Taoka
This is the first photograph of rock climbing in the Darrans I remember seeing. George Harris took the picture. It shows Murray Jones on the south face of Talbot in January 1968. He’s standing in his etriers, aid climbing over a small roof. In some ways it doesn’t pay to think about that too carefully. Really? Aid climbing? But having carried all that paraphernalia up there, I guess he wanted to use it.
The sun is shining. Murray is posing for the camera. It’s quite Étoile et Tempête, though the knitwear is plainer. The rock is coarse and dry, and above the overhang the crack scampers away up the face.
‘Oh yes, George. I have the feeling the country here does not knock you around as much as the other alpine areas. I feel that you could climb here forever’.
By 1968, the idea the Darrans might be well suited to technical rock climbing was pretty well established. In March 1964, John Evans and Jeff Foott climbed Mitre Peak from the north (IV, 5.7) on their way back to the US from McMurdo Station. There were few piton cracks but an abundance of small but sturdy rock horns. ‘The dripping wall above us seemed especially evil . . .’ In December the following year, Murray stood with Harold Jacobs at the bottom of the highest shingle fan at the head of Lake Marian, waiting for the fog to clear so they could see where to start climbing the Marian buttress of Crosscut. On the South Ridge of Christina in March 1966, Murray thought of how Darrans climbing reminded him of the tales of the European Alps.
The photograph of Murray on Talbot is on page 370 of the 1968 New Zealand Alpine Journal. Lay the issues from 1967 to 1970 out together and you have a fine quartet of modernist, International Typographic Style designs. Each has tightly-set sans-serif type, flush left, ragged right, accompanied by a single, sparely executed line drawing. They are possibly my favourite journal covers.
Inside, there’s a story being told, year on year, although its narrative shape is much more sharply defined, I’m sure, in retrospect. It begins on the Cleddau Buttress in January 1967, which Murray and Harold climbed in two stages, starting from the road where the tunnel opens out into the valley: ‘The hold I hoped for there felt non-existent, so down I went for one of my periodic falls’.
There’s Talbot the following year, but in between Murray has spent the summer climbing in Europe. He sets the story, ‘European Tales’, in Harold Jacobs’s kitchen in Te Anau. Harold is thumbing through a book of Welsh rock climbing and asks: ‘How did Cloggy compare?’
‘How could I explain, even to Harold who understood rock climbing?’
‘Had I explained why I felt a longing now to get “gripped up” on those grey slabs of Cloggy or why the sea had taken on a new meaning for me since I had climbed out and above it on the Isle of Anglesey? A man’s greatest weakness is his inability to express himself’.
By the end of 1968, Murray and Harold have climbed the North Buttress of Sabre. Then in February 1969 they fly into Te Pūoho for ten days, climbing two routes on Te Wera – one a direct line on the south-east face – and the East Ridge of Ngāi Tahu.
The drawing on the cover of the 1970 journal is titled ‘North Face’. It’s by Jill Tremain. Inside, Graeme Dingle writes about climbing the six classic north faces of the Alps, with Murray, during the 1969 summer. ‘I was strongly attracted to the European Alps, largely so that I could see and experience routes which had become familiar and even legendary through books’.
It would have been later in the 1970s that I first saw this photo of Murray. My father was an associate NZAC member in the 1960s, making a series of long transalpine trips into South Westland. I would sit on the floor in the living room and browse through his climbing books. My own legendary routes from that time were in books by Arthur Harper, Samuel Turner, John Pascoe and Mike Gill. And in these tales of Murray Jones.
What is a taonga? A taonga can be the embodiment of an ancestor. But it lives in the present. It tells tales and inspires new stories. It is a gift but it comes with an obligation. All of those things are present now when I look at this photograph. But when I saw this picture again recently for the first time in a long while, it was not the photograph that I remembered. In memory everything was altogether more serious. Steeper. Smoother. Damper. Struggle, not scampering. Rather than composure and satisfaction I had detected anxiety, perhaps even fear, in the way Murray grips his slings, leans out and scans the sky beyond the right edge of the image. So this is my first memory of Darrans climbing, and the way I remembered it, I didn’t think I’d like it.
This story appeared in the Climber 100, Winter 2017
