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FEATURE
adventurous individuals who
bagged the more remote peaks in
Tasmania but during the late 19th
century, climbing was primarily a
method of scientific pursuit.By the 1850s, mountaineering in
Europe and North America was an
accepted recreational activity but
it would be three decades before
rockclimbing as a stand alone
sport emerged simultaneously
in the UK’s Lake District and in
the German alps. Australia’s first
mountaineer was Emmaline Freda
du Faur. In 1910, she became the
first Australian — and the first
woman — to climb Aoraki-Mt Cook
in the New Zealand Alps. She also
excelled as a rockclimber, honing
her skills on the rambling sandstone
outcrops of what is now Ku-ring-
gai Chase National Park in Sydney
near her family home. She was 28
years old when she stood on the
highest summit in Australasia. Some
have argued that George Finch
was Australia’s first mountaineer
although he emigrated to Europe
with his family when he was 14 and
never returned. Regardless, Finch
was an accomplished mountaineer
and scientist, inventing the down
jacket and high altitude oxygenequipment. He was part of the 1922
British Everest Expedition, climbing
with Geoffrey Bruce to a record
8321 metres on the North Ridge
using the breathing apparatus he
had designed. With the summit
around 500 metres above them,
Bruce’s equipment failed and Finch
made the agonising decision to turn
back.But on the other side of the world,
the era of modern rockclimbing
in Australia quite probably began
on a warm March morning in 1910
when a 23-year-old driver for the
Royal Australian Artillery, Henry
Mikalsen, scrambled onto the virgin
summit of the 380 metre trachyte
spire, Coonowrin or Crookneck, in
the Glass House Mountains north of
Brisbane. It took him three hours to
make the solo ascent through the
maze of shrubbery, loose boulders
and cliffs that comprise the vertical
and sometimes overhanging
north face of the mountain. Three
decades before his achievement,
Scottish-born explorer William
Landsborough acknowledged that
rockclimbing as a sport in Australia
was lagging well behind its British
antecedent. He observed shortly
before his death in 1886 that ifCrookneck was in England, ‘it would
have been climbed a dozen times’.Two years after Mikalsen’s first
ascent of Crookneck, three sisters
— Jenny, 26, Henrietta (‘Etty’), 20,
and Sara Clark, 18 — cycled from
Brisbane with ‘male companions’
to climb the mountain, becoming
the first women to do so. Wearing
‘voluminous gym clothes’ and
carrying a safety rope, they used
belaying techniques similar to those
used by climbers today, which was
just as well — one of the trio of
women slipped and was held by the
rope tied around her waist above a
30 metre drop. It was the vanguard
of an era in Australian climbing
history where women would play an
influential role.By the early 1920s, the enigmatic
Bert Salmon was a regular climber
on southeast Queensland crags.
His boundless enthusiasm perhaps
inadvertently started Australia’s
first mass climbing movement that
included significant numbers of
women — a unique feature of early
Australian climbing culture. From
the start, Salmon and his cohort
used lightweight gear — sand shoes
and small knapsacks — and shunnedMembers of Bert Salmon’s climbing group high on Mount Beerwah in the Glass House Mountains in 1932.
A. A. Salmon collection.