Freda Du Faur (1882-1935)

The first woman to climb Mt Cook in New Zealand on the third of December in the year of nineteen hundred and ten Freda Du Faur the Sydney born mountain climber as good a climber as the best of men And yet her life it was so very tragic her long time lover Muriel Cadogan at a young age died And Freda herself who had developed a mental illness five days before her fifty third birthday comitted suicide For decades of years her remains lay in an unmaked grave in a Manly cemetery 'til friends of her memory erected a gravestone One of the great mountaineers of human history her legend through the decades it has grown When it was seen as unfashionable for women to be mountain climbers she was a pioneer for woman kind Freda Du Faur was a woman of courage and her very equal would be hard to find With Muriel Cadogan for years she lived in England but in her Hometown of Sydney she lived her final day At a time when women were in need of heroines in mountaineering the one who led the way The weight of grief at the loss of her partner for her in the end that bit too much to bear But in her lifetime she had her years of glory and people like her always have been rare Her story is one for the ages and she became known far beyond her own Hometown On the day with Peter and Alec Graham that she climbed to the summit of Mt Cook she too climbed her way into renown.