Charlie Creese remembers close his friend and '80s/90s local climbing legend, Andy Pollitt, who died aged 56 in November 2019. Andy was undoubtedly a rockstar of the climbing world, having made a large impact on both the British and Aussie climbing scenes–in fact, his rainbow tights still hang watchingly over The Lactic Factory today (along with his signed portrait of Kylie Minogue). Notable ascents include ‘The Bells! The Bells!’ (E7 6b onsight) at Gogarth, ‘Rage’ (29) on Taipan at the Grampians/Gariwerd, and of course his famous battle with Punks in the Gym (32) at Arapiles/Dyurrite.
This piece was originally published in March of 2020 via our friends at UKClimbing.com, following the unfortunate passing of Andy Pollit in November 2019. Along with Charlie, we felt it was important to immortalise Andy’s legacy and contribution to Australian climbing in print, here at home. The republication was made possible by the good folks at UKC and our own local legends, Charlie Creese, Kim ‘Spewin’ McKeown’, and Simon Carter.
Like most of us, I've periodically tried to give up climbing in favour of something more "serious." Certainly this was the case in the late 80’s when I was at university, a societally approved path if ever there was. But the real world is a strange thing to confront when you've climbed for most of your teens, and in the uni itself Post Modernism was all the rage, something forever impressed on my mind by the English lecturer who once opined that "music represents a paradigmatic excess of the signifier." Crap like that sure puts climbing jargon in perspective! Compounding my restlessness was the fact that - for the first time in my life - I had a car. It sat out in the street like a neglected pet,
