One of the highlights for many viewers of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games was seeing New Zealanders Julian David and Sarah Tetzlaff speed climbing their way up the competition wall in a now globally recognised sport.
Their ascent signalled a major milestone for the sport of climbing, an offshoot of rock climbing, which reached a new pinnacle 60 years after it first gained an unsteady foothold on the public’s imagination.
The evolution of rock climbing has been documented by Dr Natalie Looyer in her History PhD. Natalie’s research traverses the social history of rock climbing throughout Aotearoa since the mid-1960s.
“Having been a rock climber for 15 years, I knew there was so much information out there, and the biggest surprise and joy for me was uncovering all of that social history.” Long over-shadowed by their more traditional mountaineering counterparts, Natalie’s research shows how rock climbers determinedly trod their own path into the 21st century, towards recognition and their own ragged kind of respectability.
“Some turned to rock climbing as a safer pursuit they had more control over, which still offered a real technical challenge to push themselves but not place themselves at too much risk,” she says.
“A big part of the rock climbing identity in New Zealand is that while overseas rock climbing may be grand and impressive—think Yosemite Park or the Italian Dolomites—our rock climbing crags can be small and scrappy and a bit loose.
“It’s kind of shaped our rock climbing as being a little bit under the radar maybe, a bit more iconoclastic and at times that’s intentionally pushed by rock climbers to kind of rebel against that much more traditional revered mountaineering culture.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some “real gems” of places to rock climb, Natalie says, like Whanganui Bay by Lake Taupō, Baring Head near Wellington, Kura Tāwhiti Castle Hill in the Canterbury high country, and the Darrans Alpine Rock in Fiordland.
Such locations became popular amid changing social norms including the deregulation of the traditional working week from the early 1980s, which drew more people away from regular weekend sports to more individualistic lifestyle activities.
At Whanganui Bay, the embracing of a “punk rock lifestyle” led to some incidents that strained tensions with local hapū and residents, who were unimpressed by climbers channelling excess energy into shouting from cliff tops and by their disrespect of rights of access. This type of issue was recognised in the Treaty settlements of the 1990s, which saw changes to a more formal access method.
That in-your-face individualism also expressed itself in guidebooks, with poetry, cartoons, and irreverent musings about the re-naming of climbing routes as a comment on the pop culture and politics of the day. Tough economic times and a fraught international scene were reflected in climbing routes named, for example, ‘Blam Blam Blam’ for the band that sang There is no depression in New Zealand.
And then there is the curious case of various climbing routes inspired by a popular American rock climber of the late 1970s called Jim Collins. His namesake was the pilot of the ill-fated Air New Zealand Mt Erebus plane crash in Antarctica. Exoneration of his role in the crash amid allegations of a corporate cover-up, led to one climbing route being creatively re-named ‘Orchestrated litany of lunges’.
“To me, that’s the perfect climbing route name, it’s an historical reference of the time and it’s a great pun on the movement you are doing on the rock,” Natalie says.
Much of Natalie’s research was undertaken as oral history, with roughly half of her interviewees women, not to necessarily reflect their participation rates in indoor climbing, sport climbing, and bouldering, but more to ensure their voices were heard.
“Women’s climbing was a key part of that growth in diversity for rock climbing.”
The many angles covered led to Natalie being presented with the 2026 Judith Binney Writing Award to turn her thesis into a book exploring the multiple identities occupied by rock-climbing becoming mainstream while remaining “punk rock”.
“It continues to grow as an increasingly accessible, indoor, and competitive sport, as greater numbers of people, particularly school-aged children, are exposed to rock climbing in its various forms.”