Ten Question Q&A with Hazel Phillips, author of Great Hearts

Q1: This is your third book about how we engage with our mountains and the wilderness. How long have you been considering the topic of women mountaineers?

I’ve spent the past decade researching women climbers but also grappling with archival absence, and thinking critically about how stories that lie outside of the dominant narrative tend to get suppressed, dismissed and erased. I was astonished to find that these early women climbers were treated as mere footnotes in existing climbing publications. Mountaineering literature has often, historically, been a tool of empire and ego, written by a specific class of men. When women’s achievements are included only as footnotes, standard historical tools fail us. I realised this project couldn’t just be a compilation of facts — it required a methodology that challenges not just the authority of who gets to decide what constitutes history, but the archive itself.

Q2: Great Hearts blends meticulously researched social history with creative elements. How do you navigate the boundaries of where non-fiction intersects with fiction?

When the archive is empty — for example, Anna Von Lendenfeld was on the first ascent of Hochstetter Dome in 1883 but left no account in her own words — the traditional historian stops. But taking an approach of creative scholarship can help us fill in the blanks and bring history to life in new ways. Great Hearts contains the stories of 30 women, mostly written as nonfiction, but each includes a fictive vignette from that woman’s point of view. I’ve borrowed Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation as the methodology — a historiographical and literary method designed to confront the gaps, silences and erasures in the archives. That’s not a licence to merely ‘make up’ whatever you want — the fiction must remain anchored to the historical record, as much as it might test a boundary. Critical fabulation is about reconstructing the interiority that history and patriarchy denied these women, and filling the silences that were left behind.

Q3: From researching them did you quickly become aware that there was a longer story here — one that began years earlier — than is generally imagined?

We are conditioned to think women’s alpine history started later because the gatekeepers of history only validated a specific type of ‘conquest’ — Freda Du Faur’s ascent of Aoraki fits the bill as an approved achievement. Many women were climbing before the turn of the century, but because their exploits didn't fit the framework of the time, they were omitted from the grand narrative. In fact women were active in the late 1800s — Lydia Birch was in the first party to climb Te Heu Heu (the northern peak of Ruapehu), Fanny Fantham ascended Fantham’s Peak on Taranaki, and women were going up Mount Earnslaw around that time too. You just didn’t hear much about them — most narratives around mountaineering have been written by, and about, men. This work is about pulling those names off the physical peaks and restoring them to the cultural landscape.

Q4: The book is social history in a microcosm and tracks so wonderfully the transition from woman-as-extension-of-her-husband to woman-as-modern-and-independent. Were the 1930s the pivot point for that?

The 40-hour working week was introduced in 1936, which meant women had their weekends free for leisure. For independent, working women living in Christchurch, getting to Mount Cook for a weekend wasn’t feasible, so Arthur’s Pass became the training ground for weekend mountaineering in that era. The Canterbury Mountaineering Club was founded in 1927 and excluded women from the outset, so women formed their own groups and teams, and supported each other. You see this big shift from women climbers being society ladies with independent wealth and reliant on guides, to career girls such as Betsy Blunden, lawyer Marie Byles, doctor Anne Conyngham, and physiotherapy teacher Louie Roberts. It became a whole different game. The 1934 all-women, unguided climb of Mount Sefton was testament to that.

Q5: As someone used to moving on ice and snow, is it incredible to you that they tackled as much as they did with the clothing they had to hand and their really basic gear?

Absolutely; the really early women (late 1800s) climbed in their Sunday best — think long dresses, wide-brimmed hats draped with a motoring veil, and fancy gloves. They carried alpenstocks (a sort of iron-tipped walking stick) and climbed via steps cut into ice faces. That changed by the early 1900s — think hobnailed boots and long ice axes — then again in the 1930s, when crampons became more widespread. By 1953, the first all-women, unguided climb of Aoraki Mount Cook, women were wearing trousers and flannel shirts, roped together on glaciers and climbing with more modern tools. Real boots and grit sort of stuff.

Q6: These women are all so distinctive, and Freda Du Faur made a huge impact on you, but what about the others? Could you tell us who you admire the most?

Ada Julius could have been Freda Du Faur, if she’d started climbing a year or two earlier. She attempted Mount Cook the same summer Freda actually succeeded, and put up faster times on that attempt than Freda. Ada was tough, robust and ambitious, and was in the first ascent party of Mount Aylmer as well as the first woman to summit Elie De Beaumont. Her story — especially of getting married to a man in his nineties whom she declined as a young girl! — is one that’s flown under the radar until now. Unfortunately, her climbing season was cut short as her family required her to return home and perform her duties as a bridesmaid in a wedding.

Q7: Whose story is the saddest?

Ruth Adams was one of the leading mountaineers of her generation and climbed the previously unclimbed South Ridge of Aoraki alongside Edmund Hillary. Yet, the dominant cartography of the past has a way of erasing women the moment they leave the summit. Days later on La Perouse, a degraded manila rope snapped after a guide instructed Ruth to jump and put her weight on it. She was severely injured, carried out to the west over the course of a week, and emerged with a morphine dependency. Because of her injuries, she never climbed again. The narrative defaulted to the easiest map available: painting Ruth as the incompetent girl who slipped. By challenging male climbers’ versions of what happened, we can not only correct a historical myth, but also disrupt an entire entrenched landscape of memory. Ruth was scapegoated by history to protect structural reputations; narratives like these need to be interrogated and disrupted.

Q8: Who was the most confident?

Betsy Blunden — she blagged her way into a guiding job at the Hermitage in the 1920s. In her interview she was asked if she’d climbed mountains before, and she said yes — failing to mention they were the sort of mountains you could reach on horseback! She soon moved from being a picnic guide to guiding on bigger climbs, simply by waiting until all the male guides were booked up, then suggesting high climbs to the guests at the Hermitage — knowing she would be the only person available for the job. Betsy is a model of the sort of hustle, self-belief and self-confidence we all need to embody.

Q9: Who has been the most overlooked?

Muriel Pringle, later Mrs Peter Graham, was the first New Zealand woman to climb Aoraki Mount Cook, and her name is little known, as all the glory goes to Freda Du Faur as the first woman (Freda was Australian). Muriel, a society girl from Wellington, had never climbed before she married Peter Graham (chief guide at the Hermitage), so it’s to her credit that she became a decent climber in her own right. Certainly the expectations on her as Peter Graham’s wife must have weighed heavily.

Q10: What is the legacy and the inspiration they have left for this generation of women climbers?

I want the stories in this book to show contemporary female climbers that a path has already been carved out for them by these very tough, tenacious women. Representation is incredibly important — you can’t be what you can’t see. Their stories have been sidelined, marginalised, forgotten and buried — I hope that Great Hearts properly brings them back into the spotlight. These women weren’t just climbing mountains — they were battling stereotypes, overcoming social norms, and subverting society’s expectations that they’d get married and pop out babies for the good of the nation. They should be remembered — and celebrated.