The Grammar climbing wall

‘Having the wall throughout high school introduced me to the world of sport climbing. I was already an avid climbing lover, always scaling trees and fences as a kid, but at the time really had no idea there was a community and sport behind it where walls were specifically designed to challenge like-minded people. This introduction was a key turning point in my life and opened up the beginnings of my professional athletic career.’

These are the words of Lucy Stirling (2010), Australian Sports Climbing Team athlete and route setter and coach at Urban Climb. Lucy’s interest in climbing was serendipitous as Lucy’s father, John McLaren ‘Mac’ Stirling was the architect of the McCrae Grassie Sports Centre and the climbing wall.

In Mac's words: ‘The design was revolutionary in that plywood panels would be fixed to a lightweight steel frame as opposed to the older flat, reinforced concrete panels which only offered a vertical slab style of climbing without overhang. The DR Walls are also prefinished in a special textured epoxy paint to the plywood panels and a grid of toggled screw points enables the many different epoxy/plastic hand holds to be changed and new climbing routes designed at any time. As it turned out, the design of the BGGS Indoor Sports Centre had two 10 m high reinforced tilt-up slabs on the eastern end of the indoor hall building’.