MUMC – A brief historyDavid Hogg

FormationThe Melbourne University Mountaineering Club began its life at a meeting held on 9 October 1944 when World War II was still in progress. It was founded largely through the efforts of Niall Brennan, who was elected to the position of Secretary at the Club’s first Annual General Meeting on 11 May 1945. Professor Thomas Cherry was elected as President and a formal Constitution was adopted.

With Australia recovering from the impacts of the war, the first couple of years of the club’s life saw only a modest level of activity, but this changed in 1947 when Bill Bewsher joined the club. Due largely to the efforts of Professor Cherry and Bill Bewsher, in the next few years the Club was responsible for the introduction of organised rockclimbing to Victoria and played a key role, along with the Hobart Walking Club and the Geelong College Exploration Society, in opening up the Federation Peak area of Southwest Tasmania to bushwalking. It also initiated its annual 24 Hour Walk, and assumed an active role in the Federation of Victorian Walking

Clubs (now VicWalk), particularly in relation to establishing the Federation’s search and rescue function at a time when the Victorian police force was limited in such expertise.

The 1950s and 1960sDuring the mid-1950s, the level of adventurous activities declined, due in part to the introduction of compulsory National Service which occupied many club members during the summer vacation. That period nevertheless saw the first visits by club members to New Zealand for serious mountaineering, but also its first mountaineering tragedy when John Young, John Vidulich and John Hammond (a non-member) died while attempting a traverse of Mount Cook. One of the club's early New Zealand mountaineers, Faye Kerr, went on to become one of the world’s most accomplished female mountaineers until her untimely death due to illness in India in 1980.

I joined MUMC in 1962, shortly before the club entered one of the most dynamic periods in its history. The Club had just acquired its first clubrooms, "Aikman’s Road", a dingy basement beneath 21 Royal Parade, which became its centre of action for most of the 1960s and 1970s.

Climbing in KyrgyzstanRichard Bassett-Smith

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which served the wider community were now being produced commercially and there was a declining role for the club in this area. Places such as Southwest Tasmania, which the club was instrumental in opening up, were now attracting many walkers, and no longer held the same aura of exploration. With long-distance travel becoming cheaper and easier, however, other opportunities in Australia and overseas were offering club members new sorts of adventures.

Most of the established activities in the club continued during its later decades, with occasional new ones added, such as canoe polo, canyoning and proactive conservation activities such as tree planting and threatened species surveys. Having provided the impetus for the establishment of rogaining by others during the 1970s, the annual 24 Hour Walk diminished in importance and was gone from the club's program by 1989. Throughout its later decades, the club remained one of the largest at the university and, despite peaks and troughs in some of its activities, continued to remain vibrant overall.

MUMC after universityFor many of its members, MUMC has been much more than a recreational club that just provided a break from the routine of academic study. For some, the experiences through the club have been a major factor in supporting or even changing the direction of their future careers. Such experiences have also resulted in some members playing key roles in other related community organisations later in life. The friendships

that began in the club frequently developed into family relationships or otherwise into lasting associations built largely around ongoing outdoor activities. The days of the club loom large in the memories of many of its former members and are kept alive by the reunion dinners which are conducted to mark the significant anniversaries of the club's founding.

The first of many first descents in the Marañón River, Muro Poso Canyon (lower), Peru Isabel Clare Cornes

Fireside at the 2017 annual MUMC Intro TripGina Snelling

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Oxo Don Fell noted that he and his companions had used Oxo as a greeting when encountering other like-minded parties in the bush or mountains, and also for testing echoes, distinguishing themselves from the far calls of unrefined walking clubs. Other oxos concurred that they had used Oxo as a call, raising the romantic possibility that our species was named after its song like the Kea or the More-pork.

But oxo Tony Kerr cited an early recollection of the use of oxo going back to a trip to Matlock, led by Professor Cherry. Members of the trip had been using the response "Ox!" as a frequent retort to certain comments and claims made by other members this puzzled the Professor for a while. Eventually he turned to one of the party members and asked: What does this Ox mean? "Well Prof, you know that an ox is like a bull? To which the professor replied "Oh, I see &"

So it seems we must conclude that oxos are likely to have been named after their bullshit detector and from ox to oxo, from a retort, to a slang word, to a call sign the exact circumstances of these transitions are not known. But somewhere along the way, from its use as a bush call, to its first recorded association in the sixties with the Tyrolean mountaineer silhouette who would be-come oxoman, oxo became our name.

Reflections on MUMC of the 1960s and 1970sBy Michael Feller

MUMC was above all an integral part of the all-round education a university was supposed to provide. MUMC greatly enriched one's social, intellectual, and even spiritual development. It allowed one to develop self-esteem and important life skills, particularly those related to physical fitness, wilderness survival, social survival, and spatial navigation. It even provided many people with life partners and careers. Why?

MUMC members were very friendly and accommodating. Within three years, this rather shy person had found a place at Melbourne Uni that he could call home and on whose committee he could serve. The club rooms were in a rather dingy basement of a house across from Melbourne Uni in Royal Parade - Aikmans Road. Dingy, but warm and friendly. Trips to impressive bush destinations, mostly wilderness, became the weekend norm. Transport for these trips was by furniture van, fitted with rows of seats that faced one another, allowing much conversation, much camaraderie, much singing, and much meeting of people. Many couples formed and MUMC became known in time as the Melbourne Uni Matrimonial Club. Building of the Feathertop hut and the NW Spur walking track took up a year of my life and became another great friend-building, physical fitness-developing (some of us tried to see who could carry the heaviest load up - loads of 50 kilograms were not uncommon), and socialising experience. Mount Feathertop became my shrine. Covering over 160 kilometres in a 24 hour walk was an additional highlight. All these experiences complemented the intellectual education experiences of the university. Today's university web-based degrees provide nothing remotely comparable and such a university “experience” is hugely impoverished by comparison.

After five years of post-graduate work in Canada, I returned to Melbourne Uni as a lecturer in the mid-seventies. Naturally, I became active again in MUMC. By then van trips had been replaced with private car trips, but the basic physical, social, aesthetic and

Crossing the Beansburn River, the Five Passes hike, NZDanielle Andreasen-Cocker

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educational experience that MUMC provided remained intact and MUMC continued its function as a Melbourne Uni Matrimonial Club. A highlight of this period was the running of ski trips rather than the desperate snow walks of the sixties. Skiing was greatly preferable to wading through deep snow (perhaps another disappearing feature of the Victorian environment), accompanied by camping using marginal equipment – a groundsheet or lilo directly on the snow with a flimsy cool sleeping bag, having to get up at night and go for a walk to warm up.

Another highlight of this period was the exploration of wilderness gorges throughout Eastern Victoria – Little River, Snowy River, Bryces, Jamieson River, Genoa River, etc. This, together with the expansion of logging and fire access road construction throughout the remaining bush, the formation of the

Land Conservation Council and the push for the creation of an alpine national park, raised an awareness of the need to protect our remaining wilderness and opportunities for our forms of wilderness recreation. MUMC was at the forefront of bushwalker’s wilderness conservation activities, I became the club's first conservation chair and, in 1979, it was mainly MUMC members who produced the first wilderness inventory for Victoria.

It is said that one's life expectancy is enhanced by having a strong group of friends. A large group of 1960s MUMC members continues to regularly meet today and enjoy mountaineering experiences together, even with replaced hips and knees! What more could one ask of a university club?

Rafting and canyoning, Marañón River, Peru, to help conserve one of the last undammed rivers in South AmericaAnja Fuechtbauer

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MUMC 75 years on Alex Hormann, current MUMC Secretary

Seventy-five years since inception, MUMC is still holding strong and seems incapable of being knocked down, though that’s not to say there haven’t been attempts. Those well acquainted with the club know of the fateful incident back in 2015 that led to a university ban on all of our rope sports (climbing, caving, canyoning and mountaineering), leaving a significant dint in what kinds of trips we were able to run. But with over 70 years of experience, we were not a club that would be knocked down easily.

Since then we have been on a determined path to prove we deserve the sports back, through even further improved safety measures and consultations with safety experts. We are glad to say that we have our much loved sport of rock-climbing back and we are focussing on re-establishing the sport and training a new generation of climbing leaders. The future is looking bright.

Controversy aside, our club seems to still continuously pull in hundreds of members annually thanks to our active sports of paddling and bushwalking, alongside new weekly nights of “Monday indoor climbing” and “Thursday board games”. Every new member is amazed at our relatively new (as of 2013) clubrooms, which, when I first saw it two years ago, I could only describe it as an “outdoor sports Mecca”. MUMC Hut got solar panels earlier this year, our archives are now nearly entirely digitised and our library is continuously expanding! Our annual midnight ascent trip to the club hut is still running, this year with the addition of one makeshift inflatable pool spa thanks to some nifty organisers and keen pack mules. Our new 75th anniversary edition of The Mountaineer is coming soon and our annual “Pie and Slide” competition night is sure to attract a new batch of amazing photographs.

Even with the drama of the rope sports bans, keen senior members are still pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the sports. One only has to look at our past “Adventure Grant” winner’s trip: where they kayaked across from Wilsons Promontory to northern Tasmania, setting up new climbing routes along the way in the Kent Island Group; to see that climbing within the club is far from dead. The thing about being knocked down is that there is only one direction to travel: back up. And if there is one thing the mountaineering club is good at, it’s climbing up things! The current future goals of the club is to regain and rebuild our rope sports and to further correspond with and build relationships with intervarsity outdoors clubs.

The current access and conservation issue of climbing bans within Grampians National Park is also at the forefront of our minds as we continue to provide a leading voice in discussions on how to approach the topic. The club is looking good, both literally in our shiny new clubrooms and figuratively. We’re looking forward to another great 75 years!

As for me? When I first joined the club two years ago, to somebody who had little experience in the outdoors it looked almost too good to be real. It provided me with experiences I thought I could never achieve in university. I have tried and enjoyed nearly every sport the club has to offer (except for mountaineering, but soon that will be ticked off the list as well) and gained amazing friends, amazing memories and skills in outdoor survival and leadership. Though the club has, and will always have, a large proportion of members who are “superficial”; for a number of us the club means much more than just a means for outdoor adventure. I consider the clubrooms my second home and MUMC my second family and I look forward to seeing through the future of the club.

Sunrise at MUMC Hut after the 2018 midnight ascentSteven Birkett

Thunder Canyon after emerging from Claustral Canyon, Blue MountainsLuke Frisken

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