Wellington archivist and former journalist Trish McCormack describes Franz Josef as her childhood playground where she spent her days “scrambling over the ice in hob-nailed boots learning climbing techniques from my father, a guide”.
Fired up by reading mystery novels and real-life adventures, McCormack and her friends would head to the glacier and spend hours peering into icy crevasses looking for – unsuccessfully – a man who disappeared.
It’s perhaps not surprising that she ended up writing crime novels and setting them close to home. Her Philippa Barnes crime novels, including Ngaio Marsh Awards-nominated Cold Hard Murder, are set in South Island national parks. Her book Jack’s Journey is based on the letters of a great-uncle killed in WWI.
Now, McCormack has just released a fourth novel, Girl of the Mountains, partly inspired by a real-life legendary mountaineer named Junee Ashurst. The two met during a snowbound weekend at Mt Cook Village, where Ashurst, a mountain historian, shared stories.
It was perfect timing for McCormack, who was completing an MA in history with a research paper on female climbers. By the time the research paper was done, McCormack had a character in mind “storming up the Hooker Valley in the rain” for a novel. That character is the “volatile” Stella, who starts work as a mountain guide and vows never again to live a “life of domesticity below the snowline”. And so begins Girl of the Mountains.
Here, in Book takes, McCormack shares three things she hopes readers take away from the novel.
Women are integral to the history of mountaineering in Aotearoa
Stella’s story is a portal to the history of female mountaineers and guides in the Southern Alps. She embodies some inspiring women. Freda du Faur was the first Pākehā woman to climb Aoraki/Mt Cook in 1910. Betsy Anderson became a guide at the Hermitage in the late 1920s, possibly the first woman in the world to do so. Katie Gardiner survived seven days sheltering in a crevasse during a blizzard in 1933 while attempting to climb Te Horokōau (Mt Tasman). Junee Ashurst, a highly competent mountaineer and Hermitage guide, was controversially sacked after World War II by a chief guide who didn’t want a woman on his team. Mavis Davidson, Sheila McMurray and Doreen Pickens were the first all-woman party to summit Aoraki/Mt Cook in 1953. A multitude of others roamed the Southern Alps leaving few records of their climbs. Their world is imbued in this novel. In the words of author Paddy Richardson: “The imagery is vivid and beautiful – you take the reader there and you really know that landscape.”
Family life and mountaineering
Mountaineers inhabit magnificent yet dangerous places high above the snowline, and in this lies a conflict that has challenged women for decades. Some choose climbing over family life while others give up the sport they love to raise children. Girl of the Mountains looks at this issue through the lens of choices made by Stella in the 1940s and Helen in the present day. I draw on my experience of growing up in a Franz Josef family involved in glacier and mountain guiding over four decades, the characters I met along the way, and the memory of friends lost in climbing accidents. In a world of extremes, tragedy can destroy triumph in a heartbeat.
Crime and Depression
What happens to someone who commits a crime and gets away with it? When its consequences bleed into future generations? Girl of the Mountains is a mystery that begins with the disappearance of a woman at Arthur’s Pass and takes the reader on a journey into the past. It also explores the psychological highs and lows of the life of mountaineers. Freda du Faur, vibrant and courageous, blazed the way for female mountaineers yet tragically took her own life while still a young woman. A key character in the novel Jim, a returned soldier and mountain guide, struggles with what he describes as his melancholy while turning to literature and climbing to bring meaning to his troubled mind.
What I learnt from researching and writing this book
Our family was always hosting mountaineers. They’d emerge from “the hills” sunburnt and full of life and laughter. My sister and I didn’t always appreciate a steak or wedge of apple pie being removed from our plates to feed a hungry stranger. It wasn’t until I began researching female mountaineers, firstly as part of a MA in History and now for this novel that I realised I’d met some mountain royalty over the years. And although I knew about some of the more famous female climbers, I had no idea of just how many others there were until I began my research. There are some brilliant real-life stories out there and I was lucky enough to interview some of the women involved. It’s been a hugely inspiring journey and my privilege to share it with readers.
Girl of the Mountains, by Trish McCormack, Glacier Press ($39.99) is out on Tuesday, April 2.
