AUGUST 2017AWW.COM.AU 59
ABOVE: Jade at
the completion
of her trek at
Greenland’s
Isortoq hut.to ignore society’s messages “to be less – to eat
less, to wear less, to be skinnier, to shrink my
ambitions to fit in, to wait for my Prince
Charming to come and save me”.
“I feel like people are always bringing girls
down nowadays, telling them they can’t, or they
do something ‘like a girl’ – and that’s supposed
to be offensive,” she says. “If someone has a
goal they should try to achieve it, especially
young girls – and I think it’s important to share
that message.”
Every night in Greenland, thanks to a satellite
modem, Jade would send a photo and an
Instagram post home to keep followers up to
date with her progress. At the end of each day,
she and her dad would shovel snow and melt it
on a stove in their tent for three hours to make
water, then it was dinner, journal writing, and
the all-important call home to mum Vanessa and
younger brother Kane in Melbourne.
For Vanessa, it was a chance to gauge her
daughter’s mental state, which is always her
number one concern. Jade was invariably upbeat,
but that didn’t stop the anxiety. After a month
of fitful sleep, constant phone checking and the
white noise of daily worry, Vanessa could finally
relax when the other half of her family arrived
home. “Even though I had a snoring husband
beside me, I could actually sleep,” she says, with
a laugh. “I’m absolutely broken. Very happy,
but broken.”
Pottering in the kitchen while Jade talks to
The Weeklyat the dining table, Vanessa pipes up
when her daughter fails to rule out a future crack
at Everest. She reminds her daughter of the deal
they made when the family trekked to Everest
base camp when Jade was 12. “I said, ‘We’ll go
as long as you don’t want to climb Mount
Everest’,” says Vanessa – and so begins a bit of
minor mother-daughter argy-bargy. “Well, who
knows?” replies Jade. “Maybe one day. Once I’m
18 I can do what I want.” Ruling a line under the
discussion, Vanessa says, “Well, you’re not 18 yet.”
With Jade off to the South Pole in late
November, Vanessa is bracing for a sleepless
summer. It will be Jade’s biggest challenge yet:
skiing from the coast of Antarctica to the South
Pole, an adventure that will take her across
1170km in 60 days. If she reaches the pole,
Jade will be the youngest person and the first
Australian woman to do it, but she is only too
aware of what it will take to get there: “I’m
excited, but I also know that it’s going to be
a lot colder, a lot longer, a lot harder.”
Then again, as Jade says, “If it were easy,
it wouldn’t be amazing.”AWW“If
someone
has a
goal
they
should
try to
achieve
it.”