Ngapalaru Yarta.
At Moonarie we climb on the unceded lands of the Adnyamathanha, acknowledge their unbroken connection and pay respects to their elders past and present.
APRIL 1986.
My father bundles us up – three kids, a two-person tent, definitely no sleeping mats, inadequate sleeping bags, and a hatchet. We’re off to the Flinders Ranges to gaze into space. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to glimpse Halley’s Comet. It’s going to blaze across the clear desert skies. Our eyes the envy of all junior astronomers.
After dark. Seems the middle of nowhere. We turn off the main road onto a graded one. Then off that onto a dirt track. Through a dry creek bed into a shadowy copse, single fire burning in the middle. Headlights break between the callitris pines. A small band of people huddled around the flames lift their heads.
‘Where are we Dad?’
‘Moonarie.’
‘Who are those people?’
‘Climbers.’
My father is a climber. Has been since a teen in Glencoe, Scotland, sloshing around in EBs to the dissident chime of hexes.
My brother leaps out of the car with the hatchet and permission to ‘cut down a dead one’.
We’d been on climbing trips before, I had my own harness, screwgate and Figure 8. I was already a grade-16 climber and was always gonna climb higher than my age. I knew about the hardest climb at Arapiles, India (29). Hoped to do it, and still do at 46.
