Fifty years ago climbed ‘Mother Woila’, at the southern end of the Deua National Park, perhaps the last mountain to be climbed by Europeans in Australia. Geoff Mosley has sent in a report on the climb.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
By Geoff Mosley
Federation Peak in the Eastern Arthur Range of Tasmania remained unclimbed for 48 years after it gained that name and my friend Jack Thwaites was robbed of the prize of being first by John Bechervaise’s ascent of 1949. Jack’s efforts are rightly commemorated in ‘The Thwaites Plateau’, a well-known place for camping on the approach to the Peak. But was it possible that there was still an unclimbed peak in the eastern part of mainland Australia in the 1960s? It seemed unlikely until we happened on what looked like a possible candidate.
Chance certainly played a role in our discovery of this peak – a green mountain no less. In 1962, attracted by the names ‘Tinpot’ and ‘Utopia’ near Belrowra, I organised what I called “a CWTC bludge trip” to examine the old gold diggings there and soak in the nearby Tuross River. As we drove along the Belowra to Nerrigundah road and looked west we were surprised to see some fascinating rocky peaks that were not named on any of our maps. All we could be sure of was that whatever we were looking at it was roughly in line with Big Badja a prominent named peak further west. In July 1963 Geoff Marston and I climbed Big Badja with the aim of getting a look at our mystery mountain from the other side. On the way back, describing the peak we had seen to a Mr Broadhead at the local sawmill, he said “That’s Mother Woila”, pronouncing it “Wily”.
The first CWTC attempt of five walkers to reach the mountain we had seen from Big Badja on the weekend of 4-5 July, 1964 was a failure because the route we took from Breakfast Creek near Snowball Outstation across the deeply incised left bank tributaries of Woila Creek was very difficult and took up far too much time. Retreating to a more passable west-east running broad ridge we found our way to the top of a spur which appeared to run directly towards the northern base of Mother Woila. It was getting very late but we could not resist going further. Closer to the mountain the spur became a razor back and, reaching the end, we saw that it finished at the bottom of a scree underneath some cliffs above which was the tree covered summit area. Unfortunately, by then, it was 4 pm and since the night was almost upon us we regretfully retreated back up the spur to a campsite near a stream head. The following day we made our way back to the cars by way of Mt Dampier. Quite a few people were surprised when we told them we would be returning to the area the following weekend. To three of us the lure of this new country was irresistible.
So it was that on the evening of Friday 10th July, Geoff Marston, Noel Semple and myself returned to the fray. This time we spent the first night at a dry camp at the foot of Mt Dampier and having climbed to the top approached our goal by way of the long ridge running south from it towards our Mother Woila. The ridge was for several kilometres a grave yard of fallen trees but since they were all aligned down the ridge they actually speeded up our progress, as we ran along one tree and leapt onto the next. Perhaps we were going too fast because we missed the soak we had found the previous weekend. This was a big problem for me because ever conscious of reducing weight I had brought no water with me. At the bottom of the razer back we had reached a week earlier we found a passable gulley cum chimney up the cliff and to the summit of Mother Woila where we left a tin and a note pad for future visitors to add their names. There was nothing there to suggest the area had ever been previously visited. Once again we had very little time before dark to get back up the spur to what we hoped would be a campsite near the stream discovered the previous weekend but this was not to be. As we climbed up there was a noticeable increase in wind speed and this soon reached hurricane proportions. Bearing in mind all those fallen trees we had traversed earlier in the day the best we could do was to look for the most sheltered spot, unfortunately not near the creek. All night long the hurricane raged and trees fell down all around us.
We were to learn on return to Canberra that there had also been a major storm in the Alps which because of the heavy snow falls trapped people in the ski resorts for several days. Unfortunately, for us the hurricane brought no rain so next morning we broke camp early and picking our way over the fallen trees set out to try and find that illusive soak. We found it and I later wrote ‘never had water been so sweet’. I had had nothing to drink for forty hours!
Was our ascent of Mother Woila the first by Europeans? We could find no reference to a visit in any of the bushwalking magazines, but to throw the net wider I wrote an account entitled ‘The Last Green Mountain?’ that was published on the front page of The Braidwood Dispatch of 12th August, 1964. Many years later on his last visit to Australia, not long before his death in 2002, Geoff Marston told me he had had a similar piece published in The Canberra Times but I never discovered its date. There was no response concerning any earlier visits from anyone. Geoff, who was a lecturer in law at ANU had returned to take up a post at Cambridge University in 1973.
With no maps of any value for exploring the area, after our successful trip, I created a sketch map from 3D aerial photographs using hachures instead of contours. I named the other main topographic features in the area as follows: ‘Tabletop’ (a flat topped mountain and perhaps the one we had first seen from the east), ‘Scout Hat’ (no need for an explanation), ‘Little Woila’ (a lesser sister peak), and ‘Horseshoe Point’ (located at a pivotal point of two ridges leading to Mother Woila and Tabletop). From this map and glimpses from the top of Mother Woila it became obvious that there was another desirable target in the area – a circuit taking in Mother Woila, Tabletop, Scout Hat and the Woila Clearing, but more investigation seemed to be necessary before we embarked on that. We were not even sure that anyone had ever made it to Tabletop.
The first reconnaissance trip was made in March, 1965 with two Newcastle bushwalkers, Selby Alley and Malcolm Watson. We got as far as Tabletop and from there took a peek at the interesting looking ridge running down towards Scout Hat. What was clear was that the circuit could be attempted in either direction from Horseshoe Point. In late 1965 I tried again, this time with Milo Dunphy. We went over Dampier and Tabletop and then dropped down to Scout Hat and the Mother Woila clearing returning to our car by way of Euranbene Mt. I suppose one could call that a half circuit. Three things are memorable about that trip: being surrounded by howling dingos at our camp site at the foot of Mt Dampier; traversing the rocky ridge between Tabletop and Scout Hat (Milo said this was the most exposed ridge he had ever experienced); and pouring salt instead of sugar on the dessert I had prepared at the Woila Creek campsite. In December, 1965 we made plans for a circuit attempt by a combined party from Newcastle (me), Sydney and Canberra travelling to a start at the Woila Clearing and arriving there via Belowra and a walk up the Woila Creek. This turned out to be a disaster since both groups had navigation problems and the mosquitoes were terrible. The only outcome was that on 27th December, 1965 I made a solo climb of Mother Woila from the south west. Although the two parties finally met up there was no chance of a circuit attempt since I had to get back to join my family for our Christmas holiday. Geoff Marston wrote as his epitaph for the trip ‘Never has man gone so far for so little’.
So far we had taken a leisurely approach (too leisurely) to walking the circuit. All that changed when Geoff Marston told me that he had heard that Rick Higgins planned to do the circuit that Easter. This threat to our sacred soil could not be taken lightly which is why at 10.30 pm on Friday 7th April, 1966 another CBC member Karl Erett and I walked for several hours in the dark and made camp on what we thought was the top of Mt Euranbene ready to dash down to the Woila Clearing in the morning and attempt the circuit from there on that same day. Unfortunately, when we awoke we were not sure that we actually were on Euranbene and stupidly headed off to what turned out to be Big Badja (we had been on Euranbene). By the time we reached the Woila Clearing it was 11.30 am and we had lost three and a half hours. Leaving at 12.35 pm all we could now do was attempt to complete the circuit in 24 hours which we did camping at Horseshoe Point and arriving back at the Clearing at 10.25 am the next day.
The Mother Woila trips over four years, from first sighting to completing the circuit, were very much an experience of wilderness, intensified in this case by the fact that there were no accounts, maps, or photographs of the area to provide us with ideas about what we were likely to encounter. Not knowing where Mother Woila was also added spice (an extra thrill) to our trips. All that changed when we published news of our trips in the CWTC and CBC journals and I produced a detailed sketch map. Perhaps I did the wrong thing in producing that map.
Colin Gibson published a report on bushwalker visitation to the Mother Woila –Tabletop area between 1964 and 1988 in The Bushwalker (‘Mother Woila – Special Feature’ August 1994, 20 (1), pp. 6-7). In 1973 at the request of a member of the CBC I had written a detailed account for It of our six trips to the area but my ms evidently disappeared into thin air and I had failed to make a copy. The publication of Gibson’s account nagged at my conscience so 24 years later I had another go and you can find this account in Issue 66 of Wild magazine (‘Discovering Mother Woila’, pp. 42-47). By this time there were reliable 1:25,000 maps of the area (‘Snowball’ and ‘Badja’). Thirty plus years on my memory was not perfect and it was after the Wild account was published that Malcolm Watson reminded me that in 1965 we had in fact visited Tabletop (unlike me he had kept a diary). Writing this it is nearly 50 years since we reached the summit of Mother Woila but there is fortunately much about the area I can still remember and take pleasure from.