The Magic of the Mountain
By James Tugwell
Article about Mount Everest climb by Australians in 1984
First published at ABC News, October 3, 2025
There was no crowd there to witness the moment two Australians stood on the summit of Mt Everest for the first time.
"This is the summit of Mt Everest, Qomolangma, Mother Goddess of the Earth. It's the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen," Tim Macartney-Snape told the tape recorder from the summit.
"The world is staggeringly beautiful from up here. In fact, it's beyond superlatives."
Four decades later, fellow summiteer Greg Mortimer can still see the fading light at the end of the day, the arrowhead shape of a giant shadow — Everest's silhouette — spearing out to the northeast across the expanse of the empty Tibetan plateau.
"I can close my eyes and it's as if the view from the summit is on the underside of my eyelids," he said.
"I feel the cold. I feel the fear. I feel the concern about getting down. They're all connected.
"It was like being on another planet. We were so far away from anything sensible
"It's a sobering reminder of how tiny we are in the face of big natural forces."
Watching on through the telephoto lens 3,000 metres below, the crew filming a documentary could just make out a figure in a bright red climbing suit on top of the world.
Alongside them was journalist Simon Balderstone, who immediately started running down to base camp to file a story — via Morse code — that would get a monster run in screen sheets outside newsagents all across Australia: Australians conquer Everest.
 |
| The front page of the Canberra Times on October 5, 1984 celebrating the successful summit.() |
"There was a lot of hoo-ing and hollering when the little red dot made it to the top," he said.
The feat would later attract international attention, but in that moment in 1984, only the 12 members of the climbing expedition were there to witness it.
Most climbers nowadays climb the South Col route from Nepal, following in the footsteps of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
Over 68 days, all alone, the Australians pioneered a new route up the mountain that has never been repeated.
There were five Australian climbers, led by Lincoln Hall and Tim Macartney-Snape.
They were joined by Greg Mortimer, Geoff Bartram and Andi Henderson.
Together, they forged what is now known as the 'Australian Route'
One British author hailed it as "one of the greatest climbs ever done on the mountain" and "a model for what an expedition should be".
"We were going to find the route ourselves," climber Geoff Bartram said.
"We wanted it to be a new route. We didn't want to have oxygen, and we wanted to be small.
"We didn't want people to cook for us and puff out our sleeping bags.
"I felt just part of a good group of blokes off having a bit of an adventure. It was a huge adventure on a scale like I hadn't done before.
"But when I look back, I think, 'Holy shit — what did we think we were doing?'"
The climbers took with them three tonnes of food and equipment to last them for up to three months — transported along pot-holed back roads of Tibet and on yak-hide boats across flooded rivers and freezing streams. Each man carried 40 kilograms of equipment, with the rest piled high on the back of yaks.
"Once you got into Everest base camp on the north side, you were totally committed. There was nowhere to go," Mr Bartram said.
Mr Mortimer said the trip was a "Rubik's cube of logistics".
"Where are you going to sleep that night? What food, rope, supplies, and survival kit do you need at the next camp?
"Because we did a new route, it was all unknown. We were just making it up daily."
Early on, an avalanche destroyed a snow cave that the crew were using to store all their climbing equipment.
"It's like watching your favourite dog get run over by a truck," Mr Mortimer said.
"It's a reminder of how big the forces are at play and what tiny little pimples we are on the side of this huge pumpkin."
They dug and dug, but could not find their harnesses, climbing boots, axes or crampons.
Every day, they would wake at 3am, forcing down a few mouthfuls of oats, pull on climbing gear now borrowed from the cooks and support team, before exiting the warmth of their sleeping bags into a world of ice.
They would climb a few hundred metres up the mountain, establishing fixed ropes to provide support in the future, and come back down.
The next day they'd go a little further.
"It got to the point where it just became an enormous chore," Mr Bartram said.
"You are in the most stunning place you can ever imagine.
"But it gets tedious grunting up that bloody face day after day. It's backwards and forwards until you get to the top of the bloody thing and go home.
"When you spend that long at altitude, you miss family, friends. You don't sleep well. You don't digest your food well. You fart. You get exhausted. You can't help but think at times — 'Oh for Christ's sake, when is this going to end?'"
They faced all kinds of obstacles, from the small — birds ate their chocolate bars when a tent door was left open — to the big — temperatures with wind chill feeling as cold as -58 degrees Celsius.
Mr Mortimer also experienced snow blindness — a condition caused by UV rays reflecting off the sun, like sunburn to the surface of the eye — and had to sit in the dark for two days to recover.
Days later, he and Mr Macartney-Snape were caught in an avalanche with only an eight-millimetre-thick rope to grab on to.
"It was a massive tsunami wave — but one full of ice blocks and snow," Mr Mortimer said.
"We were unable to do anything or go anywhere — completely at its mercy.
"I remember burying my head into the snow, hunching down, trying to stand up in the weight of snow coming down on top of us, but I couldn't and losing my feet, and the rope just stretching, stretching, stretching but the rope didn't pop. And it just went over the top of us and we both survived."
It rattled the group.
"I am afraid of coming up," Mr Bartram radioed to the group afterwards.
"The avalanches that are coming down off Everest now are bigger than I've ever seen in my life."
And that was before the group had to pass through the heart of avalanche territory.
Around 7,000 metres up the face — the climbers had to traverse through White Limbo — what Mr Bartram described as "a huge snow slope at the perfect avalanche angle".
"It was limbo between heaven and hell," he said. "If you crossed it, you were in heaven, but you thought, 'Shit, I could end up in hell here'."
With increasingly less oxygen in the air, every breath sounded like a painful rasp, as if the body was suffering terribly.
Mr Bartram turned around at about 7,400 metres of altitude, suffering from the symptoms of Cerebral oedema — brain swelling caused by the high altitude.
And when it came to the final push, Lincoln Hall decided to go no further — he'd lost toes to frostbite previously and was worried his pace was too slow.
Just 50 vertical metres from the summit, Andi Henderson's crampon broke. But as a result of taking off his gloves to fix it, he suffered severe frostbite.
His fingers would later puff up like big black shrivelled bananas and nine of his fingers would need amputation.
And so, out of the original party of five, it was only Mr Macartney-Snape and Mr Mortimer who summitted about 8pm on October 3, 1984.
The first Australian to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-metre peaks, Andrew Lock, said the 1984 feat "pushed the boundaries of what even veteran Himalayan ascensionists had thought reasonable. Being an oxygenless ascent of a new route on a massive, extremely threatening face on the highest peak in the world, completed in spite of the loss of key equipment, was truly extraordinary".
Four decades later, the climbers say Everest has changed from what it used to be.
"Everest has become a place to stand on the top of and you do that by the most expedient way. That's the norm," Mr Mortimer said.
"It's approached completely differently. It's commodified.
"It's become a high-altitude gymnasium. It's more about getting to the top rather than the way in which you do that."
Mr Mortimer thinks no one will ever repeat the Australian Route to the top because the drive to grind for days up a tough route is gone.
The magic of conquering the untouched is gone.
Mr Bartram agrees.
"Why would they come and repeat our route?" he said.
"Now, at Everest, the focus has been on guaranteed success on the standard route.
"If I go and climb the Australian Route, I'll be second — what for? If I just want to get to the top of Everest I might as well do a route that's going to give me a better chance and not be as dangerous.
"If you want to do something new, it always gets progressively harder. On Everest, I don't think there'd be many new routes left."
How likely are climbers to summit?
Successful summits on Mt Everest have increased from less than 10 per cent of attempts in the 1980s to a record 78 per cent in 2018.
The next generation of adventurous climbers, inspired by the Australian expedition, are less interested in Everest where fixed ropes now extend right to the peak. They instead focus on summitting lesser-known mountains, or summits that require cheaper permits and more technical climbing ability.
Mr Macartney-Snape and Mr Mortimer were the 159th and 160th people to summit Mt Everest.
As of December 2024, 7,136 people have now reached the top.
Mr Balderstone said the numbers swarming Everest each year were "crazy big".
"Nowadays you can't climb when you want because of the crowds and with two small windows pre and post monsoon," Mr Balderstone said.
Such narrow windows force many climbers to try to summit at the same time.
In May 2019, this photo of what appeared to be a queue to the summit went viral.
250 people were attempting to summit that day.
Mr Balderstone, who became the founding chairman of the Australian Himalayan Foundation, has noticed a change in the type of person attempting the feat.
"There are tonnes more non-climbers — not experienced people — attempting the mountain now — people going for trophies or wanting it on their CV," he said.
"They're up there, and they're up there too long, because of the queues and they're often very slow."
It's a reflection that gets to the heart of the philosophy and ethics of mountaineering.
Why does anyone climb?
"We sat around for hours discussing whether we were selfish or not. Are we selfish for doing what we do?" Mr Balderstone said.
"Would you still climb if you were the last person on earth? It's about people's egos and their motives.
"I don't think any of our guys wouldn't. I don't think most of the people who climb the mountain now would. Our group had the purest of motives."
Last year, a video went viral claiming to show the first backflip on the summit.
Just last week, a Polish skier made history by becoming the first person to climb up and ski down Mt Everest without the use of additional oxygen.
"No other mountain in the world has the same attention as Everest," Mr Bartram said.
He said Mr Henderson turned the Order of Australia he was awarded for the expedition into earrings.
"None of us did it for that stuff," he said.
In the memories of those who participated in that very first successful Australian ascent, Everest still evokes magical memories.
But that's all they were interested in — an adventure with some mates attempting something borderline ridiculous.
The Everest of their expedition, big and uncharted and expansive and empty — still exists, if you step away from the crowds.
"I don't even have my slides anymore," Mr Bartram said.
"I threw them in the bin. Maybe five or six years ago. I did a slide show for some friends … and the colours all fade and it doesn't look like your memory and I thought, 'My daughter doesn't want to look at all that shit. Who wants to look at all this stuff. Ah, I don't need all these old bloody slides.'
"My memories are there, still, but that's about it."
Credits: Reporting: James Tugwell
Graphics: Phil Jalyawong
First published at ABC News, October 3, 2025
