Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  Dedication

  To Mark, Sarah and James with love and gratitude

  Epigraph

  When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,

  pray that the road is long,

  full of adventure, full of knowledge.

  Constantine P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaca’

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 For Fear of a Nightmare

  2 A Name Like Honor

  3 Cranky Ghosts

  4 Working in a Wild Museum

  5 Shards of Memory

  6 Each Item Had a Story

  7 Brilliant Times and Places

  8 ‘Like a Wave Lifting Everything’

  9 Where There Are Roses There Are Usually Thorns

  10 A Naughty Blue Leopard with a Great Big Smile

  11 The Bittersweet Schoolroom

  12 So Many Stories

  13 The Coming of the Brumbies

  14 Out of Eden

  15 Paradise for her Daughter

  16 Crucifix in the Pudding

  17 Pushing the Boundaries

  18 Undercurrents

  19 Beyond the Family

  20 War Secrets

  21 War Friends and Waterskiing

  22 Another World

  23 Visitors to Our World

  24 Typical Upper Murray Fun

  25 Early Skiing

  26 Skiing Is Serious

  27 The Magic of Summer Skiing

  28 Adventures on the Alpine Way

  29 Skiing the World

  30 Accident and Intrigue

  31 Moths in the Lamplight

  32 Toorak College

  33 A Bid for Freedom

  34 A Love of Freedom

  35 The Time Warp

  36 ‘A Man Who Would Have Sons’

  37 Wings to Find My Life 299

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  Inspired by her travelling and storytelling parents, Honor Auchinleck has led a peripatetic life. With her husband, Mark, who served in the British Army, she has moved home nineteen times, living, working and travelling in five different countries on three continents.

  Born in Melbourne in 1953, educated by correspondence schooling, as a boarder at Toorak College and at the Australian National University, Honor has always had strong ties to Australia. In the thirty-four years she lived overseas, she never lost touch with her roots, returning frequently to the old family home, Towong Hill.

  Honor has taught English as a second language, worked as a freelance features writer and photographer on expatriate newspapers and for two years was a judge for the Commonwealth Essay competition in London. She has also worked in archaeology.

  She has two grown-up children, and she and Mark now live in Melbourne and on their property, formerly part of Towong Hill, where they raise Aberdeen Angus cattle.

  Prologue

  My mother, Elyne Mitchell, was already an established writer before I was born. By then she’d had six books published and a number of articles, but her big break hadn’t yet come. When it did, in 1958, Mum had been writing for more than twenty years and had given birth to four children: Indi, Harry, me and John. Her success was unexpected and quite thrilling.

  In November 1956 Mum had written to her friend and fellow writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman explaining her new direction: ‘I should have been writing another novel [for adults] but instead of that I am writing a book for Indi.’ Less than a year later, on 28 September 1957, Mr Voss Smith, the Australasian manager of the English publishing house Hutchinson, wrote one of the most encouraging letters Elyne could ever have hoped to receive:

  I am sorry for the slight delay concerning ‘The Silver Brumby’ but can now advise that I have read it, so has our Sales Manager and also our outside reader. We all agree it is excellent, and the Reader comments –

  ‘I think I can say it is one of the finest juvenile horse stories I have ever read.’

  For your information, although we don’t usually pass this information on to the author at this stage, the Reader comments inter alia –

  ‘The author writes with beautiful simplicity, her sense of the dramatic allows drama to arise from the action of the story and is never marred by a cascade of adjectives. There is a nobility and dignity about these wonderful animals – her painting of the Australian scene is marvellous, matching in the beauty and dignity, the horses who live there.’

  Only eleven months later, on 6 August 1958, Mr Voss Smith was again writing enthusiastically to my mother, this time about Silver Brumby’s Daughter. He explained that he had not been in a hurry to get this manuscript to the London office as ‘I want their full concentration on “The Silver Brumby” and didn’t want anything else to be considered until this was published as a certainty in time for Christmas here.’ On 23 December Mr Voss Smith once again wrote, wishing Mum a happy Christmas and also telling her that he estimated world sales of The Silver Brumby would be in the region of 13,000 by the end of that year. It was a wonderful achievement, and the reviews were ecstatic. Mum marked in red her journalist friend Pamela Ruskin’s remarks:

  An Australian classic, and one of the most beautifully written children’s books of the last decade, is Elyne Mitchell’s story of the wonderful Silver Brumby. Thowra roams the Australian Alps and valleys, wild and free and ever in danger from his enemy, Man.1

  Mum’s real talent lay in creating the characters of her animals – such as Thowra, the magnificent and illusive Silver Brumby, and Beni, the friendly, wise kangaroo – rather than people in her marvellously evocative descriptions of the bush. As a young girl I read The Silver Brumby and fell in love with the horses, the indigenous animals, the mountains and the bush. Mum gave her imagination a much freer hand with animals than she did with the two-legged characters in her earlier novels and short stories.

  Weaving tales about the world of wild fauna and flora offered Mum a pleasurable escape into an imaginative world. It was a form of release that she could not find in her immediate domestic environment. By the time Mum started writing Silver Brumby’s Daughter she was highly attuned to observing and understanding fauna and flora – a result of her many prewar and wartime expeditions into the mountains on horseback, skis, foot and later via car. With the success of the first two Silver Brumby books, her interest and delight in every conceivable aspect of the bush began to soar. Through her stories she breathed thrilling magic into the Australian bush, not just for herself and my sister, Indi, and me, but also for generations of children across the world.

  The success of The Silver Brumby rewarded the hard work that went into it. With four young children and John just a baby, born in November 1955, throughout 1955 and early 1956 Mum wrote and typed only a few pages a day. She said that she wrote The Silver Brumby ‘between [her children’s] correspondence school courses and lifting the baby out of the biggest puddle’.2 In the 1950s Mum usually had domestic help – a cook, a cleaner and a gardener (who also milked the five Jersey cows) – but she had to oversee, sometimes assist the staff, and cope with any problems that cropped up. It is hard to imagine how she managed to write successfully, bring up a family and run a house. Many people said she was remarkable, which indeed she was. Some people realised it must have been difficult too.

  I felt that many aspects of my formal primary education were sacrificed for her later success while she wrote Kingfisher Feather and Winged Skis and was trying to write another adult novel. While Mum’s books added fabulous degrees of magic to my childhood, I do have some regrets about my schooling. Her attention often seemed to be elsewhere when I was struggl
ing with my correspondence lessons.

  As I grew up I realised that The Silver Brumby was a very useful key to understanding Mum; it could help me in that long and interesting journey. I can still hear her voice and her perceptive wisdom in these words:

  Kunama reminded [Thowra] of Bel Bel, with her inborn wisdom. Perhaps, like Bel Bel, she would be given an even greater wisdom than the wisdom of mares, because she, too, being cream, would lead a hunted life, and must be wise in order to survive. Mares, Thowra knew, with foals to look after as well as themselves, often had a special understanding of the bush and weather. If like Bel Bel and Mirri, they were ‘lone wolves’, their wisdom, knowledge and cunning could be very great – that was why Bel Bel had been almost as much leader of the herd as Yarraman; that was why he, Thowra, having learned from Bel Bel, seemed magic to the other horses and to the men. Anyway, he knew – as soon as he saw Kunama prick her small ears, then shiver, as seven black cockatoos passed overhead, flying, crying, that she would need everything he could teach her and all her own inborn wisdom, too, if she were to remain free and wild, and live her life in the mountains.3

  Mum often wrote that black cockatoos foretold bad weather or even danger. She also knew that danger was the downside to Paradise, and that nothing in life can be taken for granted: you have to be wise to survive, wild horses and people alike.

  Twenty years after writing The Silver Brumby, black cockatoos came into our own lives.

  1

  For Fear of a Nightmare

  Not long after Mum died, I was back in our old family home at Towong Hill, near Corryong in north-eastern Victoria. I dreamed about trying to open the door of the wardrobe in my bedroom. The full-length mirror in the door had been loose for as long as I could remember. It rattled and scraped whenever I opened and closed it. The wardrobe was half of a pair; it stood at one end of a much larger piece of furniture on the dark side of the room, furthest from the windows. A shorter shelved cupboard above three deep drawers separated the two long cupboards. It was a late Victorian prefabricated item of furniture dating from the turn of the twentieth century when the house was built. A hundred years later, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the piece had some curiosity value.

  In my dream, instead of opening my wardrobe to the usual clothes jumbled on hangers and a disorderly collection of shoes, to my horror I saw hastily but firmly nailed graffiti-covered sheets of compressed pine wood, the kind used to board up disused buildings in the down-at-heel suburbs of big cities. That filthy wall was severing me not just from the little that remained of my clothing but from my childhood memories, as if I had never belonged at Towong Hill. I woke and sat bolt upright, turning on the light and leaping from bed. I had belonged, and I didn’t want to lose any more connection with my past. I’d lost too much already with Mum’s death. I opened my desk drawers and pulled out the scrappy bits of paper, letters and notebooks that I had kept down the years and thrust them into my overnight bag. It was through Mum that I would start remembering because she had been right at the centre of my life until well into adulthood.

  Shortly after Mum’s funeral in Corryong in March 2002 I returned to Towong Hill before my husband, Mark, and I were due to go to Ankara for Mark to take up his appointment of defence attaché at the British Embassy. I knew Mum’s work reasonably well and I was interested in her writing, so I hoped to collect and assemble her archive. My cousin Richard Chauvel had travelled up from Melbourne with me and stayed and helped for a weekend. It was an awkward job because Mum never really filed anything systematically. Particularly in her latter years, she didn’t spend much time on maintaining an orderly environment in which to work – of much greater importance to her was putting time and effort into thinking, research and creative writing. Dusty manuscripts bulged from collapsing manila folders, correspondence burst from envelopes, elastic bands, ribbons and pieces of string. Papers spilled out everywhere from overfilled cardboard boxes and had become scattered. The carers who assisted in Mum’s later years clearly didn’t understand what the manila folders and bundles of papers were about, nor did they have the time to find out.

  Initially I took on the job of unofficial executor, but it soon became official. This was both extraordinarily illuminating and at times deeply distressing, the papers and photographs evoking all kinds of memories and emotions: laughter, gratitude, deep regret and the knowledge that her death ensured that some misunderstandings and mysteries would linger on, with little or no possibility of further explanation unless I happened upon clues as I gathered, sorted and explored.

  I began by dividing the material into broad categories and removing private correspondence so the archive could be professionally assessed. As I worked, I searched the dusty desks, bookcases, walls, and other nooks and crannies of Towong Hill, remembering the companionship of my brother Harry fixing his radio set, and stimulating conversations with Mum about anything from David Campbell’s poetry to where kingfishers nested. Often Dad could be persuaded to tell stories from the old days when his grandfather, old Thomas Mitchell, first came to the Upper Murray. Now silence filled those familiar spaces.

  But my work with the archive gave me the chance to preserve my memories, to try to understand Mum better and make up for some of the opportunities I hadn’t taken when she was alive. Mum died on 4 March 2002; Dad had died eighteen years earlier on 4 February 1984. It was as if Mum’s sixty-year writing life, which I was trying to pack up, might disintegrate before my eyes if I was not careful, taking with it many of my remaining connections with my childhood. I worked carefully and quickly, wanting to get as much done as possible before returning to my own life on the other side of the world. The dream exposed my fear that, with my departure early the next day, I would lose some of the most treasured memories of my mother and of my childhood.

  The following morning I began my travels south to Melbourne International Airport and from there back to England, where I had to pack up and move from our army quarters, see our daughter, Sarah, who was studying in London, and then, with my husband, Mark, and son, James, drive across Europe to Ankara.

  I was daunted by both the work required for Mum’s archive and the preparations for attaché life, as well as all the travel before me. If I focused on what I had to do for the archive stage by stage, it would be just manageable. Yet Mark’s role in Ankara would require more of me. Never had I felt so torn between two threads: the past and the immediate future at opposite ends of the earth, pulling strongly against one another. Nevertheless I felt certain that I had to know where I’d come from to form some idea of where I was going.

  For as long as I could keep my eyes open on that flight and at every other opportunity during the journey from Melbourne to London, I thought about my parents, and Mum in particular. I needed to remember and record my childhood to ensure I would be firmly rooted in my identity and not lose my past. My parents’ stories were inextricably interrelated with my own.

  Some of Mum’s last words were still ringing in my ears: ‘There is so much to talk about – but I can’t talk here,’ she said, indicating that the local hospital was not the appropriate environment for the things she wanted to say. She wanted to go home but never had another chance to, and she hardly uttered another word. There was so much I wanted to know. I wanted to find the mother I had known in my childhood before I began to lose her. Death and illness in the family as well as physical distance had separated us many years before she died. As a child I was thrilled by the stories she wrote and told and now, in my grief, I wanted to go back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly those happy times when I was learning to read and Mum was writing the first four books in the Silver Brumby series.

  Mum would read the first few paragraphs of The Silver Brumby with me, making sure I identified each word as she said it. Sometimes she had to read the same chapter over and over again and answer masses of my questions. I wanted to know whether the Ramshead Range really looked like a ram’s head, with curly horns like a merino
ram. Once I asked her if she would take us to see the place where Thowra was born. She seemed both vague and worldly wise when she replied, ‘You will know it when you find it yourself one day.’ Now I think of her remark whenever I climb the Ramshead.

  I wanted to find the woman behind the tall, lean, fit figure, once effortlessly beautiful and later with a weathered, tanned face, crisscrossed with lines of happiness, endeavour and sorrow. In her later years she was often difficult, prickly, highly critical and thoughtlessly determined to get her own way, but she was also exceptional, both as a person and as a mother. She was charismatic and compelling, and I wanted to accept and understand her the way she was, warts and all.

  Writing down my memories would help me to separate memory from dream, and good dream from bad. At that stage I didn’t plan to write a memoir. I had often kept a journal, particularly when I travelled, and I had written travel features for newspapers. Recording my memories meant that I had to put into words what the significant characters in my family looked like, what they did, and the events and family occasions in which they took part. As I wrote, I discovered that I knew a lot about Mum, but I couldn’t write about her without writing about Dad too.

  I had my own notes about my memories of my parents and the ambience of the house and garden at Towong Hill, and the materials I had been seeking out and assembling for the archive also acted as aides-memoire. All I had to do was write it all down.

  Before the plane had even taxied down the runway at Tullamarine on that trip back to Europe, the gum trees in the surrounding countryside flashing past, memories were tumbling like Mum’s photographs and letters spilling from a box, landing in no particular order.

  The first scene that sprang to mind was more about my eldest brother, Harry, than Mum. One brilliant winter morning Harry lobbed a small stone on the ice on the trough at the end of the backyard outhouse. It skated over the swirly ice patterns that distorted the reflections of both the sky and our faces as we leaned over it, our breath forming misty clouds before our eyes. Then he chucked a bigger stone that broke the glittering surface into sharp angular fragments. We scooped some out of the freezing water, dumping the ice shards on the ground and sorting out shapes – swords, scimitars, diamonds and triangles sparkling in the early morning sunrays. It was the first time I remember really enjoying Harry’s company.