climbers in the Blue Mountains 1934 serenaded by George Fraser on bagpipes. Ken Rogers collection.

The 1st ascent of the Arethusa Falls

In 1931, the Blue Mountaineers set out on their biggest challenge—the first ascent of Arethusa Falls in the Grose Valley. The first attempt by Osmar White, Lowe and Jim Starkey in August 1930 ended in failure as darkness caught them before they had reached the crux—the cliffs above the falls. The following year, Dark, White, Lowe and Starkey set off again, and although delayed by heavy rain, climbed to the top of the falls and camped there for the night. Next morning, they surveyed the 100 metre cliff above them. Eric Lowe was optimistic:

The climb to the first ledge looked possible if we could get to the top of a massive rock about 30ft high. After many attempts we managed to throw a rope across a projecting point of the rock, and with a man on each end of the rope pulling it into the side of the cliff, I went up hand over hand. The top of the rock was a reasonably wide and flat platform with a grass tree growing on it. To this I attached the rope and Dr Dark came up to me. But what had looked possible from below proved utterly impossible when tried from the top of the rock.

From the top of the rock, they could see a solution. Jim Starkey had to swim 50 metres in a strong current across the pool at the base of a waterfall and then edge up the cliff where he was able to lower a rope to their ledge. Dark and Lowe pulled up on the rope and they were within striking range of the top. But the battle was not over yet. Eric Dark took the lead, as Lowe related:

It was a very fine climb. He started along a narrow crack that just gave toe space, with a similar crack 6ft above for his hands. These two cracks ran parallel across the sheer face of the cliff, gradually rising to a projecting tongue of rock. He worked along slowly and carefully; the projecting tongue was extremely difficult and the least error in judgment meant disaster. The climber’s body was forced out by the jutting rock, and balance was tested to the utmost…From this point he zigzagged up a narrow track that sloped so steeply as to make the last 30ft of climbing the most dangerous of all. We were very relieved and elated when he reached the top of the ledge. We came up ourselves with a safety rope around our waists.

At the top of their climb, they traversed to make a final pitch out of the gorge. At the base of the last cliff, they found a long, dead sapling with steps cut into it. Clearly someone else had visited this area before. They leaned the sapling up against the cliff and used it to scramble to the top. Creative use of rope techniques and a passion for a first ascent had come together to reward them.

The Warrumbungles

Throughout the 1930s, Eric Dark pioneered climbing in the Warrumbungles, a group of spectacular volcanic spires in western New South Wales. In 1933, he returned the area with a group from the Sydney Bush Walkers, including Marie Byles and Dot English (later Dot Butler). English’s habit of walking and climbing barefoot gave the name to her autobiography published some years later—The Barefoot Bushwalker. She recalled the experience: ‘This was my first introduction to technical climbing. Accustomed to rushing up and over rock faces barefoot and unroped, jumping for likely-looking holds, swinging about on scant bits of vegetation growing out of the cliffs, it was a new (and somewhat painful) experience to be tied on to a restraining rope, hooked over impeding belays, obliged to ‘stop and make sure two holds are secure before relinquishing the third’. Eric Dark was impressed with her climbing ability and they set out to climb Crater Bluff (pictured above). With them was a Polish climber, ‘Mr Paszek’, nicknamed ‘Pan’, who had climbed in the Dolomites in his youth and in the Swiss Alps as a member of the Tatra Mountaineering Club. They walked around to the Green Glacier, on the southern side of the Bluff, carrying a 60 metre rope. The first 200 metres was easy and then they roped up. It was here that 'Pan' turned back. The lithe Dot English took the lead and climbed up a steep crack in the face. Dark led through and reached the top. Perhaps influenced by news of the practice in Queensland, they lit a small fire on the summit to alert local people of their success but the inevitable happened—it spread and they were cut off from their descent route. Dark had to piggyback English across the embers as she had no footwear. On the same trip, Dark and Eric Lowe climbed all but the last 60 metres of what is known today as Diagonal Route on the north face of Crater Bluff.

Picture: Michael Meadows collection.

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.

A record crowd of 15 people climb Crookneck, 3 September 1933

Queensland’s climbing women became big news in the 1930s. The 1934 efforts of Queensland climbers Muriel Patten and Jean Easton in snatching the first female ascents of the First Sister in the Blue Mountains from under the noses of their southern sisters was taken up by Brisbane newspapers with gusto. The Truth proclaimed: ‘This exploit astonished the less adventurous Southerners, who have not taken mountaineering so seriously, and did not realise that the Queensland girls have left the rest of Australia far behind in this exacting and exciting sport.’ There were many articles and photographs published in the local press about their exploits on the crags in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. One full-page story in the Brisbane Truth in 1934 featured glamorous studio photographs of these ‘modern maids of the mountain’. The story explained they were all members of a climbing club, started by Bert Salmon in 1926:

There are 15 girls attached to the club, among whom are several very capable and daring climbers…Jean Easton (Windsor) and Muriel Patten (Wooloowin) are the leaders of the women’s section. These two agile maids caused a stir recently when, during a holiday in the Blue Mountains, they accomplished some very dangerous and difficult climbing among the rocky pinnacles of those ranges…Miss Easton probably has done more mountaineering than any girl in Brisbane. She and a girl companion were the first two girls to reach the summit of Mount Lindesay (4300 feet) and holds a similar honour in connection with the treacherous eastern face of Tibrogargan (Glass House group)…Recently a party of 18 members of the club climbed the formidable east face of Tibrogargan and the precipitous heights of Crookneck in company with a Fox Film cameraman…The girls in the party were Jean Easton, Muriel Patten, Lexie Fraser, Hazel Rigby, Ena, Lydia and Kathleen Robinson, Shirley Miller, Ellinor Byth, Valerie North, Mary Hansen, and Sonia Dimes (of Beerburrum). The girls’ climbing attire consists of shorts, blouse or jumper, sandshoes and no stockings.

Picture: Cliff and Lexie Wilson collection.

The challenge of the Fly Wall

New South Wales identity Dr Eric Dark (pictured at the top of the cliff) headed a small group of local climbers called the Blue Mountaineers. As the name suggests, the Blue Mountains west of Sydney were their playground. The group, also known as the Katoomba Suicide Club, had devised a test climb that all new members had to complete before being allowed to join. It was up a steep, eight metre sandstone wall—the Fly Wall—and the Queensland contingent visiting the area in 1934 was champing at the bit to have a go. But there was a problem—Eric Dark insisted they use a rope tied around their chests as a belay. ‘I put the rope on,’ Salmon recalled, ‘and then I took it off!’ Eric Dark, the president of the Blue Mountaineers, retorted: ‘You won’t!’ Ignoring him, Salmon replied: ‘I am going to try, anyway,’ and he started up the climb unroped, to the horror of the Blue Mountaineers looking on. ‘I tried my level best for Queensland and for my own reputation,’ Salmon said, ‘and I succeeded in climbing to the top of the wall without the rope. That was the first time it had ever been done! Dr Dark was amazed.’ Now it was Salmon’s climbing partner George Fraser’s turn. He dutifully tied the rope around his chest and started up the wall but after a few metres, the feisty Scot (pictured above) shouted, ‘Blimey, ‘I’m going to climb it without the rope, too!’ In true ethical style, he downclimbed to the base of the wall, flung off the rope, and climbed it ‘as surefooted as one of those mountain chamois that roam the Alps in Switzerland’. The Fly Wall was noted for its ‘rudimentary’ finger and foot holds and at one point, climbers had to jump for the next hold. A miss would have seen the Queenslanders injured or worse. Salmon and Fraser had shown-up the locals, perhaps the catalyst for the interstate climbing rivalry that persists today.

Picture: A. A. Salmon collection.

Brisbane climber Muriel Patten on the final few metres of the first female (and unroped) ascent of the 1st Sister in the Blue Mountains in 1934. She was one of a large group of Queensland women climbing at this time as part of the first mass climbing movement in Australia.

Picture: A. A. Salmon collection.

Women's place on the heights

Women found themselves at the centre of Australian climbing culture throughout the 1930s with Queensland hosting the first and most extensive mass climbing movement in the country. The Blue Mountains was the only other place in Australia where some climbing activity was underway but the unique and extraordinary movement in Queensland saw large numbers of men and women, in roughly equal proportions, regularly scaling the heights in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. Bert Salmon and his cohort of climbers had formed an informal club in 1926—the first known climbing group in Australia. Women’s prowess on the rock was obvious and acknowledged in newspaper and magazine articles of the day. With women regularly making the most difficult ascents in southeast Queensland, they began to seek new horizons and in January 1934, 16 Queenslanders travelled to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains on a ‘rock-climbing holiday’. They met with the doyen of New South Wales climbing, Eric Dark, and he showed them his favourite climbing locations, including the Three Sisters, the Boar’s Head at Narrow Neck, and Orphan Rock. Early one Sunday morning, with 300 people watching from a nearby lookout, Salmon and 21 year old Muriel Patten climbed the first of the Three Sisters. The Katoomba Daily was impressed:

Miss Muriel Patten, a petite and daring Brisbane girl, claims a record: that she is the only woman to scale the first of the Three Sisters. One section of this climb is extremely difficult and hazardous: particularly for a lady…The Dr [Dark] informs us that, to his knowledge, no lady has previously scaled the first of the Three Sisters although there are several instances of ladies attaining the summit of the second and third members of the group…To make the job complete, Messrs Salmon, Fraser and Rogers, (accompanied by Sid Marsh, Katoomba) scaled each of the Sisters and, to lend a touch of novelty, Mr Fraser
played Scottish airs on the bagpipes. A big crowd was present at Echo Point and watched intently the progress of the daring climbers—Miss Patten in particular.

The success of Muriel Patten on the Three Sisters and the publicity it received in Brisbane and Sydney probably spurred her good friend, Jean Easton, into action. Shortly after dawn on the 11 March that year, she made the second female ascent of the 1st Sister, climbing with two of the Blue Mountaineers but this time, using a rope. Brisbane’s Courier-Mail praised her accomplishment this time:

Another Brisbane girl has made mountaineering history. Miss Jean Easton, of the Department of Agriculture and Stock, is the second woman to scale the perilous Katoomba crag known as the first of the Three Sisters. Less than two months ago Miss Muriel Patten while on a holiday visit to Katoomba achieved the honour of being the first woman to perform the feat. Miss Easton who is a fellow employee of Miss Patten at the Department of Agriculture, is also an enthusiastic mountain climber, and has been a member of parties that have scaled most of the difficult peaks in Southern Queensland. She has the reputation of being one of the best lady mountaineers in the State.

And Jean Easton’s reason for climbing? She replied succintly: ‘There is a thrill in seeing a view with which few other people have had the opportunity of becoming acquainted.’

Picture: A typical climbing group on Tibrogargan in 1935, Nancy Hodge collection.

The first Queensland climbing fatality

Newspapers in Brisbane and beyond reported the first climbing fatality in Queensland on New Year’s Eve, 1928—that of 22-year-old Lyle Vidler. He was transfixed by the possibility of climbing a new route on Mt Lindesay up what was called ‘the Great Chimney’, a huge crevice (pictured left) that split the cliff on the mountain’s eastern side. Vidler had left Brisbane alone by train on Christmas Eve, cycling to the mountain, and when no word had been heard from him three days later, a search began. As the party climbed the steep grass slopes towards the cliffline, an eerie mist hung in the air. Bert Salmon, who was among the searchers, climbed to the summit alone and finding no evidence that Vidler had reached it, knew where to look next:

Reaching the crevice at its base, I climbed about 50 ft, and then saw the body of my friend suspended in the crevice far above me. When I reached the place, I found that the body had been caught between the base of a large stinging tree and one of the walls of the rock chimney. It was held from under the armpits by vines and a number of dead branches. The haversack, torn from the body lay a few feet away. From the moment I reached him I was convinced that Mr Vidler had been killed instantly.

Just after midnight on New Year’s Day, 1929, the rescue party received permission to bury him at the base of the crevice, where he lies today.

Picture: A. A. Salmon collection.

Climbing 'the living rock'

In early November 1927, Bert Salmon (pictured), now 28, and Lyle Vidler, 21, set out to climb one of the last virgin summits in Queensland—Egg Rock. They caught the train to Nerang and walked 35 kilometres into the Upper Numinbah valley. An inspired Lyle Vidler recalled the evening: ‘Darkness fell long before we spied the light of the inn at Advance Town but a glorious full moon illuminated the dusty road and the dim aisles of the bush, whilst the purling rapids of the Upper Nerang sang in our ears as we plodded along to the incessant chirrup of crickets, and other small bush sounds…After a short walk, we were rewarded with a first glimpse, through the tree tops, of the goal which had drawn us so far on foot. A few hundred yards brought us to a clearing from which we had an uninterrupted view of this tremendous rocky column. Bathed in the flood of moonlight with the star-studded velvety sky above and the high mountain walls beyond, the Egg Rock suggested a huge antediluvian monster of unheard-of dimensions rearing his colossal head in an endeavour to overlook the confines of his primeval domain.’ They were up at dawn next morning and began their climb, unroped, as Vidler recounts: ‘Slowly we advanced up the sheer wall, aided here and there by the presence of stunted and hardy plants which projected invitingly from small cracks in the living rock.’ After around 100 metres of climbing, they reached the summit at five past six in the morning. The two friends built a cairn around the trunk of ‘a small oak’, a flag pole for what had become Salmon’s traditional calling card—a small Union Jack.

Picture: A. A. Salmon collection.