Trying to squeeze a right-angled block of rock hard enough to hold all of your weight is no trivial task. It demands a Herculean effort in an absurd position - imagine trying to hold yourself on to the adjacent sides of a refrigerator using only your hands.
Now try it while clinging to a massive pillar of rock rising straight out of the ocean as the wind invites you to relent to her fury and, far below, waves crash into the base with a force usually reserved for wiping out entire armies.
The Totem Pole, in the southeast corner of Tasmania, is one of the most epic settings for a rock climb. Roughly four metres wide on each side, this famous tower stands defiantly amid watery depths that swirl in a frenzy. It is inhospitable, yet mesmerising.
Somehow, over the course of millennia, the pillars of dolerite surrounding the Totem Pole all collapsed. All except for this remarkable, single tower. The neighbouring cliff, called The Candlestick, is a seamless collection of similar-looking pillars, giving the impression of what the whole cliff line used to look like until, somehow, everything around the Totem Pole crumbled into the Tasman Sea.
"Imagine a matchstick,” said first ascensionist John Ewbank. “Scale it up a hundred times until it is 70 metres high and four metres square. Stand it alone in the sea, a single, freestanding dolerite column so fragile to the eye one dares to hardly breathe.”
Very little information is known about the first ascent, in 1968. As was the norm for difficult climbs at the time, it was aid-climbed, meaning Ewbank and partner Allan Keller placed climbing gear inside the rock’s cracks and crevices and used them to haul themselves up. A storm brewed as they topped out, and
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