Foreword

Frenchmans Cap is Australia’s most majestic mountain.

As Frances Cox observed on her walk along Tasmania’s remote Linda Track to Queenstown in 1890, ‘like the Matterhorn, the Frenchman is unique!’

In this book, Simon Kleinig chronicles the public rapture with Frenchmans Cap since the convicts in Macquarie Harbour’s infamous prison named it in the early 1820s. The defiant white-topped mountain 35 kilometres to the north symbolised their dreams of France’s post-revolutionary freedom and equality.

That rapture lights up the record of remarkable and, at times, terrifying efforts by adventurers and nature lovers to reach the Cap, then climb it, then make it more easily accessible for others.

‘The Frenchmans Tier in its massive grandeur...is grandly sublime and indescribably beautiful...if there is an Elysium (paradise) on Earth, it is this. Poets and artists would feast their eyes of its glories and immortalise its splendours’, wrote Thomas Moore in 1887.

And so they did!

‘The Frenchmans Cap, nearly 5,000 ft high, suddenly burst upon us in all its glory’ – James Walker later in 1887.

‘The Monarch of the West’ – J. E. Philp, 1910.

‘A crowded hour of glorious ecstasy!’ – Robert Eyes, on top, 1914.

‘The object of our desires revealed himself in all his beauty to our fascinated gaze’ – Fred Smithies, 1928.

‘The most spectacular mountain in Tasmania’ – Sydney Laughton, 1929.

‘A glowing pillar of fire’ – Jack Thwaites, at sunset, 1934.

‘I doubt if the conquerors of Everest looked down on to anything more inspiring or sublime’ – Frank Hurley, on top, 1947.

While the popular Romanticism of a century ago has diluted, the newcomer’s awe of the Cap has not. Half a century ago, Frenchmans Cap was reached by rock climbers.

In 1962, Peter Sands, roped halfway up the grand east face of the Cap overnight, wrote ‘we are now high up on the edge of the east face...the full moon rose and the wall just glowed like the screen of a drive-in theatre...it was an awesome experience... there are occasions in a young man’s life when it is better his mother does not know what he is doing!’

A decade later, David Neilson, after spending a night roped on the same spot, wrote ‘it was a sunrise without equal, for we had bivouacked in the centre of the most impressive rock face in Australia’.

In 1977, with rock climber turned rafter Rick Rolls, I walked southeast to the summit of Frenchmans Cap, and back, from the Irenabyss campsite on the Franklin River. It was a hot, sunny day and we were delighted by both the openness of the ridge top and the loveliness of the scenery.

On top we were met by a patch of snow and a field of purple, six-petalled Hewardias (Isophysis tasmanica). The panorama was spellbinding, including the view back to Macquarie Harbour and its prison site.

We knew we were walking thousands of years behind the Aboriginal settlers who crossed Bass Strait to Tasmania during the last ice age. They had encountered glaciers crunching down the flanks of this great mountain, which they called ‘Mebbelek’.

However we didn’t know that we were way behind Thomas and James Moore, Walter Smith and Howard Wright who had ascended up the same northwest ridgeline in 1887. Or that a party of unnamed convicts working for surveyor James Sprent had been the first to reach the top, from the east, on 16 January 1853.

Or were they the first? How about Paul de Strzelecki, fresh from his triumph on Mt Kosciusko, who crossed Bass Strait and ‘ascended the Frenchman, during very stormy weather and...fancied himself on its highest point’ in 1841? Unless his lost diary turns up, we shall never know.

And who was the French female, known only by her first name ‘Nicole’, who became history’s first woman to climb the Cap, in 1935?

Rick and I, and our companions back at the Irenabyss camp, were on a different mission, to raft and film the doomed Franklin River, which flows in a wide loop around Frenchmans Cap and drains its entirety. We were part of the growing campaign to save the wild river from a series of dams which would have left the Cap surrounded by a methane-emitting moat of dead river and rotting rainforest.

So what a joy it is to read Simon Kleinig’s Frenchmans Cap, knowing that this stunning spire of quartz has survived such degradations and is now protected for all times. How fascinating to read of the people who have fought for the Frenchmans Cap region which became a national park in 1941.

Many thousands will set out for Frenchmans Cap in the future. Due to the works of good managers, track builders, hut restorers, the Parks and Wildlife Service and generous supporters like Dick Smith (and weather permitting!), a healthy proportion will reach their goal. Millions more will glimpse it from afar – from the Lyell Highway, the wilderness lookout at Donaghys Hill, a cruise on Macquarie Harbour, or from the air, including the Melbourne–Hobart air route which sometimes gives spectacular views of the distant Cap.

For everyone, Simon Kleinig’s Frenchmans Cap brings new life to both the heights of exploration and depths of despair, which have occasioned the history of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area’s grand central peak.

His book is a valuable extra for the pack of modern day adventurers heading off along the track to Frenchmans Cap which Kleinig rightly describes as ‘one of the world’s great wilderness walks’.

Bob Brown

July 2012