By Freda Du Faur, Foreword by K.L. Webber
Coming as I do from a family of adventure-seeking climbers and mountaineers, it is an inspiring, yet daunting, task to undertake an exploration of the history of Emmeline Freda Du Faur, Australia’s first woman mountaineer, who was in her day the top amateur mountaineer in the world. I have the good fortune to live close to the Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park, where Du Faur grew up, roaming with her dog, and where I often hike and rock climb, my footsteps surely crossing and overlapping with those of Du Faur’s. On each long walk down to the crags, I find myself looking for the echoes of her personality in the land, inspired by the steep valley vistas. I’ve hiked in New Zealand with my family, looking in awe at the mountains she ascended. The international rock climbing and mountaineering communities (for there is both overlap and distinction between these) are full of powerful, capable climbers today, who are the spiritual descendants of Freda Du Faur. In recognition of this, I confess to being impressed with a definite case of hero worship, and I’m clearly not the first: the craggy bushland of Mount Colah in the north of Sydney boasts the “Du Faur Wall” rock climbing area, and the names of individual climbs in the area pay homage to a trail blazing mountaineer. There is ‘Freda Soul’, ‘Petticoat Brigade’ and ‘Oh Muriel’, amongst many others. She might have slowly evaporated from the public consciousness since the hey-day of her acclaim, but the local climbing community still remembers Freda Du Faur.
I first ‘met’ Freda in a museum near Aoraki/Mount Cook. It had been raining, as is often the case in the Land of the Long White Cloud, and on a day of rest after hiking with our families over the pass towards Mount Aspiring, we children (for I was a child, then), were turned loose to explore the cultural center, and provide our parents with some quiet relief.
In a back corner, there was a photo of a woman, monochromatic, looking away from the camera into the distance, the mountains in her eyes, her small head surmounted by heavy-seeming coils of hair atop a long neck. A white, long-sleeved, high-necked shirtwaist, with knee length skirt, thick black stockings, and boots. A long ice axe in her right hand anchored her to the ground, and one foot was perched atop a rock. A woman in the wilderness, ready to walk out of the frame towards the high peaks. There was accompanying information, which described her life and mountaineering exploits in a few short passages. I dragged my parents over to look, admire, witness. I spent the next few days daydreaming that I was her companion, roaming through the peaks and fording boulder-smashed rivers. But… enough of me. You’re here for her.
…
Emmeline Freda Du Faur was born in Sydney in 1882, and spent much of her youth living near the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, where (as she will tell you) she explored the hills alone, and honed a rare confidence in her own physical abilities for women of the age. Du Faur’s childhood took place over the tipping point between the late Victorian and Edwardian eras: corsets, dresses and social conventions were restrictive. In Australia, basic education was compulsory, though impossible to enforce, and the standards of teaching were low. But literacy was increasing. The middle class was becoming better educated and better off, enabling women began to access wider networks of information and support. In 1902, white women across the Commonwealth of Australia were granted the right to vote, though indigenous people from Africa and the Asia Pacific region were barred (excepting those of Maori descent). In 1903 in the United Kingdom, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Advocates and protestors for women’s rights began to make louder demands for autonomy. Coupled with these slowly won changes was an inevitable resistance to them.
Freda Du Faur’s father, Frederick Eccleston Du Faur, was a keen traveler, cartographer and businessman, and Du Faur may have inherited her love of exploration from Eccleston, who was both a fellow and chairman of the geographical of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and who funded a number of expeditions in Australia and New Guinea throughout the 1870s. After the death of his first wife, Augusta Louisa Du Faur, in childbirth, he remarried Blanche Mary Elizabeth Du Faur, and they had four children, one of them Emmeline Freda Du Faur.
Du Faur grew up in the middle of this era of social foment, exploring the wild bush solo and developing her skills in rock climbing. Her father, reported that “She started climbing over the Cowan hills when she was about 13, … and even then did such venturesome things that I thought she was a little too daring, though she never came to grief.”[i] Du Faur trained as a nurse, but found the emotional demands and stress of the work too difficult to endure, a fact that she admitted frankly. Luckily, she received a small inheritance from her namesake composer and musician aunt, Emmeline Woolley (1843-1908), which provided enough for Du Faur to live independently. On a trip to New Zealand in 1906, she discovered the mountains, and what was to become the consuming passion of her life. Upon a later 1908 trip to investigate the mountains in more detail, she met the alpinist and guide Peter Graham, who agreed to train her in mountaineering techniques, and who would be one of her chief climbing companions for the next few years. Together they planned to climb together, despite the disapproval of other women holidaying in the area, who were horrified as to what climbing alone with a man might do to Du Faur’s reputation. Graham suggested a compromise, that a second guide be employed as a chaperone. Frustrated by the unnecessary outlay of funds that she had been saving, for so unnecessary and fragile an article as a reputation, Du Faur wrote that, “for about ten minutes I almost succeeded in wishing that I possessed that useful appendage to a woman climber, a husband.” The porter they ended up employing for the purpose was both unfit and unfamiliar with the mountains: on the slopes, Du Faur ended up saving his life when he slipped and fell.
In preparation for her 1910 ascent of Mount Cook, Du Faur trained at the Dupain Institute of Physical Education, where she met Muriel Cadogan, a trainer, writer and co-editor of the The Dupain Quarterly, advocate for clothing reform[ii] and (most importantly) the woman with whom Du Faur would form an enduring lesbian relationship. In time, Du Faur would make a number of first ascents, and named the peak Mt. Cadogan[iii] in honor of her partner, whom she described as a “thoroughly sympathetic companion.” Upon successfully completing the expedition, Du Faur became not only the first woman to climb Aoraki/Mt. Cook, but also broke the previous record by completing her ascent in 6 hours. It was to become one in a string of first ascents and traverses in the South Island in the seasons that Du Faur climbed there, and her actions, in addition to demonstrating her technical expertise and physical endurance, broke the mold on what was permitted to a female mountaineer. Future women climbers would not be required to employ porters to guard their reputations; nor would they be so hampered by the rigid refusal of the climbing community to admit them in.
“…so now, five years after my first fight for individual freedom, the girl climber at the Hermitage need expect nothing worse than raised eyebrows when she starts out unchaperoned and clad in climbing costume. It is some consolation to have achieved as much as this, and to have blazed one more little path through ignorance and convention, and added one tiny spark to the ever-growing beacon lighted by the women of this generation to help their fellow-travellers climb out of the dark woods and valleys of conventional tradition and gain the fresh, invigorating air and wider view-point of the mountain-tops.”
…
However, the ending of The Conquest of Mount Cook is bittersweet when we read it with the longitudinal focus of time. Conquest is a snapshot of the passions and adventures of Du Faur’s early years mountaineering, and she seems so certain to continue on in bright hope to higher and higher slopes. Perhaps there might have been a Conquest of Mont Blanc, or an account of Mountaineering in the Himalayas to follow, had all continued well…
But The Conquest of Mount Cook was only written because the outbreak of World War One prevented Du Faur, who had moved to the United Kingdom and established a household with Cadogan in 1913, from climbing in Europe. They remained together, mainly living in a property in Boscombe, until 1929, but the historic record is silent as to Du Faur’s mountaineering feats or training, or even their adventures during that era. In an interview with The Sun, Du Faur’s father reported that at the outbreak of the War, Du Faur had been living in a Breton village with some female companions (Muriel most likely amongst them). In order to return to England, and relatively safety, the women walked 20 miles throughout the night to a nearby port, risking being challenged for their passports[iv] in order to make a 5:00am boat. Little other information is extant about Du Faur and Cadogan’s experiences in the war years.
Sometime in 1929, following what may have been a breakdown in Cadogan’s mental or physical health, Cadogan and Du Faur admitted themselves to hospital. When the nature of their relationship was comprehended, Du Faur was prevented from visiting her partner, and she left the hospital, whilst Cadogan continued treatment. Cadogan’s family arrived to take her back to Australia. She died[v] on the voyage home on 6th June 1929, from causes never explained.
Du Faur never climbed again. Eventually, she returned to Australia, living briefly with her brother and his family, before spending the remaining years of her life alone in Dee Why, where she resumed the solitary bushwalks of her youth. Her mother Blanche had died in 1906, her father Eccleston in 1915. Finally, under the weight of deteriorating mental health, Du Faur committed suicide in her home on 13th September, 1935. She was 53 years old. [vi]
The last mention of her life in the newspapers[vii] is the report that the proceedings to test the validity of Du Faur’s will were underway before the Probate Court.
Until 2006, her grave in the Manly General Cemetary was unmarked except for a small rock cairn erected by Ashley Gualter. In December 2006, a small group of people from the Australian and New Zealand communities arranged for the installation and dedication of a memorial plaque for Freda Du Faur, complete with a stone from Aoraki/Mount Cook. For further details on the people who organized this, read the article Finding Freda Du Faur on SummitPost.org.
And, finally, dear reader, page on. Read Du Faur’s words, and recount her incredible adventures. This is the only autobiography left to us of an incredible, courageous, trail-blazing woman, and her ‘thoroughly sympathetic’ lover.
K.L. Webber, June 2016
…
“In an ordinary way the culminating moments of a climb are the last few, when you are nearing the summit and eagerly strain forward for the first glimpse of what lies beyond. It is then you know the thrill of victory and achievement in its fullness, a feeling so subtle and soul-satisfying as to defy analysis, and which is absent, no matter how great is your achievement, when you conquer and see nothing.”
Freda Du Faur
Would you like to read more? You can download a copy of The Ascent of Mount Cook here.
[i] The Sun, Sun 18 Apr 1915, ‘Miss Du Faur: Sydney’s Alpine Climber’
[ii] The Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser, Fri 28 Mar 1913, ‘The Evil that Corsets Do’
[iii] Australian Dictionary of Biography, 25 Jun 2017
[iv] The Sun, Sun 18 Apr 1915, ‘Miss Du Faur: Sydney’s Alpine Climber’
[v] The Sydney Morning Herald, Fri 15 Jun 1929, ‘Deaths’
[vi] The Sydney Morning Herald, Fri 20 Sep 1935, ‘Deaths’
[vii] The Sydney Morning Herald, Tues 3 Mar 1936, ‘Probate Court: Byles v Du Faur’