by Sue Williams
At six, Alyssa climbed her first local mountain, Tabletop. Just a few kilometres east of the city, it’s a flat-topped mound with an 11.5 km hike to the top, also 700 metres above sea level. ‘It’s not huge, but it’s a good climb,’ says Alyssa. ‘The first time Dad let me go up with him, I remember being really excited. We always did a lot of walking together but this was different. There are some large steps over the part known as the camel’s hump, and then there are a lot of boulders and loose gravel, so at some points you really have to scramble over the rocks.
‘I loved those bits. There’s one section right before you hit the top that was just scrambling and pretty steep, and for me that was the best part. Then when we reached the top, there were great views over the valley and I felt a real sense of achievement. I felt on top of the world!’
From that point on, Tabletop Mountain became a favourite destination for Alyssa and Glenn, and they regularly walked and climbed the circuit with the family’s little black rescue Staffordshire bull terrier, Kimba. With her short legs, the dog wasn’t keen on the scrambling, and Glenn or Alyssa often carried her part of the way. Alyssa’s older sister, Brooklyn, accompanied them once too, but decided early on in the walk that it wasn’t her idea of fun.
But for Alyssa, doing something physical out in the fresh air, surrounded by nature and enjoying a companionable silence with her dad, became her favourite way of passing the time. People they met along the way, however, didn’t always understand. One group watching the tiny girl skip her way down from Tabletop, sucking on the tube leading from the CamelBak water pack on her back, asked whether she was actually on oxygen. Another woman snarled at Glenn that making his daughter walk in such tough country was tantamount to child abuse.
When Alyssa did settle down with a book, it was always about dramatic adventures. She liked a good Tashi story, a series of fabulous tales involving a character dispatching monsters, dragons and anything else that ever threatened him or the world at large.
She much preferred sport, though, any sport, and excelled at gymnastics, tennis, soccer, cross-country, boxing – whatever was going. Glenn trained people in boxing and keeping fit, and ran boot camps, as well as working out himself, and while Brooklyn showed not the slightest interest in sport, Alyssa hung around the gym every moment she could, copying the way she saw adults and older kids train.
When she was five years old, her grandmother Carmel Clark, Glenn’s mum, came to stay, and was woken by a noise in the backyard, just before daybreak. ‘I looked out and the sun wasn’t even up, but there was this little girl running from one side of the backyard to the other, with a stopwatch in her hand,’ she says. ‘She went back and forth, back and forth. She seemed to be timing herself and she’d look at her watch at the end of every lap. You could tell when she presumably beat her last time. She raise her fist in the air, and yell, “Yeah! I’ve done it!”’
Alyssa developed into an active kid, who was quiet and thoughtful and didn’t talk a lot, but who put everything into whatever she happened to be keen on at the time. She also had a strong streak of stubbornness, something that would later serve her well.
‘I think the love of trekking came from her dad, and the ability to do such a solitary activity,’ says Therese. ‘But if I’m being totally honest, I think she has the stubbornness from me.
‘Personality-wise, she was always quite reserved, but just into everything. She’d walk in with one of my Tupperware containers, open the lid and, without any warning at all, out would jump a big blue-tongue lizard. She was always outside, and she was up for everything. When she started school, she’d get into school sports and all her teachers would pull me aside and say she really had a knack for gymnastics or ballet or soccer … Practically everything she did, she was good at. They all said, physically, she put everything she had into whatever she was doing, which was what made her so good at everything she tried. That was obvious from a very early age.’
At her primary school, The Glennie, she quickly became known as a daring kid, afraid of nothing. ‘She was a natural leader,’ says Hannah Mason, who was in Alyssa’s gang of four besties. ‘She was the head of our group and we always followed her lead. She was always up to something, doing interesting things that were fun. Having adventures seemed to be part of her nature even when she was very young.
‘She didn’t have a wide group of friends; she mostly stuck to the three of us, and she wasn’t loud or anything. But when she decided she wanted to do something, she was always incredibly focused on what it was she wanted to do, and what she needed to do to get there. She was never afraid to take the lead and certainly had a lot more confidence than I did. Sometimes I’d feel a little bit inferior to her as she was so impressive and driven. She’d get excited by plans and dreams, and they were always much bigger and better than anyone else’s.’
Alyssa was just pretty much absorbed in her own world, unaware of how others felt, and was intent on getting physical whenever she could. ‘I liked the idea of becoming an athlete,’ she says. ‘I tried all the traditional sports and loved them all.’ Her determination showed through constantly. As a tiny five-year-old, she caused consternation at her first school carnival after a 60-metre race by complaining to officials about another runner veering into her lane.
Regular activities were just never enough, however. When Glenn was asked if he’d like to lead an expedition along the Kokoda Track, Alyssa, then aged six, asked him all about it, and begged her parents to be allowed to take part. They would have none of it.
Glenn devised a rigorous training regime for the participants in the months before they were due to leave, and Alyssa came along and watched them go through their paces. Sometimes she’d join in at the side, pretending she was one of them. And she never stopped asking if she could accompany the group.
‘The first time I met Alyssa was when I was asked to take the people planning on going to Kokoda on some walks deep in the bush,’ says Andrew Mills, a neighbour of the family and an experienced local bushwalker. ‘They’d been doing a lot of circuits around the streets of Toowoomba, but wanted to see how they’d fare in the bush. Glenn was leading that expedition, so I got to know him through walking his walkers, and that’s when I first met his daughter too. She always wanted to join in.’
Before the group left for PNG, Alyssa grilled her dad on every step of the expedition, working out where they’d be and when, what hurdles they’d have to face, and how they’d surmount them. After their departure, and throughout their absence, she drew maps and told her mum, her friends and anyone else who’d listen what stage they’d be up to and what they’d be doing next.
When Glenn returned, she listened spellbound to his stories of the places he’d seen and the people he’d spoken to along the way. She asked about every detail of the trek, memorising the names of each of the stages, the villages and the historic battle sites, poring over the souvenirs he brought back and treasuring each one. And when he set off on the next Kokoda expedition, after again refusing all her pleas to be allowed to come along, she hugged him hard and told him to remember plenty of stories for his return.
‘I loved to hear about all the different people who’d go on his expeditions,’ Alyssa says. ‘He’d tell me both the good stories and the bad, probably to try to turn me off ever wanting to go! He’d talk about the people who don’t prepare properly and obviously pay the price over there and regret it, as well as the people who do really well. I guess that’s where my mentality started to come from. I always told myself I wanted to train really hard because I’d heard of people who didn’t and didn’t achieve what they wanted to, and regretted it big time.’
By the time Alyssa celebrated her seventh birthday, she’d grown wilier about arguing her corner. Glenn loved inspirational quotes and would pin his favourites up around the house to keep himself motivated. One day when he told Alyssa that she was just too small to go to Kokoda, her jaw firmed and her head went up. ‘Dad, you’re always telling me we’re not too sm
all to do anything,’ she countered. ‘How can you now say different to me about this?’
Glenn laughed; it was a fair call. So when he returned from his next Kokoda trip, and she started asking again if she could come on another he had planned, he was finally more conciliatory. ‘Okay, Alyssa,’ he told her, ‘I’ll take you next year under one condition: I’m going to set you a training program and even when I’m away, even in the middle of winter, you’ve got to go out walking. If it’s raining or it’s 4°, that doesn’t matter. If you miss even one training session out of a minimum of three every week, I’m not going to take you because it says to me that you don’t really want to do it. When I’m away, I’ll arrange for a friend to take you. But miss one, and it’s over.’
His daughter grinned back at him, nodding enthusiastically. She had absolutely no idea that he’d set the bar deliberately high, thinking there was no way she’d be able to reach it. ‘I’ll be honest,’ says Glenn. ‘I did that because I was certain she’d miss at least one training session. I thought she’d do it for a month and then after that she’d have had enough of it and drop out. I had no idea how determined she really was …’
For at least three days every week, and usually more, Alyssa went out walking to complete her training regimen. In a year, she never missed a single day. By the time twelve months was over, Glenn was forced to admit defeat. Therese was appalled; Alyssa was ecstatic.
The expedition company Glenn ran the trips for had one setting out soon after this, so he organised a separate side trek for himself, Alyssa, Andrew Mills and Mills’ then girlfriend, Sandy Paterson, as he was worried his daughter wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the adults. The four would camp with the others but walk by themselves, just in case. Therese wasn’t keen, and didn’t want to encourage her daughter at all, but on the other hand, she tried to be supportive, knowing how determined Alyssa was. ‘She eventually came to terms with it,’ Alyssa says. ‘But she wasn’t thrilled about it.’
Alyssa shared the news about her upcoming trek with her mates at school and they took it in their stride. Nothing surprised them about Alyssa. They knew she went off walking all the time and had privately marvelled at her determination. ‘We knew how much she was training for that trek and I think a few of us thought she was crazy for putting so much effort into it,’ says Hannah Mason. ‘We were all about seven or eight, and at that age you don’t usually have any motivation for anything other than having fun with your friends. None of us would have been prepared to put anything like that amount of time into anything and miss out on the fun stuff, like the Saturday cartoons.’
Glenn and Therese had brought Alyssa up with the philosophy of giving back to the community where possible, and they talked to Alyssa about trying to raise funds with her trek for a suitable charity. She was enthusiastic and the three came up with the idea of nominating the Toowoomba Hospital children’s appeal. That instantly created more publicity for her quest, too, and support came from some unexpected quarters. Four-time world light welterweight champion Kostya Tszyu even visited Toowoomba for a fundraising dinner for the hospital organised by Glenn, and spoke at the function, showing clips of various fights throughout his career, holding a Q&A session and then presiding over a silent memorabilia auction.
The local newspaper heard an eight-year-old girl was about to take part in one of the toughest endurance tests known to humankind, and ran a couple of stories. Others followed. A news crew from the TV station turned up at her school and interviewed her. ‘I remember watching her with everyone else through the classroom windows with the TV camera on her,’ says Mason. ‘We all thought what she was doing was incredibly exciting, although we never quite understood what exactly it was she was doing!
‘We talked about it, but none of us appreciated what a huge challenge it was. We had a class photo with Alyssa, and we all held up a banner saying, “Good Luck, Alyssa!” I think a few people were a bit jealous of her as she was going to be doing something so exciting, and she was getting all this attention, and the rest of us were still stuck at school. But she never boasted. She was just always excited about what was coming, and so focused on making it happen.’
The stories in the media about an eight-year-old going off to do Kokoda and, in addition, raising funds for the local hospital caused a sensation in the community. Her mum’s workmates bailed her up: surely she wasn’t really prepared to countenance her daughter doing such a thing? ‘I would just cringe,’ Therese says. ‘Of course I was proud of her and wanted to support her, but people were saying, Are you sure that’s something an eight-year-old should be doing? But they didn’t know her.
‘We put a lot of support in place and if she wanted to change her mind she could, and there was medical help there too. But a lot of people said negative things at the time.’
Glenn was having a hard time too. A few people accused him of trying to live through his daughter. He reacted angrily: by now he’d completed ten Kokoda treks of his own, so where was the personal satisfaction for him in dragging Alyssa along? The Toowoomba newspaper ran a poll on its opinion page, asking readers if they felt he was being irresponsible in taking his young daughter to Kokoda. ‘I watched that paper for a week, but no one wrote in to say yes,’ Glenn says. ‘I thought that was pretty cool.
‘But I knew that if something happened to her, that would be the worst thing ever, and that would be tough to live with. I would live with it forever, and part of me would always think, Did I do the right thing or not?’
In the meantime, he did everything he could think of to ensure Alyssa’s safety. He put in extra days as a precaution, running the expedition over sixteen days rather than the normal eight or nine.He tried to work out what he could do if she wanted to drop out. His contingency planning included being prepared to carry Alyssa if she didn’t want to continue or injured herself, and his mates carrying her to safety if anything happened to him. He was sure he’d thought of everything.
In the event, it turned out he hadn’t.
MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2013
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ISBN: 978-1-74253-614-9
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