A pioneering conservationist, a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism to Australia and the first woman to gain a law degree in New South Wales, Marie Byles was a trifecta feminist, who also summited unclimbed peaks around the world. Rachael Kohn tells her story.

A pint-sized trail blazer, Marie Byles was compelled to prove her mettle in a man's world, but she was motivated by much more than the personal challenge. She was a practical idealist, doing her utmost to preserve the natural environment for the enjoyment of others and working to make a difference in the lives of women disadvantaged by unjust laws.

Born in 1900, she was the daughter of non-conformist Protestant parents who instilled in her the words of the Congregationalist hymn: 'Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone! Dare to have a purpose firm! Dare to make it known.'

Her father, the son of a Congregationalist minister, was an electrical engineer who had come to Australia to work on the railways. He passed an ethic of service on to his daughter, but also an independence of mind, which he had learned from his own father.

'My grandfather... erected a notice at the door of his new church: 'Jews, infidels and heretics—all are welcome.' The term heretic was one of pride in our family, not of shame,' wrote Byles.

The Congregational Church, however, was not of the same view, and her grandfather was asked to leave. For Byles who did not consider herself Christian in any conventional sense, her grandfather's attitude presaged the path of her own spiritual search.

She would become one of the first Buddhists in Australia and the author of a bestselling work on the life of the Buddha, Footprints of Gautama Buddha (1957).

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Australian filmmaker and author Anne McLeod read the book in 1992 while on a Buddhist pilgrimage to India. It impressed her as an extremely accessible and humanised version of the Buddha's life, but she also became fascinated with Byles and eventually wrote a book about her: The Summit of Her Ambition: The Spirited Life of Marie Byles.

When she read a newspaper article about her in 1996, McLeod resolved to visit her house, Ahimsa, which had been bequeathed to the National Trust.

'Fortunately her close neighbours were still alive and they had known Marie for 30 years,' says McLeod. 'They really helped me understand her, inspired me and gave me all these other contacts of people to speak to, and it just sort of grew.'

Byles' is a large and complicated story to tell—she had many strings to her bow. She established the first Civic Trust to fight development in Pennant Hills on Sydney's outskirts and in the 1930s lent her legal skills to the Federation of Bushwalking Clubs of NSW, which resulted in the raising of funds sufficient to gazette 263 hectares of headland for the Bouddi National Park near Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast.

Local conservation remained an interest, but Byles had larger territory to conquer. A keen mountain climber, she trained in Banff National Park in Canada's Rocky Mountains and climbed peaks in England, Norway, New Zealand and the Yunnan province of China (while the country was on brink of war with Japan in 1938).

'The Japanese army is invading, coming south from Manchuria and the news gets worse and worse, but Marie has decided that she's found this mountain in the southern part of the Himalayas in the Yunan province called Mount Sensato, [for this trip] which she had organised for two years... trying to get together an all-female party,' says McLeod. 'She convinced everybody that it would all be fine.'

Sensato proved to be the most formidable of all her expeditions. The ever-changing terrain was just one of many obstacles and it was the weather that ultimately kept her from ascending the last few hundred meters of Jade Dragon, as the mountain was locally known. A gust of wind could have easily swept a woman as light as Byles to her death.

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Eventually, a foot injury put an end to Byles' mountaineering days, but she moved on to another journey that would take her to equally challenging spiritual heights. She explored the Society of Friends, or the Quakers, a non-conformist Christian community, but after careful consideration they rejected her application. She was, after all, frank about not being a Christian.

Forays into Carl Jung's depth psychology gave her a taste of eastern thought mixed with the language of universal archetypes, but it would be Buddhism, which had no established community in Australia at the time, that became her religion.

Nonetheless, she brought her own rationalist and feminist perspective to this ancient tradition. She did not see Buddha as a man to be worshipped, but a person whose teachings were reasonable and practical.

Interest in Buddhism grew in Australia, but for Byles it was always an intellectual exercise as much as it was a personal search for solace. She wrote several books, including Journey into Burmese Silence (1962) and Paths to Inner Calm (1965), and travelled to India, Burma and Japan.

Yet it was her resolute feminism which always guided her even in the spiritual realm. She remained highly critical of sexism in the religion, and nuns being subservient to the monks.

According to her biographer, McLeod, it is likely that Byles paid a terrible price for her uncompromising feminism, and while sleeping on her verandah, as she had done since childhood, she was brutally attacked.

The assailant was never caught, but there are theories. McLeod has her own, but it was Byles' deeply cultivated Buddhism that gave her the strength and self-understanding to carry on.