Trekking the Himalaya, the Andes or the Sierra Nevada is common enough these days. Trekking companies have degrees of hardship package tours to suit everyone, enabling you to take it easy or push yourself to the limits. But the history of commercial trekking is relatively new, and hinterland resident, Antonia Deacock has the rare privilege of being one of the first to pioneer this popular adventure activity.
Exactly 50 years ago, Antonia and two female friends motored through twelve countries in Europe and Asia, trekked 300 miles on foot in the Himalaya, crossed five high passes up to 18,000 feet, and explored the mysterious country of eastern Zanskar where European women had not been seen before.
In this article, Antonia Deacock reflects back on that adventure, which was remarkable at the time for three women travelling alone.
Born in South Africa, Antonia trained as an architect in the 1950s and went on to work in London. That’s where she met her husband Warwick, an adventurer in his own right.
“Warwick introduced me to a world I had not encountered in my growing up years. In the professional circle of architecture one wasn’t so aware of the discrimination between the sexes. I was always very comfortable in the company of men or women. It didn’t matter to me. “
“I never saw feminism as a competition with males. My mother was big on equal under the law. That was as far as she went. I was never interested in the bra burning and all that.”
In 1958 while Warwick was climbing Pakistan’s Mt. Rakaposhi, Antonia and her two friends, Ann Davies and Eve Sims decided they wouldn’t “stay at home by the kitchen sink” but set out on what became known as the Women’s Overland Himalayan expedition. This raised eyebrows at the time, mainly because they were three attractive women travelling alone into a wilderness zone.
With remarkable confidence the three women secured sponsorships from Land Rover, Ovaltine and the Rank Organisation. The girls were meant to get to the camp site each night and, with a donated 16mm camera, take film of themselves drinking Ovaltine. Sadly, they often camped late and the film was too dark to use.
What is amazing today is the relative ease with which the women drove through countries like Iran and Afghanistan and without being molested. You would be extremely unwise to travel to Kandahar today and yet, 50 years ago the women were welcomed there as honoured guests of the Pakistani consul.
They even secured an audience with the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at his official residence in Delhi. They were first to climb Biwi Giwi renaming it Three Wives Peak and in the centre of a Buddhist kingdom the women discovered Padam, a rare Muslim village community.
Returning from their ten months adventure, Antonia said it wasn’t difficult to settle down to an urban role. She started writing a book on the trip, No Purdah in Padam. It sold out in 1959 but was sneered at by the Times Literary Supplement. Other sexist reporters spoke of buttons and hair clips and the cheap press view was that the girls’ exploit was not a REAL expedition.
Antonia is pragmatic about the sexism of the period and credits Warwick with being supportive of women striking out on their own.
“I couldn’t have handled Warwick if he’d been completely egocentric”, she laughs. “I think it’s a male characteristic to be somewhat self-focussed. It’s a limitation in their makeup. They can’t handle more than one thing at a time so they’ve worked out they’d better be number one.”
Antonia and Warwick have a healthy mutual respect which enabled them to set up their own adventure travel company – Ausventure – the first of its kind in Australia. Warwick had been used to mountaineering and route marches with heavy packs. But he had seen that trekking by Antonia and her friends could be enjoyable rather than a physical challenge.
“Here we were as women wandering along with our porters having a lovely holiday and this is what later inspired our travel venture”, says Antonia.
Antonia doesn’t think the same opportunities for adventure exist 50 years after her memorable trip.
“If the opportunities do exist they are quite rare, mainly because the first world countries have seized hold of the field of adventure. It has become big business and maybe Warwick and I contributed to it in our own way in taking people to out of the way places.”
“Nowadays international boundaries are more restrictive too. You would be stopped from entering many more countries, and of course, you may just get blown up as a by-product of visiting these places. “
There’s no doubt in Antonia’s mind that the Women’s Overland Himalayan Exhibition of 1958 opened up that region for many others to follow.
“Trekking has become enormously popular”, says Antonia, “and that is one of the good things to come out of our experience, that ordinary people can make these trips and not feel they have to be supermen or women.
“I think we were very privileged to be alive when we were because what we were witnessing was the transition of the West first meeting the East and changing it forever”.
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