Newspapers and rockclimbing in Queensland

The changing role of Queensland newspapers in imagining leisure and recreation

 

Possibly the earliest newspaper images of climbing published in Australia: the first known women to climb Crookneck, Sara, Jenny and Etty Clark are pictured with two of three male companions on the summit in 1912. The absent figure was photographer, George Rowley (Queenslander 8 June 1912).

The first detailed article I wrote following four years of archival research into newspaper representations of rockclimbing in Queensland and beyond was published in the online journal ejournalist in 2001. Please visit the site and download  it (free) by clicking on the following link: The changing role of Queensland newspapers in imagining leisure and recreation.

Crux columns: climbing wars--or Victoria versus the rest!

-->

Climbing wars — or Victoria versus the rest!

Far be it for me to fan the flames of interstate rivalry on the rock but our rockclimbing history does include periods of character building that seem to be less prominent in the climbing scene today. For many at the time, it was simply part of what 60s American climber and philosopher Lito Tejada-Flores called the ‘games climbers play’. Climbers, he argues, determine the rules that govern activity on the rock. And off the rock? Well, you be the judge.

During the 1960s, the emergence of the clean-climbing, hard-hitting John Ewbank saw the pages of the national climbing magazine, Thrutch, often filled with bitter recriminations, usually following one of his acerbic articles on ethics. Comments in his 1970 Supplement to Rock Climbs in the Blue Mountains are typical of his feelings about the bolting brigade and the state of local cliffs: ‘This great legacy of rusting steel is an unfortunate hangover of the “Golden Age of Bolting” when every man and his dog was placing bolts with missionary zeal in every section of unbolted cliff he could get his drill tip into.’ Flicking through recent copies of Rock, this sounds strangely familiar.

Oblivious of this, Rick White, Chris Meadows and Greg Sheard headed south to the Blue Mountains in January 1969 to hone their jamBing skills following the discovery of Frog Buttress a few months earlier. Sheard recalls the scene that confronted them: ‘There were bolts everywhere and we decided to chop a few. Then we went to a Sydney Rockclimbing Club meeting and Chris had a few drinks. And next thing, some guy turned up and introduced himself as the Safety Officer. He was a bit stroppy and Chris was understandably a bit put off and was going to have a severe discussion with this guy’s head using both of his fists.’ It was not a good start to fostering cordial interstate relations.

Around this time, a ‘Victoria versus the rest’ conflict emerged. Veteran Queensland climber Ian Thomas — who, incidentally, now lives in Victoria — has a simple explanation: ‘Because Victorians were incredibly up themselves.’ Whatever the reason, the Victorian faction was led by a vociferous Chris Baxter — dubbed ‘Radio Australia’ by his then adversary and jamBing el supremo, Rick White. One focus of disagreement was the Arapiles classic, The Rack, put up by Ewbank and graded 18. Despite their best efforts, the Victorians literally fell about trying to climb it, claiming it had been deliberately undergraded. When visiting South African Iain Allen sailed up it confirming Ewbank’s grade, the silence was deafening — except from north of the Victorian border, that is! To rub it in, Rick White put together a home movie of him ripping up the demanding Frog Buttress classic, Odin, flaunting his obvious jamBing expertise to the throbbing music of Deep Purple! But it was more like a red rag to a bull when it premiered in Victoria. 

‘There was the absurd interstate rivalry between Victoria and New South Wales and Victoria and Queensland,’ Chris Baxter recalled. ‘And a lot of that was due to the lack of contact. It was childish on all sides. I suppose it was taken seriously and the letters would fly back and forwards through Thrutch and that would trigger it off. And there’d be raiding parties down to free Victorian routes or free NSW routes or whatever it was…’

In the early 1970s, White put up what he claimed as the hardest aid route in the country, The Antichrist, M6, on Mount Maroon. Within weeks, Chris Dewhirst and Peter McKeand put up Lord Gumtree at Mt Buffalo in Victoria, grading it M7 — it was the hardest in the country. White and a youthful Robert ‘Squeak’ Staszewski immediately drove to Buffalo, climbed Lord Gumtree, announcing that it was barely M6! The columns of Thrutch were smoking as the insults and accusations flew!

Ian ‘Humzoo’ Thomas was an emerging star at the time and recalls reading about the interstate rivalry in the Brisbane Rockclimbing Club magazine well before he met any of the protagonists: ‘I remember pissing myself laughing at articles by Greg Sheard about him chopping bolts in the Blue Mountains. So in ‘71 when Squeak and I went down there, the first thing we did was not climbing, but we got our hammers out and chopped bolts. It just seemed to be the thing to do!’ With the hostilities at their peak, Thomas was only too happy to turn up the heat, as Rick White recalled: ‘His offhand reference to Grampians classics as “loose, crumbly lines on Mt Crumblebar in the Crapians” did little to improve interstate relations.’

Humzoo (Ian Thomas) climbing in the Warrumbungles around 1975 (Keith Bell collection).

Early in 1973, simmering interstate climbing rivalries reached fever pitch. Thrutch published a letter from a disgruntled reader, cancelling his subscription and accusing the magazine of becoming an ‘ego tripper’s soapbox and…an editorial policy seemingly devoted to fostering interstate squabbles’. He had a good point — in the same issue, Queenslander Trevor Gynther complained about ‘specialists’ downgrading certain climbs at Frog Buttress — namely The Nemesis; Chris Baxter whinged about inaccuracies in the publication in not mentioning that Rick White had used a top rope on his recent climb of Lord Gumtree; and Staszewski accused the Victorians of over-bolting climbs at Mt Buffalo. White had had enough and refused to write anything for a climbing magazine for the next 20 years!

The tension between Victorian climbers and the rest was palpable at the Easter 1973 climbing meet at Porter’s Pass in the Blue Mountains. A Victorian climbing delegation attempted Flake Crack at Wirindi, failing in front of the assembled gladiatorial mob of Queensland and New South Wales climbers, then promptly got into their cars and drove home in disgust.

But all’s well that ends well. John Ewbank became a musician; Rick White and Chris Baxter patched up their differences and became good friends; Greg Sheard concentrated on giving up smoking; and Ian Thomas still thinks Victorians are up themselves. And interstate climbing rivalry was never heard of again. Well, almost.

(First published in the Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux Number 5)

Crux columns: transport trauma

-->

Transport trauma

From the very first time that climbers were lured onto the heights the issue of transport to and from crags has been a significant one. Before the widespread use of cars in Australia around the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, climbers resorted to more simple means of travel. The earliest recorded ascents of mountains in Australia usually involved the use of horses to get close enough to the destination. For example, Patrick Logan rode to the base of Mount Barney to make the first European ascent in 1828. At the time it was the highest-known peak in the country.

An early climbing party returns from Mount Lindesay (background), Christmas 1933 (A. A. Salmon collection).

Almost a century later, one attempt to reach the base of the Steamers – a rhyolite complex of pinnacles near Warwick in southeast Queensland -- resulted in the would-be climber being attacked by ‘numberless eaglehawks’ that swooped on him from above. Perhaps it was one reason the Steamers remained unclimbed until 1950 despite a reputed 100 pounds reward for a first ascent being offered by a Warwick businessman. The first climbers to stand on the summit -- Bob Waring and Jon Stephenson – got there by motorbike. Despite their achievement, they never received the reward.

But before the postwar climbing boom in the early 1950s, the 1930s crowd relied more on their initiative and endurance. Bert Salmon and Lyle Vidler made the first ascent of Egg Rock in the Gold Coast hinterland in 1928 after catching a train to Nerang, then walking 40 kilometres to the pinnacle, climbing it and walking back to the station. All part of a good weekend out! Much earlier, the hardy Clark sisters had cycled 70 kilometres back to Brisbane on the same day they made the first female ascent of Crookneck in the Glasshouses in 1912! 

Raoul Mellish chats to a local farmer near Mount Barney with Bob Waring's Indian motorcycle in the foreground. Waring was on his way to make the first traverse of an exposed ledge on Leaning Peak, 1949 (Raoul Mellish collection).

A common form of postwar transport for members of the short-lived Queensland Climbing Club in 1950 were motorbikes. And the bold Bob Waring was perhaps a standout here. Not content with mere ownership of a convenient form of transport, he insisted on testing its ability to get there as fast as possible. He was a daring climber, soloing several first ascents in the Steamers and on Mount Barney – routes that modern climbers have backed off even with the array of modern equipment available.  Waring left Australia to work as an engineer overseas in the mid-50s and entered the famous TT motorcycle race around the Isle of Wight. He was in third place and was outraged when his bike expired.

Another daring duo from Queensland during the late 1940s and early 1950s was Peter Barnes and Alan Frost. They were both super fit and could climb at an extraordinary speed. Frost was the first to climb all seven peaks of the huge expanse of Mount Barney in a day. They’d think nothing of jumping on Barnes’ old Indian motorbike and riding off at 10 o’clock at night to climb one of the Glasshouses by moonlight.

Despite the onset of the sixties, it seemed that the cars of the 1950s ruled. It probably had something to do with their cost but virtually all of the new wave of climbers who emerged in Queensland in the late 1960s seemed to have old cars, and more often than not, French ones! Rick White destroyed his Morris 1100 in a few months driving up the cobblestone track to the newly-discovered Frog Buttress. He moved ‘up’ to a 1952 Riley – which he drove to the Blue Mountains and back -- then to a 1948 Citroen Light 15. meanwhile, Ted Cais’s obsession with motorbikes – a CZ, various Japanese models and a restored Velocette Clubman – was broken when he lapsed into a Peugeot phase with 203 and 403 models suffering under his relentless pursuit of perfection, not only on the rock. 

A rudimentary rack on the bonnet of John Shera's Mazda 800 en route to The Glass Houses in 1968
(Michael Meadows collection).

Perhaps following the tradition set by the rapid Bob Waring, there has always seemed to be an unusual urgency amongst climbers in getting to the climbs. In Queensland, perhaps it was the influence of competing in car rallies by climbers like my brother Chris Meadows, John Shera  and myself, but the last few kilometres into a crag, on dirt, always seemed to be particularly exhilerating.

But the mantle for the most outrageous climber-driver of that era in Queensland at least was the inimitable Greg Sheard. The proud owner of an ageing black Hillman Minx, Sheard used his doubtful mechanical skills to extract an unreasonable amount of power from the small, inefficient engine and believed that both he and the car were indestructible. He was almost right. Sheardie took many spectacular falls as a bold lead climber in the late 1960s in his frenzied efforts to be the first to eliminate aid from the hardest climbs in Queensland at the time. He still believes Rick White kept the secret of Frog Buttress from him for months because he was convinced Sheardie would try to remove the aid moves in the early ascents there. 

Sheardie (pictured left giving up smoking in 1968) once drove his car almost to the base of the classic climb, East Crookneck, defying logic and gleefully leaving an ageing landrover wallowing behind him. His secret was speed – at all times and in all circumstances. We often spent more time making roadside repairs to the Sheard Hillman on the way to a climb than on the climb itself. But all good things come to and end.  The moment Sheardie announced that he had ordered a brand new Torana, tweaked to his personal specifications, the Hillman was fair game. Ted Cais was first to strike painting a swastika on the doors and the slogan, ‘Hitler is king! along one side. Needless to say, within hours, the Hillman was pulled over by police – even Queensland cops couldn’t miss that – and the car was ordered off the road. When  Sheard, again foolishly, made this announcement at a Kangaroo Point climbing afternoon, I decided to test out a theory of mine and dropped a 100 kg section of railway line from the cliff top onto his boot. As I suspected, it crashed straight through!  Following that episode, even the wreckers wouldn’t take it so he dismembered the car with an axe.

It was all part of climbing – and still is, of course. Perhaps not the axe.

(First published in the Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux Number 4)

Crux columns: women with attitude

Women with attitude

The largest to climb Crookneck in The Glass House Mountains on 'Salmon's Leap', 1933 (Cliff and Lexie Wilson collection).

 

Browsing through the plethora of multimedia climbing images available today it’s clear that women are increasingly making their mark on Australian crags. The current surge in female climbing activity in Australia began around the early 1990s with the popularisation of indoor sport climbing, gradually extending into all forms of the activity since. But women’s attraction for high places began in eastern Australia more than a century ago. During the 1930s, the number of women climbing—particularly in Queensland—roughly equalled that of their male counterparts. After World War II in Queensland, women all but vanished from the climbing scene—Australia was embroiled in era of nation-building and women’s place, it seemed, was anywhere but in the mountains or on the rock.

Australia’s pioneering female climbers had plenty of international role models. Henriette d’Angeville was 45 when she became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc in 1838. Despite her achievement being denounced as ‘unfeminine and plain dangerous’, she inspired generations of female climbers to challenge the prevailing viewpoint that women did not climb. By the 1850s, women in Europe and the United States had established themselves firmly as highly competent climbers, but they still climbed with men. It wasn’t until 1900 that the outstanding British climber-photographer, Elizabeth Aubrey Le Blond, made the first ‘manless’ ascent in the Alps—and it quickly caught on. Le Blond also pioneered winter climbing for women and was instrumental in starting the Ladies Alpine Club in 1907. Women in this era climbed in ‘voluminous skirts’ but by the 1880s, a pioneering few began to discard them after leaving mountain huts, climbing in riding breeches, although dressing for their return to ‘the civilised world’. The popularity of active sports like mountaineering, walking and cycling in Europe prompted a new wave of ‘athletic’ fashions for women to sweep into Australia in the form of the ‘Velocipedienne’ skirt—while riding a bicycle, women could undo a section of the garment, extending it so as to conceal the feet and ankles. 

The European influence on local climbers was clear. In 1894, Queensland adventurer, John Hardcastle, found a bottle with 17 names listed inside on the summit of Wilson’s Peak, at the southern end of the Main Range and observed: ‘The fact that five girls, whose ages range from 15 to 21 years, reached the top of this great peak shows that the natives are not far behind their sisters of other countries in mountaineering as it requires far more than the average woman’s nerve to make the ascent of this mountain.’

In 1908, Australia’s first mountaineer, 26 year old Sydney climber Emmeline Freda Du Faur, stood on a pass below the summit of New Zealand’s highest peak and was inspired: ‘Then and there I decided I would be a real mountaineer, and some day be the first woman to climb Mount Cook.’ Two years later Du Faur achieved her goal. She grew up with Kuringai Chase in Sydney as her backyard and practised rockclimbing on the many sandstone outcrops there. She also worked out in the Dupain Institute for Physical Fitness—one of the earliest known instances of any climber training in this way. Two years after her historic ascent of Mt Cook, Du Faur made the first Mt Cook-Mt Tasman traverse with brothers Peter and Alex Graham. In the same year, the first women—Jenny, Sara, and Etty Clark—stood on the summit of Crookneck in southeast Queensland. Etty attempted Crookneck a second time 36 years later and managed to get about halfway up the climb, reflecting: ‘When I climbed to the top in 1912, we girls took off our skirts and finished the climb in knee-length bloomers. They didn’t have shorts in those days.’

Women’s involvement with climbing in Australia began in earnest after World War I. But even in 1925, ankle-length skirts remained the usual climbing attire for women. Within a few years, a remarkable change would free women of the long garments that had plagued them from the time of their very first steps into the mountains. By the end of the 1920s, women were climbing in shorts and sandshoes and setting the trend that continues, albeit with some modifications, to this day.

From the late 1920s until World War II, an extraordinary mass climbing movement emerged in Queensland, inspired by the enigmatic Bert Salmon. It involved large numbers of women who made the most difficult ascents known at that time. The era began when Jean Easton and Doris Williams became the first women to climb Caves Route on the east face of Tibrogargan in 1928. For 20-year-old Easton, it was the first step towards becoming one of Queensland’s most accomplished sportswomen and one of the State’s leading climbers in the 1930s. Following her daring ascent, Easton observed: ‘At no stage of the ascent was a rope used but at times, real thrills were experienced when substantial handholds and footholds were lacking.’ The Queensland female climbing coterie soon attracted national attention with the magazine, Walkabout, concluding that ‘women are good climbers, and as novices give less trouble than men’.

The formidable summit of Mt Lindesay on the Qld-NSW border was the next to succumb in 1931 when Easton, 22, and Nora Dimes, 21, reached the summit, accompanied by the irrepressible Salmon. The event caused a stir in nearby Beaudesert with the local newspaper lauding their achievement: ‘Great praise is due to the abovementioned ladies on their successful feat as they are the first ladies to ever conquer this formidable mountain of rock which Mr Salmon states is second to none in Queensland from a climbers standpoint.’ In the same year, rockclimbing was praised as a ‘health-giving sport for women’ by the Women’s Weekly, featuring novelist Eleanor Dark (Eric’s wife) in action on the Katoomba sandstone. Rockclimbing in the Blue Mountains around this time was popular although it was not quite the mass movement north of the border.

Queensland climber Muriel Patten becomes the first women to climb the First Sister, Katoomba, 1934. Bert Salmon is above her as both solo the climb (A. A. Salmon collection).

 With a female climbing culture firmly established in Queensland by the early 1930s, January 1934 saw 16 Queenslanders—including 7 women—travelling to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains on a ‘rock-climbing holiday’. Early one Sunday morning, with 300 people watching from a nearby lookout, Bert Salmon and 21 year old Muriel Patten climbed the first of the Three Sisters, unroped. It was the first female ascent and 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.’ When Muriel Patten returned to Brisbane, she was a celebrity, with the Courier-Mail reproducing the story of her success: ‘Miss Patten yesterday laughed at the idea of nervousness on these expeditions, although she confessed that she has had to acquire the climbing taste. She has long since lost the neophyte’s nervousness in daring expeditions to the top of Crook-neck (Glasshouse), Mt Barney, and Mt Lindesay. Now she is looking round for other crags to conquer.’

This publicity probably spurred her good friend, Jean Easton, into action. Shortly after dawn on the 11 March that same year, she made the second female ascent of the 1st Sister, climbing with two of the Blue Mountaineers. Easton, described as being ‘of slight athletic build’ and ‘one of the best lady mountaineers in the state’, apologised to readers of the Courier-Mail that although she had been climbing for five years and had never used ropes except on the 1st Sister, it was mainly ‘because her male companions were not acquainted with her capabilities as a mountaineer’. And her reason for climbing? ‘There is a thrill in seeing a view with which few other people have had the opportunity of becoming acquainted.’

Queensland’s climbing women had become big news. A full-page story in the 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,’ the article exclaimed. ‘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).’ The newspaper recounted Easton’s and Patten’s pioneering Katoomba climbs and undoubtedly fanned the flames of interstate rivalry, concluding: ‘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.’ 

Jean Easton (above) and Muriel Patten on the east face of Tibrogargan in The Glass Houses in 1934
(Cliff and Lexie Wilson collection).

World War II saw women virtually disappear from the rockclimbing scene around Australia although female membership of postwar bushwalking clubs offered an alternative. The Melbourne University Mountaineering Club in 1947 was the first postwar climbing club in Australia with the Brisbane Climbing Club (1950), the Sydney Rockclimbing Club (1951) and the Victorian Climbing Club (1952) following suit. While influential women were most certainly involved in the early days of postwar climbing in Australia, they were few in number.

The experiences of two young women, Bernice Noonan and Margaret Hammond, in Queensland in the early 1950s perhaps typify those who persisted despite the odds. The two friends would sometimes hitch from Brisbane to the Glasshouse Mountains for a climbing weekend. Bernice Noonan remembers the equipment she used was minimal: ‘We bought a rope, one rope, for the lot of us to use, and we had one carabiner. My son just shrieks with mirth at that,’ she laughs. Despite being vastly outnumbered by male climbers at the time, she felt at ease climbing with the boys: ‘I didn’t feel that the men were superior or that there was a difference because of the sexes. I never felt that at all.’

It is an attitude by women towards climbing that had its genesis more than a century ago in the European Alps—and clearly it persists today. And perhaps Bernice Noonan’s words best sum up what it’s all about—for women, at least. ‘I just felt we were all on the same level,’ she says. ‘We were all experiencing a good sport and we all enjoyed it and unless we all pulled together we weren’t going to get there.’ It seems abundantly clear that women have well and truly reclaimed their place in the Australian climbing scene.

(First published in the Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux Number 3)

Crux columns: ghosts and The Glass Houses

Ghosts and The Glass Houses

The 300 metre high peak, Crookneck, in the Glass House Mountains north of Brisbane was one of the last summits in Australia to be claimed by Europeans. In 1886, Queensland explorer and climber Thomas Welsby described ‘a great falling away of stone’ on the east face of the mountain. Seven years later in 1893, the Royal Society of Queensland heard details of another landslide revealing ‘a huge fissure’ following a sustained period of heavy rain that caused massive flooding in Brisbane. And so the climb known today known as East Crookneck was born. But it would be more than half a century before climbers seriously considered the east face as a possible ascent route.

The mountain, called Coonowrin by the Kabi Kabi people, has always been an object of fascination for Europeans. Towards the end of the 19th century, speculation on the possibility of someone climbing the peak was rife with one local sage insisting: ‘It has always been said by old bushmen that Crookneck cannot be surmounted.’ Another scribe in 1885 made a bold prediction—curiously accurate, as it turned out: ‘I don’t doubt that when the railway makes these [mountains] within reach of the Brisbane tourist, many will try then ascend, but without engineering skill being brought to help it will not be done.’ Pragmatic local explorer William Landsborough simply reminded them that if the mountain was in England ‘it would have been climbed a dozen times’.

But it wasn’t until 1910 that 23-year-old local lad Henry Mikalsen (pictured above) made the first ascent, solo, up the treacherous, loose north face. ‘The feat was not accomplished without difficulty and danger,’ the Brisbane Courier reported. ’The trip took about three hours from start to finish, and as his home is at the foot of the mountain, he was watched with anxious eyes and could be seen the whole time.’ Pioneer climber Bert Salmon always referred to this first ascent of Crookneck as the birth of modern climbing in Australia.

 Two years later, on Empire Day 1912, three sisters—Jenny, Sara and Etty Clark—became the first women to reach the elusive summit, climbing a new route on the southern side now known as Clark’s Gully. It is one of the earliest recorded instances in Australia of the now accepted technique of belaying. One of the Clark sisters tested out the system unexpectedly, as this account of the climb suggests: ‘As she stepped off onto another little corner the rock gave way and left her swinging for a moment in mid-air, some 100 ft above the ground. Fortunately, the rope was good, and in strong hands, and she soon gained a fresh foothold and she soon clambered into safety.’ Etty Clark managed to get halfway up the climb, 36 years later, observing: ‘When I climbed to the top…we girls took off our skirts and finished the climb in knee-length bloomers. They didn’t have shorts in those days.’

In the early 1920s, Philip Webster and his brothers, Tom, George and the ‘partially handicapped’ Norman, found a new climb on the south side of Crookneck which follows most of the existing Salmon’s Leap or tourist route. Strangely, this is the only climbing route in southeast Queensland bearing Salmon’s name, but it is one he never claimed. During the 1930s, with climbing booming in southeast Queensland, Crookneck was one of the favoured destinations. On one trip in September 1934, Salmon took a record group of 26 people up the mountain, encouraged by the irrepressible George Fraser playing ‘Highland airs’ on his bagpipes from the summit! Around this time, Salmon and another 30’s stalwart, Cliff Wilson, made an extraordinary first descent of west Crookneck.

The first serious attempts to climb the east face began in 1950 when Bob Waring and another University of Queensland student, Jim Gadalof, abseiled down the fiercely overhanging route. They had no abseil devices—not even a carabiner—adopting the classic method for the painful 75 metre descent. Waring discussed the possibility of climbing the face with John Comino, a co-founder of the University of Queensland Bushwalking Club (UQBWC). Comino abseiled down to a small ledge, dubbed the ‘Eagle’s Eyrie’, and climbed what would eventually be the last pitch of the route. But the real problem was what lay below.

This was the challenge for university physics student Ron Cox who began his drawn-out project to climb the face in June 1959. Cox read Guido Magnone’s 1955 book, The West face of the Dru, and was inspired to apply the same techniques. ‘That was the great era of artificial climbing in the Alps,’ Cox recalls, ‘and reading that and other books and magazines I became very interested in artificial climbing which had its apogee at that time. So that’s how we started doing that sort of thing.’ He teamed up with UQBWC friend Pat Conaghan and the two set about making their own gear for an attempt on East Crookneck—etriers and wooden wedges in Cox’s father’s furniture factory, and pitons cut from steel plate. Cox recalls the pitons were flat with no wedge: ‘I remember on one occasion going to a guy who had a little forge in Margaret Street—unimaginable now—and I gave him some of these pitons and got him to hammer a taper into them. I remember using one of these on East Crookneck and the head snapped straight off!’

Ron Cox engaged in the assault on the east face of Crookneck,
The Glass House Mountains, 1959 (Pat Conaghan collection).

Cox found ‘great piles of ironmongery sitting at the foot of the cliff—big spikes, 30 cms long’— perhaps evidence of previous attempts. Climbing on weekends and belayed by a range of partners, Cox slowly advanced up the route over the next three months. ‘It was vertical: that’s the essential thing’, he recalls. ‘And in a sense, to that point in Queensland, we were climbing things that weren’t vertical that had a bit of a slope.’ It was arguably the first serious application of double rope, aid climbing techniques in the country. Although he had adopted the European approach, he still imposed ethical limits, rejecting the use of bolts ‘because they made anything possible’.

Cox had quickly established himself as one of the best—and safest—climbers in the Brisbane-based cohort and had already made his mark on the cliffs at Kangaroo Point, climbing the route now known as Cox’s Overhang on a top rope, early in 1959. Described by Comino as ‘built like a bloody spider’, Cox was one of the few at that time who could climb the overhang free. The climb was probably the hardest in Queensland. Comino remembers being impressed by Cox climbing the route and then being challenged to have a go himself—on a top rope: ‘Anyway I got up there and after that I think Ron thought, “Well, this fellow can climb” and that’s probably what caused him to look me up about Crookneck some time later.’

Pat Conaghan bivvying during the first ascent of the east face of Crookneck in 1959 (Pat Conaghan collection).

Following his 7th attempt on East Crookneck and with just 25 metres of the route left, Cox decided it was time for a first ascent push. He asked Comino to come out of retirement to join Conaghan and himself and the trio gathered below the face on 18 September. Cox reached his previous high point in about three hours and called for Comino to follow. Conaghan described the experience in the 1960 edition of the UQBWC magazine, Heybob: ‘Comino had not climbed artificially and for a while was floundering in the technicalities. Adjectival phrases floated down consistently and at one stage, having already discarded his hat, he threatened to throw his etriers away too. He was soon, however, heard quietly praising the possibilities and efficiency of these mechanical contrivances and by late afternoon had joined Ron on the ledge.’ The stance was just big enough for two people and with the light fading, Cox and Comino set up a bivvy. ‘I retired to my own little protected ledge under a large roof near the start of the climb,’ Conaghan recalls. ‘During the night, heavy showers of rain carried by a N-W wind fell. I wondered if the boys were getting wet on top.’

Cox began climbing the final pitch at 11.00 am the next morning, as Conaghan describes it: ‘First up the crack, then out onto the wall, then back into the crack again. A piton here and there was needed but progress was fairly quick for this face—25 feet an hour. So the gap between Ron and the top narrowed.’ Conaghan dozed and was woken at 1.30 pm by the sound of some big blocks crashing down as Cox cleaned out the exit chimney. He crawled onto the summit ridge at 1.55 pm.

In these pre-jumar days, it was almost dark by the time Conaghan reached Comino on the last stance and with a torch dangling around his neck, Conaghan kept climbing: ‘Ron yelled directions from above—where to look for the next piton, or find essential holds. A flash of my torch would reveal the route for the next few feet, then followed moments of fumbling for holds as the torchlight danced fitfully, at waist level.’ Conaghan recalls the moment he reached Cox on the summit ridge: ‘A cold wind was blowing on top and the night was crystal clear. Stars sparkled brilliantly and a full moon was just rising from the ocean.’ Comino, ‘festooned in a tangle of rope, etriers, wedges and links’, soon joined them and they scrambled up the last 20 metres to the summit together. Their entry in the log book read: ‘First ascent East Crookneck—8th attempt—40 pitons, 7 wooden wedges—last man up at 8.30 pm.’ Conaghan recalls they had some trouble finding the path down Salmon’s Leap but there was another reward on the descent: ‘A huge gleaming mass stood out against the western sky. It was Beerwah, lit by a silver moon.’

Despite the epic nature of the climb, it was a significant achievement, although Cox remains circumspect about its impact: ‘I felt very elated doing it and very embarrassed in retrospect at not having done it cleanly at all. I guess I could have done it more cleanly but at the time we were not aware of purer forms of climbing. We just went up and looked at it. I would say I learned to climb on East Crookneck which is not the ideal place to learn to climb. Since we couldn’t climb very well we took a long time to get up.’ In 1961, Cox repeated the route with Peter Hardy, a member of Rhum Dhu, a radical offshoot of the Sydney Rockclimbing Club. On a top rope, Hardy managed to climb much of the second pitch free using the chimney, rather than following Cox’s original peg line on the left hand wall.

But it remained essentially an aid route until expatriate British climber Les Wood’s visit to Queensland in 1966. His impact on raising standards in Australia at that time was similar to that of a young Sydney-based climber called John Ewbank. One of Wood’s first Queensland targets was East Crookneck, urged on by his close friend and climbing partner, Donn Groom. ‘We found most of it could be climbed free and that the etriers were necessary in one place,’ Wood recalls, consulting his diary. ‘The last pitch was done in very heavy rain. Three and a quarter hours. A good route. I remember Donn saying that he thought this was one of the big challenges in the Glasshouse Mountains.’

The last aid move on the climb—at a huge bell-shaped overhang—was eliminated by an energetic Greg Sheard and Chris Meadows in 1969. But another challenge has loomed: five years ago all climbing on Crookneck was officially banned—allegedly for ‘safety’ reasons. But strangely, voices can still occasionally be heard drifting down from the heights on Crookneck—perhaps those of the ghosts of climbers past, determined to keep alive the spirit of adventure on this memorable crag.

 (First published in the Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux Number 2)

Crux columns: the origins of Australian climbing

The origins of Australian climbing 

There’s a lingering perception amongst many Australian climbers, young and old, that rockclimbing here is a recent phenomenon. And it is, when compared with its English predecessor, invented in the 1880s. There’s a common misconception that rockclimbing in this country began in southern Australia shortly after World War II. But its origins go well beyond publicised tales of activity here in the 1950s and 1960s. In this first contribution to Crux, I want to look at some of the individuals and ideas that helped to shape modern Australian climbing.

-->

On June 6, 1926, Albert Armitage Salmon, better known simply as ‘Bert’, and his climbing partner Alan Clelland climbed the imposing east face of Tibrogargan in the Glasshouse Mountains, 70 km north of Brisbane. It was one of the earliest known occurrences in Australia of someone climbing a peak by deliberately choosing a route other than an existing, easier path. And for 26-year-old Bert Salmon who had started climbing three years earlier, it marked the start of an extraordinary two decades of activity. 

Bert Salmon soloing on the north face of Coonowrin (Crookneck)
in the Glass House Mountains, Queensland, 1932. (A. A. Salmon collection)

Within three years of Salmon’s historic ascent in Queensland, another influential climber—Eric Payten Dark—emerged south of the border. Like Salmon, Dr Dark, as he was later known, pioneered the exploration of new climbing routes in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and the Warrumbungles in central western New South Wales. But when it came to climbing ethics, the two could not have been further apart. Whereas Salmon—a staunch monarchist—shunned the use of rope, Dark—a socialist, and 10 years older—was probably the first to introduce European roped climbing techniques into Australia.

Adventures in the Blue Mountains

In 1929, Dark and a small cohort of local climbers formed the Blue Mountaineers, otherwise known as the Katoomba Suicide Club. They used rope and rudimentary belaying techniques, including an ‘unethical instrument’ to place belays, described as ‘a two metre long ice axe with a deeply curved pick and a notch to hold the rope where the shaft entered the head’. Dark opposed the use of ironmongery and followed the ethical doctrine of legendary English rockclimber Albert Mummery—that a rope should never be used as an aid for climbing but solely as a precautionary measure.


By the early 1930s, climbing had become a mass activity in southeast Queensland and to a lesser extent, the Blue Mountains. The two movements evolved independently until January 1934 when a contingent of 16 Queenslanders travelled to Katoomba on a ‘rock-climbing holiday’. They met up with Eric Dark and were ushered into Blue Mountains’ climbing culture with visits to the Three Sisters, the Boar’s Head at Narrow Neck, and Orphan Rock. It was the first Australian rockclimbing meet.

Early one Sunday morning, with 300 people watching from a nearby lookout, Salmon and 21 year old Brisbane climber Muriel Patten climbed the first of the Three Sisters, unroped. It was the first female ascent—a memorable event made even more so by Queenslander George Fraser pumping out tunes on his bagpipes as they climbed!

The next challenge was the so-called ‘Fly Wall’, a steep, eight metre sandstone cliff that budding Blue Mountaineers had to climb before they could join the club. The short climb was noted for its ‘rudimentary’ ledges and at one point, climbers had to jump for a handhold. As the Queenslanders lined up to try the route, a problem emerged: Eric Dark (pictured at the top of the cliff above) 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!’ The feisty Queenslander ignored him. ‘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.’Within minutes, George Fraser (above) had become the second person to solo the wall, perhaps inadvertently sowing the seeds of the mostly friendly interstate climbing rivalry that persists today. The Queensland contingent then headed to Narrowneck where the exposed Boar’s Head awaited them. This time, with a sheer drop of more than a hundred metres below them, they used the rope!

It’s clear from these and other stories of climbing activity throughout the 1920s and 1930s, that friendly rivalry and ethical debates have influenced the development of climbing in Australia from the start. A scan of current online climbers’ discussion forum topics suggests little has changed. But what seems to be missing is an awareness of the high ethical standards that defined Australian climbing for the first 20 years of its existence.

The beginning of modern Australian rockclimbing?

Bert Salmon always referred to Henry Mikalsen’s 1910 first ascent (solo) of the 300 metre pinnacle, Crookneck, in the Glasshouse Mountains as the birth of modern Australian climbing. And well before the exploits of Salmon and Dark became more widely known, Australia’s first mountaineer, Freda Du Faur, was rockclimbing on the sandstone cliffs of Kuringai Chase near her Sydney home as she prepared for a series of historic first ascents in the Southern Alps of New Zealand from 1910 to 1912.

It’s also important to acknowledge that it is highly likely that most peaks in Australia had been climbed by Indigenous people, perhaps thousands of years before white settlement. The incorporation of all landscape features into Indigenous cosmology demands a respect for place that cannot be isolated from the activities we define as climbing today.

Whenever Australian climbing could be said to have started, it was Bert Salmon and Eric Dark who popularised it in Australia. They helped to change it from an occasional activity by the odd—and sometimes very odd—adventurous individual, to a sport that attracted significant numbers of men and women between World War I and World War II, particularly in Queensland. It was this movement that shaped the idea of climbing here until an explosion of clubs and standards following World War II pushed Australian climbing ever closer to its current global prominence.

 (First published in the Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux Number 1)

About The living rock

 A book based on the material you can view here -- and much more -- will now be available in August 2015.

This blog is a collection of words and images which start to tell the story of the origins of rockclimbing in Australia. It includes material that I and colleagues have gathered from other passionate climbers willing to share their experiences and observations, along with information we've gathered from newspaper archives, personal photographic collections and first-hand accounts by protagonists. We started this quest more than a decade ago and still have some way to travel. The material we have gathered thus far has revealed stories of the emergence of the idea of climbing in Australia before World War II which has shaped the development of what is now known as 'adventure' or 'traditional' climbing in postwar Queensland and beyond. The time period covered by this research stretches from the very beginnings of human interaction with the Australian landscape, shifting to mostly Queensland activity after the second world war. Primarily, these observations do not focus on the period beyond the late 1970s when climbing began to fragment into several, distinctly different elements: sport and gym climbing, bouldering etc, gradually pushing what became known as 'trad' or 'adventure' climbing to the periphery. The detailed story of climbing in Australia from the 1980s onwards is for others to write.

I've also included here some of my own writing about rockclimbing culture in Australia, its genesis, and some of my own experiences as a climber. This includes five columns I contributed to the now departed Australasian Climbing Journal, Crux, between 2006-2007, and a collection of other pieces I have written (and co-written) for various publications over the past decade or so. I hope it will give you some insight into the rich layers that contextualise and define rockclimbing in Australia. You can access these readings by clicking the files on the Blog Archive links on right-hand side of the page.

Like all histories, this is a version of events. It does not pretend to be the definitive account (if there is such a thing) and comes from an obvious Queensland perspective. It offers an alternative to the predominant view of Australian climbing history that has tended to assume that climbing as a mass sport started in New South Wales and Victoria. The somewhat episodic examples here provide some insight into the extraordinary range of mostly young men and women who have felt compelled to move beyond the usual pathways to explore the more elusive aspects of the Australian landscape. Although 'modern' Australian climbing began less than 100 years ago, a small number of individuals has been exploring high places here since the European invasion. Indigenous people had already inscribed every aspect of the landscape into their cosmology for millennia. But this is a story about climbing as a European 'invention'. Each climbing community around Australia and beyond has its own stories, its own histories and I hope this encourages others to tell them. Please pass on this web address to anyone you think may be interested or who has information to add (or correct) what I've presented here.

Reproducing images or text

This blog represents a small fraction of the material that I and others have accumulated during this ongoing project. It has relied on the goodwill and trust of many climbers, current and past, who agreed to be interviewed and who have offered access to their private photograph collections. Please respect the copyright on the photographs published here, asking permission from the original owners (through me, if you like) before reproducing any of the material. But share this with friends, by all means.

More to come

The book based on the material I and my colleagues have gathered in an effort to tell this fascinating story will be published in 2015. My aim has been to ensure that as many as possible of the images gathered and personal stories related to me by the climbers who have created this history are passed on to future generations drawn to the heights. The research for this continuing project has so far unearthed around 3000 images (most from private, previously unpublished collections) and close to 4000 archival documents (letters, diaries, newspaper and journal articles etc) relating to Australian climbing history. I discovered stories of adventure that have rarely, if ever, been told. I think it offers an insight into a fascinating history that few Australians--climbers especially--are aware. Please enjoy this small sample of Australia's rich, climbing heritage.

Pictures: (above) On Mount Barney and below, the author contemplating life on the east face of Tibrogargan (Michael Meadows collection).

Mist and memory

A storm during an ascent of east Beerwah.

A tiptoe through time

Louis Thomas, 10, of Melbourne in action (below) on the classic Arapiles multi-pitch climb, Tiptoe Ridge, in April, 2006. It was his second outdoor climb, having made an ascent of the Cave Climb on Bushranger's Bluff the previous day. Louis seems set on following in the footsteps of his father, Ian ('Humzoo'), who climbed with him on a memorable day. On the summit after the climb are (above from left) Ian Thomas, Louis, and Michael Meadows.

Why climb? The next generation muses...

Brian Moes (from the late 1990s) : The great thing is that whether you’re climbing 22 or 31 or 14, it’s such a personal thing. For some people, climbing a 17 is something equivalent to another person climbing something much, much harder. And that’s the beauty of climbing—it’s such a personal thing. You have to be really careful that you don’t get arrogant and start thinking that you’re better than other people.

Alison Moes (from the late 1990s): I think it’s almost the grace of it sometimes. Like it’s almost dancing when you move on a cliff. I really love that. I think it’s a combination of things like with the power and stuff like that. I like that as well. I think it’s also an achievement thing. It’s actually taught me a lot about ways of setting goals and reaching your own goals because it’s such a short-term thing. You can have one climb that you can really set your mind to and if you get it, it’s a really good feeling of achievement.

‘Tash’ (from the late 1990s): If I’ve climbed something that for me is really challenging, and I manage to get to the top of it, and I manage to get to the top of it with pretty good technique and all of that and I feel really great about it, it is the most euphoric feeling in the entire world—apart from sex. It is fantastic. It is a great feeling. I can’t explain to anyone apart from a climber or someone who is really into their sport. When they do something that was a real challenge and they just kick its arse, they know how good it feels. It’s just fantastic—it just makes me want to cry. No honestly, it’s the best feeling in the world. That’s why I climb because of those moments—they’re few and far between but they happen.

Picture: Climbers' camping area at The Pines, Mt Arapiles. Michael Meadows collection.

Attitudes to climbing through the years...

Michael Groom
(from the 1970s)

And people say, ‘Well, what are you going to do now with your life?’ But I feel so content with what I’ve done that I have no burning desire to go out and test the limits, or push the limits. I feel in some ways very fortunate that I do feel content that I’ve done so much with the early part of my life. It’s been a good life. There wouldn’t be too many things I’d change. I was able to find my passion or calling early in life—and that is, climbing—and even luckier after my second chance at it, to be able to re-live it, and continue living it after the problem with my feet; and then luckier again still by being able to earn a living from it. But as some people say, you make your own luck.

Picture: Three generations...Michael, Donn and Harry Groom. Michael Meadows collection.

Scott Camps
(from the 1970s)

I guess it became more of a personal journey—that’s what I really liked doing. I think it’s very important that a first ascentionist should be heavily active in repeating routes, particularly in a local area because you’re always broadening your knowledge and you know what you’re comparing it against. I know for a fact, a lot of the young guys haven’t done Out of the Blue and Into the Black [Tibrogargan] or Phaedra [Mt Maroon]—all those classic cutting edge routes for their time. That’s really important if you’re going to run around and beat your chest and demote routes that have previously been done and you don’t have anything to compare them against. You don’t understand how well people were climbing back then—climbing with hexes, small stoppers and a basic rack of Friends on this hard technical stuff.

Robert Staszewski
(1970s to present)

The cornerstone of rockclimbing is that the climber must bring himself [sic] to the standard required by the climb, not lower the climb to your standard. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing rockclimbing—that’s the first ethic of rockclimbing.

Picture: Robert Staszewski above the east wall on Mt Maroon, 2000. Michael Meadows collection.

Ian Thomas
(1970s to present)

Climbing gives you the time to sit down and minutely examine your immediate surroundings—a ledge, ‘There’s a rock on the edge of the thing’; ‘No I won’t touch that’; ‘There’s another rock. Look at that one—I wonder how that got there.’ It’s a funny little microscope that you have. I remember those sorts of thoughts back then. Part of the deal is you can’t get rid of that no matter where you go. If you’re sitting at a meeting and two tables are put together, your fingers can’t help but slip in between those two tables and form a little finger lock. You can’t help but feel under the table for the undercling. You can’t walk down a city street without accidentally brushing a brick and giving the mortar a bit of a tap. So I think those sorts of things are just fantastic, even if I never climbed again I would be doing that. Just driving around the countryside you can’t help but look at cliffs and things. If you travel overseas, you look at a cliff and you can’t help thinking, ‘There’s probably a route there’; or ‘There is a route there.’ That sort of stuff is with you and I don’t think that changes.

Picture: Ian Thomas in a tendon-flexing engagement with Scarab at Bundaleer, 2000. Michael Meadows collection.

Dave Gillieson
(1970s to 1990s)

I think that climbing and caving gave my life purpose and developed strong self-reliance and tolerance of others. When I was in dead-end jobs, the prospect of the weekend dominated my thoughts and kept me focussed. I made lasting friendships with people who I could rely on absolutely. I have been in difficult situations with them in deep New Guinea caves and in the Himalayas. Those shared experiences forge strong bonds that transcend geographical location.

Marion Darveniza (nee Speirs)
(late 1960s and 1970s)

[Climbing gives you] a wonderful sense of achievement and freedom. It certainly tests your problem solving skills. Perhaps it has given me the confidence to try new things and knowing that I have got good balance.

Picture: Marion Speirs in the Warrumbungles, 1967. Hugh Pechey collection.

Greg Sheard
(late 1960s to present)

I guess climbing’s something that gets into your blood. You always enjoy going back to it. I gave it away for 20 years and still came back to it for different reasons. It’s something about the mountain, the climb, the exposure and the enjoyment of it. I don’t make a tick list. I don’t climb to increase the grade. If a climb’s enjoyable I go and do it. It’s always something you go back to. You run into a lot of people who retire from climbing but they’ll still go and do it occasionally…For me, it’s not trad [traditional] climbing—the ultimate is the multi-pitch climb, regardless of whether it’s easy or not. It’s a different style of climbing. It’s as different from Frog Buttress as Kangaroo Point is from indoor climbing. I think the long multi-pitch climbs are the ones that offer the enjoyment that is most likely to appeal to people because you run across people who run across those climbs and they say, ‘This is great. This is not doing 22s, 23s, 24s—this is doing a 13 which is phenomenal.’

Picture: Michael Meadows collection.