A white woman wears a skirt, jacket, stockings, boots, and hat stands calmly on the edge of a cliff.
“I was the first unmarried woman who had wanted to climb in New Zealand, and in consequence I received all the hard knocks until one day when I awoke more or less famous in the mountaineering world, after which I could and did do exactly as seemed to me best.”
– Emmeline Freda Du Faur
Born in Australia on the 16th of September, 1882, Emmeline Freda Du Faur did not begin as a first. She was not even the first to her name; she was named after her aunt Emmeline Woolley. Freda would find many other commonalities with Emmeline. Freda was a feminist, partly due to her aunt’s influence. Their mutual support made Freda bolder than most. She felt entitled to the rights for which her aunt had fought. By all accounts, that thrilled Emmeline. Emmeline and Freda experienced white women’s suffrage in Australia at the respective ages of 59 and 20.
As Freda grew up, the two women realized they had another thing in common: both were lesbians. Emmeline found a life-long partner in her fellow musician and children’s book author Edith Pedley.
It is hard to know how this information affected Freda, but one thing is clear: she did not do much to hide her own sexuality. In her aunt, she had found a confidant, a mentor, and an example showing her that not only did people like her exist, but they could live long happy lives. Few people at the time had access to that wisdom.
This was not all Emmeline gave Freda. Emmeline faced financial hardships as a female musician and struggled for many years. When she saw her niece struggle with and eventually leave nursing school, she feared history would repeat itself. That path seemed even more certain when, like Emmeline, Freda stumbled across her passion. At the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, Freda fell in love with mountaineering. She would write of this discovery:
“People who live amongst the mountains all their lives, who have watched them at sunrise and sunset, in midday heat or moonlight glow, love them, I believe, as they love the sun and flowers, and take them as much for granted. They have no conception how the first sight of them strikes to the very heart-strings of that less fortunate individual, the hill-lover who lives in a mountainless country. From the moment my eyes rested on the snow-clad alps I worshipped their beauty and was filled with a passionate longing to touch those shining snows, to climb to their heights of silence and solitude, and feel myself one with the mighty forces around me. The great peaks towering into the sky before me touched a chord that all the wonders of my own land had never set vibrating, and filled a blank of whose very existence I had been unconscious. Many people realize the grandeur and beauty of the mountains, who are quite content to admire them from a distance, if strenuous physical exertion is the price they must pay for a nearer acquaintance. My chief desire as I gazed at them was to reach the snow and bury my hands in its wonderful whiteness, and dig and dig till my snow-starved Australian soul was satisfied that all this wonder of white was real and would not vanish at the touch.”
Mountaineering was hardly a popular career path at the time, even less so among women, and Emmeline knew her niece needed support. She put Freda as the sole beneficiary in her will. By doing so, she passed down all she earned in her life and the ability to pursue the controversial career she had chosen.
Two years before her aunt’s death, Freda first saw pictures of New Zealand’s Mount Cook. When her aunt died in 1908 at the age of 65, Freda went to New Zealand to climb it.
She first had to find a teacher, and she was lucky in finding Peter Graham. He was a man who, by all accounts, was well respected and respected Freda in turn. Many people scoffed at even the idea of Freda taking up mountaineering because of her gender. Graham took her seriously and, after assessing her abilities, began training her in snow and ice climbing.
As she learned, the people around her began to take notice—and made their opinions known. Some mocked her for even attempting. Others came to her with sincere (if slightly patronizing) concern for her reputation. She was not dressing correctly; they insisted she wear a skirt while mountaineering. She brought the suggestion to Peter Graham, who upon inspecting the garment allowed it. The second demand was more challenging to manage; she could not go on an unsupervised overnight trip with a man.
She wrote of it in her autobiography:
“The fact that the guide in question was Peter Graham, whose reputation as a man was one at which the most rigid moralist could not cavil, made no difference. They acknowledged it was true, but seemed absolutely incapable of applying it to the facts of the case. One old lady implored me with tears in her eyes not to “spoil my life for so small a thing as climbing a mountain.” I declined gently but firmly to believe that it would be spoilt, and added, with some heat I am afraid, that if my reputation was so fragile a thing that it would not bear such a test, then I would be very well rid of a useless article.”
Still, both she and Graham attempted to find a solution, eventually deciding upon bringing a porter with them as a chaperone. While she was not happy with the situation, she accepted it. She would later write:
“I agreed to this, but felt vindictive when I thought of the extra expense entailed, and threatened to send the bill into my tormentors. Graham agreed that advice was cheap and that they might feel rather different if they were asked £1 a day for it. However, it seemed like the thin edge of the wedge, and later I would probably be beyond their advice. I sighed, not for the first time in my existence, over the limits imposed upon me by the mere fact that I was unfortunate enough to be born a woman. I would like to see a man asked to pay for something he neither needed nor wanted, when he had been hoarding up every penny so that he need not be cramped for want of funds.”
Having made her compromises, Freda began her first significant climb: Mount Sealy. After leaving the lodgings, most of the troubles fell away, and Freda focused wholeheartedly on her love of mountaineering with Peter Graham there to guide her. It seems that even from that point, she had a natural talent for climbing. She remembered this climb writing:
“At first Graham, who led, turned round every minute or so to show me a hand or foot hold, or to give me a pull with the rope on what he considered a difficult bit. He evinced considerable surprise when he usually discovered me already at his heels without the proffered assistance. Once I caught a gentle murmur that sounded like ‘Did not know I was taking out a blessed cat.’”
Trouble came with the forced compromise when the porter almost fell, but even this became a testament to Freda’s skill:
“Just as we arrived at the last rocks joining a snow slope, the porter, who was nervous, slipped, lost his footing, and slid away down the slope. In less time than it takes to tell my axe was jambed in a crack with the rope round it, and the porter brought to a standstill before Graham had time to reach me. He exclaimed, “Where did you learn that?” “I didn’t learn it; I knew it—by instinct, I suppose,” I answered, quite as surprised as he was; I had not had time to think, I had simply done it unconsciously.”
At this time, she and Graham began to discuss her future in mountaineering seriously, and she revealed her ambition to climb Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain. While Graham was not against the idea, he discouraged her from pursuing it immediately, saying:
“Climb Mount Cook at once, and you will have done what is considered the biggest climb in New Zealand, therefore you will have nothing left to look forward to here. You probably won’t enjoy the doing of it, or be fit to appreciate your success when you have gained it. Except the mere notoriety of being the first woman on the summit, you will gain nothing, and stand to lose the best of a wonderful experience, because you have tried to grasp it before you are ready to appreciate it in all its fullness. Furthermore, you will lose all the pleasure of looking forward to it and thoroughly enjoying the climbs that bring you each week a step nearer your ideal.”
Though disappointed, Freda agreed with Graham’s assessment and began making new plans upon finishing the climb. Only a week after her ascent of Mount Sealy, she could set her eyes on Mount Malte Brun. It was there that she would make her first First. She became the first known woman to climb to the summit, the fourth known person to climb it, and fastest known time, reached by taking the most dangerous route. That record would remain unbroken for years.
With her growing success came growing recognition, and since her first climb, she no longer was troubled to keep a chaperone. One thing she did keep on every climb was her skirt. It was not that she found it helpful, but she was well aware of her expectations as a woman. Before she gained any success, she was supposed to wear more traditionally feminine clothing; now that she had begun to succeed, people began expecting her to present more masculine. She outright refused. She greatly enjoyed upsetting people’s expectations now that she could do so with less backlash, and with her feminist sensibilities, she wore her skirt proudly.
Freda would go on in 1910 to attempt to climb some of New Zealand's highest mountains but was deterred by weather conditions each time. Eventually, the season ended, and she returned to Australia with Graham's advice: keep in shape.
This advice led her to the Dupain Institute of Physical Education in Sydney, where Muriel Cadogan was teaching physical fitness to women. A fierce feminist like Freda, the women got along like a house on fire.
While Freda was outspoken about her wants and ability, in general, she was a more quiet person, a temperament that Muriel contrasted nicely. Muriel was a louder, more confident woman and was deeply involved in Sydney's feminist movement, writing articles arguing for equality of the genders. The two women spent three months training together, getting Freda ready for the next season. When Freda was feeling particularly down, Muriel would make a point to exercise with her outside.
It is impossible to pin down exactly when, but the two women fell in love and would be with each other for the rest of their lives.
After three months of training with Muriel, Freda returned to New Zealand and impressed Graham with her improvement. This season she was determined; in 1910, she became the first known woman to climb Mount Cook, doing the climb in a record six hours.
Unfortunately, as Graham predicted, she wasn't incredibly proud of her climb. Though she had become the first known woman climber of the mountain, that was not what she was looking for when climbing. In reality, she was much more focused on the experience of climbing a mountain; she had fallen deeply in love with the thrill. After finding that she may not have been the first to climb another mountain, she wrote:
"Since our climb I have some reason to believe that this was not a virgin peak, but was climbed by Mr. Malcolm Ross, of Wellington, in mistake for Mount Sealy. I have not had the opportunity of clearing the matter up, but virgin or not the climb will always have a very pleasant place among my memories."
To her, the fame that had won her freedom was only useful for that purpose. Her love of the sport motivated her. In one case, when she and Graham climbed another peak, she wrote of it:
"I was indeed lucky in climbing my first virgin peak on such a day. Other peaks were ahead of me of greater name and fame, but I wondered if any of them would inspire me with the utter happiness, satisfaction, and peace of this little unknown peak, climbed on the spur of the moment and conquered only by strenuous effort."
In contrast, the climb of Mount Cook did not hold an entirely pleasant place in her memories. She wrote of it afterward:
"I gained the summit and waited for them, feeling very little, very lonely, and much inclined to cry. They caught my hands and shook them, their eyes glowing with pleasure and pride, and with an effort I swallowed the lump in my throat and laughed instead. Then we all began talking at once; it was only 8.40 a.m., and we had beaten any previous record by two hours, and I a mere woman! I felt bewildered, and could not realize that the goal I had dreamed of and striven for for years was beneath my feet."
This climb brought her the most acclaim by a large margin, yet it is not remembered as a favourite. While she was the first known, and it did get her great recognition, those things never pleased her as much as just being on the mountains did.
When a party was thrown in her honour, she continued pushing against what people expected of her, writing:
"Superstitions die hard, and being perfectly well aware that the average person's idea of a woman capable of real mountaineering or any sport demanding physical fitness and good staying power, is a masculine-looking female with short hair, a loud voice and large feet, it always gives me particular pleasure to upset this preconceived picture. In the year of grace 1910 a love of fresh air and exercise is not a purely masculine prerogative, fortunately, and should be quite easily associated with a love of beauty and personal daintiness, which the last generation deemed impossible except to the type of woman to whom personal adornment is the one serious pursuit in life.
The mere force of contrast always makes it a pleasure, after days of roughing it in suitable garments, to return to civilization and clothes which combine beauty with utility. Consequently, I strolled out to dinner immaculate in my prettiest frock, and so supported was able to face the hotel full of curious strangers and the toasts and congratulations that were the order of the evening."
She finished off the season by climbing two more of New Zealand's tallest mountains and returned home to Australia and to Muriel. When she returned for her third and final season, she arranged for Muriel to join her halfway.
This stretch was unquestionably Freda's most successful, both in the number of firsts and joy in her sport. For the first time, she had someone she felt understood both her and her love for the mountains. Together they climbed and delighted in each other's company. On her second to last climb, she would again climb Mount Cook, finding another virgin summit and naming it after Muriel.
Though she expected to return to New Zealand, she was sad to go. While she was the first person to climb the top five highest summits in the country (and seven of the top ten), her leaving also meant change. In part because of her accomplishments, more people were being drawn to mountaineering in New Zealand. The places she had felt so free were becoming crowded; the Hermitage where she stayed was torn down and replaced by a more upscale and fashionable hotel.
Not all the changes were negative ones, though, as she wrote:
"I was the first unmarried woman who had wanted to climb in New Zealand, and in consequence I received all the hard knocks until one day when I awoke more or less famous in the mountaineering world, after which I could and did do exactly as seemed to me best.
Fortunately in this world, the wonder of one day is taken as a matter, of course, the next; 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."
So when she left New Zealand, she left both her sport and the country changed, and she ended out her autobiography with a goodbye to New Zealand, writing:
"As the car rushed away across the plains a mist for a moment blotted out the towering mountains, the blue sky, and the brown faces of my comrade-guides; with a lump in my throat I waved a last farewell. Life is opening out. I may see many lands and make many friends, but as long as it shall last I will carry with me an imperishable memory of that happy home among the mountains, memories of good friends and true, of brave deeds quietly done—days of exultation and triumph, days of sorrow and failure. Love, freedom, and peace, with beauty unutterable brooding on the star-lit heights and the winding valleys; dear home of hopes and dreams, may fate some day bring me back again to wander in well-remembered ways, but now—
I leave the brown lands; crying, 'Sorry to go,' 'Sorry to go'—
'Good-bye!' and 'God-speed!' and … 'Sorry to go!'"
In 1914 Emmeline Freda Du Faur moved with Muriel Cadogan to England, where they would live together. In her time there, she experienced again the suffrage of the white women in the country. Most of her time, though, was spent writing her biography.
Her story had spread throughout New Zealand, and hers was a well-known name. The same could not be said for her home country Australia. There Muriel was by far the more famous of the two. As previously stated, Muriel was a fierce feminist and ran a relatively well-respected feminist club in Sydney.
Because of World War I, they were unable to do the mountaineering they had planned together. Freda took the time to write her autobiography, and Muriel worked for the Women’s Service Bureau. Around this point, most discussions of Freda’s life wrap up, but this is not the end of her story.
At the end of World War I, the two women were able to return to Australia to mourn their father’s, both of whom had passed away while they were gone. They returned to England soon after.
Settling in a seaside town called Bournemouth, the women continued their quiet life together for quite some time. Muriel had plans of becoming a doctor, which Freda supported with 2,000 pounds, coincidentally the same amount her aunt Emmeline had left Freda to follow her dreams.
Tragically, Freda recorded that in 1929 Muriel had a mental break. It is hard to precisely understand what happened as the common knowledge of mental illness was not very nuanced, but it is known that the situation scared Freda. Muriel began causing scenes in public, and seeing no other choice, Freda brought her to a doctor. Freda wrote:
“I was very tired; having been through a great strain nursing Ms. Cadogan for a year, and the night before had no sleep, as Ms. Cadogan went insane and made a scene in the boarding house we were staying at. I had smoothed matters over and had taken her at 8 A.M. to Dr. Dean; to whom she was so rude he lost his temper and said if she was not careful she would find herself in a padded cell. I arranged with Dr. Morten that Ms. Cadogan was to go to a nursing home for a few weeks and then I unnacountably said; I can’t go on doctor, I’m afraid of a nervous breakdown. Take a rest cure said Dr. Morten, for a week or longer. He had given me the name of Strathallen, a large Boscam nursing home for Ms. Cadogan. I decided we would both go there together.
It was 4:30 PM when we got there. We had both walked all day since 8 AM with no food. I arranged that we were both to come in for 6 pounds 6 a week. I was taken up to see the room in which we were both to be together. I came down to tell Ms. Cadogan it would do. She was gone.”
It is impossible to know whether Muriel was taken away willingly or not, as this would be one of the last times Freda would see her. Though male homosexuality was illegal, lesbianism was not and was instead seen as a psychological disorder. It seems that the facility had somehow discovered Freda and Muriel’s relationship before they arrived, and had taken it upon themselves to cure it.
Just as Muriel had been taken away, so to was Freda. She wrote:
“For a week I was in a dazed semi-consious state. Asleep all night and half the day. I think I must have been heavily drugged. I took whatever medicine and food I was given. I had a queer experience I could not account for.
A voice said to me, I was awake, “You will have nothing of your own anymore and never be as before. You have an inverted hedonistic persuasion at four points. Will you become a Jewess and do as you are told? Or have eternal pain?” I said I was a Christian and forgot the matter.”
When Freda could get out at the end of the week, she found that Muriel had been taken to another facility closer to Dr. Dean.
The doctor had decided that the source of Muriel’s problems was Freda and their relationship. Since Freda was not recognized legally as Muriel’s partner, there was little she could do. Still, she showed up to visit Muriel. Freda was able to get in a couple of times against Dr. Dean’s orders; they tried to turn her away by saying that Muriel had contracted influenza, but Freda insisted and got in. When she saw Muriel, the other woman was drugged and didn’t seem herself. After this visit, the institution banned Freda from seeing Muriel. Dr. Dean had contacted Muriel’s family, who had been given guardianship over her because of Muriel’s supposed mental state. Her sister came from Sydney to bring her back to Australia and separate the two. Of their final visit, Freda wrote:
“She was so changed, I hardly knew her. She was frightened and clung to me. I asked her to stay with me, but she felt she must go home to Sydney. She was put on board the port Huwen, a cargo boat with no comforts. I received a cable to say she had died in the Red Sea of heat prostration.”
It is widely known now that the true cause of death was suicide.
Muriel had left everything to Freda, but both Muriel’s brother and Dr. Dean fought her for the sum to the point she was forced to stay in Sydney for two years before receiving it in full. It seemed only shortly before Muriel’s death, Dr. Dean had extorted exuberant amounts of money from the fragile woman for her non-consensual treatment.
There were marks left on Freda from her “treatment,” both physical and psychological. What happened to her in her week in the facility was mostly a mystery to Freda. In the end, she returned to England two times in an attempt to discover what exactly had been done to her. A woman who had previously been confident in herself and even somewhat open about being a lesbian changed. She experienced what is now understood as flashbacks and reported voices in her head that scared her; she wrote of this:
“My hedonistic persuasion inverted has ruined the last six years of my life. I cannot sleep, or read, or write, or think without the processes being followed. I know I was hypnotized in Strathallen Hospital. An Australian girl once said to me, “Have you heard the voices in the air?” I never stop hearing them. And they never stop discussing my private business.”
Freda attempted to get her life back, visiting the Grahams, joining a bushwalking society in Australia, but her mental state was steadily declining. She met a fifteen-year-old girl, Francis Lorde, whom she had taken under her wing much as her aunt had done with her. She wrote the girl into her will, leaving everything she had to Francis.
In 1935, seven years after the death of her life partner Muriel and the trauma she endured at Strathallen Hospital, Freda also committed suicide. Her family would go against her wishes to be cremated and buried her in an unmarked grave as they considered it to be less trouble. Her family contested her will, in which she left all of her possessions to Francis Lorde, on the grounds of insanity.
While Freda was widely known in New Zealand, she was never as famous in Australia, so her death and life went mostly unnoticed for a long while. It was in the end because of the biography Between Heaven and Earth: The Life of Mountaineer Freda du Faur: 1882–1935 written by Sally Irwin and released in 2000 that interest in Freda was renewed. In particular, a farmer from New Zealand named Ashley Gaulter read the book and, recalling his reaction, said:
“I read that she was over here in Manly Cemetary, and at the time, I was living quite close by, and I thought, well, I’ll go and find her. And couldn’t in the first instant, and then found a map and tracked her down and found this poor little patch of grass surrounded by other tombstones and pieces and there she lay in an unmarked grave.
And that seemed like an injustice. And I understood the reasons why and that she took her own life and that she lived a pretty alternative lifestyle for the day that wouldn’t have been broadly accepted, living with another woman and so on. But it still seemed like a wrong thing to do so. I thought we would do something about that.”
Gaulter contacted a friend who worked at the paper who did a piece about the situation, alerting many more New Zealanders to the injustice done to one of their cultural icons. A local stonemason came forward, offering up a rock that resembled one of the summits Freda climbed, and together they made both a monument and a plaque for Freda.
Many of the people who still tell her story have worked hard to ensure her relationship with Muriel Cardogan is not forgotten or dismissed as friendship. Gaulter said of this:
“She’s got a lot of people batting for her now, which maybe she didn’t have towards the end of her life.”
References and Further Reading
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Du Faur, F. (1915). Chapter XXII — Good-Bye to New Zealand. In The counquest of Mount Cook and other climbs: An account of four seasons’ mountaineering on the Southern Alps of New Zealand (pp. 238–246). George Allen and Unwin Ltd. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-FauConq-t1-body-d22.html
Emmeline Freda Du Faur | Monument Australia. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2020, from https://www.monumentaustralia.org.au/australian_monument/display/109145
Emmeline Freda Du Faur: Pioneering Mountain Climber. (2020, November 10). CURVE. https://www.curvemag.com/culture/history/emmeline-freda-du-faur-pioneering-mountain-climber/
Family Notices. (1882, September 18). Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), 1.
FEMINIST CLUB. (1914, December 5). Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 - 1950), 3.
Finding Freda Du Faur: Articles: SummitPost. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2020, from https://www.summitpost.org/finding-freda-du-faur/188031
Langton, G. (1996). Du Faur, Emmeline Freda [Encyclopedia]. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatu Taonga. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3d17/du-faur-emmeline-freda
O’Donnell, E. J. (n.d.). Du Faur, Emmeline Freda (1882–1935). In Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved November 19, 2020, from http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/du-faur-emmeline-freda-6025
Rayner, M. (2009, May). HIndsight [Podcast]. https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2009/05/hht_20090524.mp3