Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked, in case Dad started talking about Aunt Fanny instead of Uncle Jack.

  ‘We had trouble all right. Those bullocks were pretty big and wild, I was bungling, Uncle was shouting his head off, and there were men and beasts galloping all over the place. I got the bulk of the curses but everyone got some. I did not get actually hit with the whip and nor did my pony, but he was heavily flushed with rage.

  ‘That evening was killing night and I was still nervous: we had a cranky killer in the killing pen, and I took three shots to kill him. This was a most heinous offence and if he hadn’t already cursed me enough, he cursed me one hell of a lot more and I felt dreadful. Over dinner he chatted away pleasantly about old times at Tangambalanga but during the night he had a heart attack and died. The doctor said it was due to overexcitement and exertion.’ That was 30 August 1921.

  Dad was educated at Cranbrook School in Sydney where in 1918 he was one of the foundation students. Afterwards he was accepted to Jesus College, Cambridge. He then went on to study law and for the bar in London. Strangely, for a man with such a good memory, he found academic work difficult, at least initially. He said he couldn’t have succeeded without Granny M’s encouragement and support. Judging from his diaries, I suspect travel, sport and a very active social life had something to do with any academic difficulties. Nonetheless, he graduated with his BA in 1929 and was admitted to the bar in London in April 1931. He returned to Australia and was also admitted to the bar in New South Wales. An accomplished skier, by the end of winter in 1932 he held Australian and Victorian ski titles. Instead of practising as a barrister, by November 1932 he and Honnor were boarding a ship to visit Germany, spend Christmas in Switzerland and then race in Davos and Innsbruck, Austria, during the European winter of 1932–33.

  Mum and Dad first met in November 1933. At that stage, Dad was more of a city dweller and sportsman than a bushman, and almost more English than he was Australian. Theirs was a relationship forged on the whirlwind of a few social meetings in Sydney and Melbourne and, by today’s standards, when they announced their engagement on 20 March 1935 they scarcely knew each other. Mum let on when I was an adult that she had some misgivings and broke off the engagement briefly. She said she had no idea what to expect and knew virtually nothing about sex.

  In January 1936 Granny M welcomed the newly married couple to Towong Hill before she left to stay with Aunt Honnor and Uncle Moreton at Blowering, eventually returning to live in Sydney.

  The ghosts of Dad’s cranky uncles across the border in New South Wales haunted the newlyweds at Towong Hill. Neither Peter and Tui nor Jack and Fanny had any children, so there were never any Mitchell first cousins living close by to alter the family dynamics. The God-fearing Mitchell family thought that Jack and Fanny couldn’t have children because it was a sin to marry a cousin. Aunt Pinkie and Uncle Willie Chisholm’s son Malcolm spent school holidays with Fanny and Jack, his aunt and uncle; he was Jack’s heir and like an older brother to Dad. Much to everyone’s sorrow, Malcolm was mortally wounded on 26 August 1914 and died a few days later – he was the first Australian to be killed in the First World War.

  When Uncle Jack died in 1921, Malcolm’s younger brother Colin inherited the Khancoban property and built a new house. Peter died the same year and in his will set up a couple of scholarships, one at Duntroon and the other at Sandhurst in England. He stipulated that candidates ‘must possess a sound and appreciative knowledge of parts of the Protestant Bible’. The will also attempted to ensure that none of his relatives could be beneficiaries. Peter was determined to fight the family beyond the grave and down the generations. When I was offered a glass of wine by the wife of the winner of the scholarship at Sandhurst, I drank a silent toast to my viperous old great-uncle and to the fine tales I had heard about him. Apparently the scholarship cheque was only sufficient to pay for a very few to have a drink or two – nobody was going to hit the tiles at my great-uncle’s expense – but he hadn’t written his will carefully enough to prevent the winner of either scholarship spending it on alcohol. Nor had he been clever enough to prevent me being the ultimate beneficiary of Tui’s watch, left to me by a distant relative.

  Arriving on a large sheep and cattle station with a thoroughbred horse stud as a somewhat intimidated twenty-two-year-old bride, Mum must have wondered how she was going to make the grand house at Towong Hill, with its short and mostly sombre history, her home. She must have wondered, too, what sort of life she and her cosmopolitan wanderer of a husband would be able to create in the bush. She must have searched every facet of her new environment for inspiration and clues as to what might lie ahead in life. At first she hated the house and was intensely lonely; if life had not worked out in the way Granny M and Granddaddy M had hoped, it also didn’t work out in the way Mum might have expected or wished. I have often wondered if she ever felt her parents-in-law’s tragedy could turn out to be a bad omen.

  Mum and Dad never packed up our grandparents’ possessions; it was as if they were forever guests in someone else’s house. It is a wonder that Mum didn’t exorcise as much as possible from the house to discourage the ghosts haunting her. She simply pushed their works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and a wide range of Granny M’s French literature to the back of bookcases and, over time, placed her own books and papers in front. She repeated the process with other objects in the cupboard under the stairs, the pantry, my upstairs bedroom and the linen room, creating a complex stratigraphy of literature and possessions for the historical archaeologist. When I sorted out Mum’s papers and belongings, Granny M’s neatly ordered French paperbacks were disintegrating behind a collection of Mum’s first editions.

  At the time of their marriage, the only room that seemed to have been exclusively Dad’s was his small, musty, book-lined study at the back of the house. Appropriately, he called it the ‘Weasel Hole’, and it would have been ideal for one person, or two people working closely together. When they moved into Towong Hill after their honeymoon, Dad had a desk put in for Mum. It was no more than a polished wooden bench, a small concession to his shy but ambitious bride. A large crepe myrtle blocked the view from the only window; the Weasel Hole was a serious work room.

  From the Weasel Hole Mum and Dad planned their first skiing and walking trips in the mountains. In 1936 they rode from Geehi to the snowline and then skied to the Chalet at Charlotte Pass. They explored the Alps from all points of the compass: the Dargals Range at the northern end to Mt Pinnibar in the south across the border in Victoria. It was remarkable that Mum was able to meet such tough challenges – Dad was exceptionally fit as well as being an accomplished skier, having already won Australian and New Zealand titles. They were united by a love of adventure. If not explorers themselves, they saw themselves following in the footsteps of the explorers and perhaps even gathering some of the knowledge that the explorers hadn’t recorded. The Weasel Hole was the base where they kept their maps and wrote their lists of food and equipment. One such list included tins of sardines, salmon, camp pies, various tinned fruits, ‘cakes of chocolate’ and a mouth organ. Mum only ever brought her piano accordion along when they were taking a packhorse, or on shorter outings when they took a vehicle into the bush for a picnic.

  But it wasn’t long before the world was again plunged into war. Dad was commissioned into the 2/22 Battalion and was assigned to the headquarters of the 8th Division. Before Dad left for Malaya in autumn 1941, the serious-minded couple drew up a program of study they were going to undertake while the war kept them apart. Mum’s program included literature, philosophy and history.

  The Weasel Hole was where Mum worked from the time of her first arrival at Towong Hill until after the war ended. During the war and as she gradually began to feel at home, she added her mountaineering books to Dad’s shelves and had a glass-fronted bookcase built to accommodate her growing collection of volumes on philosophy, poetry and the craft of writing. It was at her desk in the Weasel Hole that she
wrote to Dad when he first went away on active service, to her own family in Melbourne and to the wider family scattered between Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland, and further afield across the world. Here too she typed her diary and compiled the scrapbook containing press cuttings collected from their visit to New Zealand for the InterDominion Ski Championships in 1936 and their trips in 1937 to Hawaii and in 1938 to North America, notably to Sun Valley and Banff. In the southern hemisphere winter of 1938 Mum and Dad skied in Chile and Argentina before going on to ski in Austria. Many of Mum’s letters, diary entries and notes eventually became part of her inspiration for future articles and books.

  Mum wrote a good deal of her first book, Australia’s Alps (1942), from the detailed letters she wrote to Dad (some from the Chalet at Charlotte Pass) about her ski expeditions to the Cascades, the Western Face and to Mawson’s Hut and Jagungal. She never went alone. George Day, Colin Wyatt, Toddy Allen, cross-country ski champion Ken Breakspear and Jill Macdonald were among her most frequent touring companions. If Dad was ever jealous, he never let on. The few letters he wrote in 1941 from Malaya that I have seen were always encouraging and full of admiration – she was carrying on the life that they had agreed she should lead while he was away.

  With the assistance and encouragement of her distant relative and family friend Ethel Anderson, at the end of the ski season Mum completed the manuscript of Australia’s Alps back at Towong Hill in the Weasel Hole. In Chauvel Country (1983), Mum explained:

  I don’t know whether [Ethel] suggested the article on the Snowy Mountains which Walkabout published and which became the first chapter of Australia’s Alps, but she knew I intended to write Australia’s Alps and to do all the exploration on skis which Tom and I had always intended to do together. I sent each chapter to her as it was written and typed while at the Chalet, and she took six of them to Mr Cousins at Angus and Robertson, and her interest and his interest gave me the encouragement to go on.1

  In the early mornings and evenings following the news of the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, after which Dad was listed as missing, Mum began to write the diary that she, again with Ethel Anderson’s help, turned into the book Speak to the Earth (1945). Soil and Civilization followed and was published in 1946. Not knowing whether Dad was alive and often fearing the worst, Mum didn’t hear until January 1943, via the Red Cross, that Dad was in Changi.

  Even so, she didn’t know he had been injured or anything about his health or the way he and his fellow POWs were being treated. From their shared experience in the mountains, she would have known that he had good survival skills and that he would have kept himself as strong and fit as possible. She might have felt that his military training with the Melbourne University Rifles Regiment, then his training with the 2/22nd Battalion and his courses at the gas, bomb and camouflage schools in Singapore in 1941 had not prepared him for an overwhelming enemy such as the Japanese. Indeed she must have wondered if even the most professionally trained men would have felt capable of withstanding the onslaught. She must have endured many anxious months, wondering what her future held, if indeed there was a future.

  She would not have known then that Dad was being looked after by Dr Ken Burnside, or that Peter Chitty and other men from the Upper Murray would look out for him during the dark months and years of their captivity. Mum never discussed with me how she felt during that time, but having spent twenty-seven years as an army wife, with Mark often away on operational tours, I can imagine, to some degree, what she must have experienced.

  After he returned from the war, Dad helped Mum with photographs to illustrate Images in Water, which came out the following year. It seems strange to think that the smallest room in the house nurtured two fine but increasingly divergent careers.

  By the time of my first memories, Mum had expanded her writing space and moved to another desk in the front hall where there was more room. Dad quickly filled the void in the Weasel Hole with piles of parliamentary papers and other material relating to his diverse array of interests. Soon Mum started writing her way round her home, ultimately using almost every room in one way or another as part of her writing space. When an idea came she wrote it down in the shorthand notebook she carried in her pocket, or on the back of an envelope, or on any other scrap of paper to hand. Sometimes the ideas became stories, or parts of stories, articles or poems. Otherwise, they were simply left in a drawer in case they held some inspiration in future. The house at Towong Hill could easily absorb a trail of books, notebooks, biros, broken pencils, broken typewriters, cardboard boxes and envelopes filled with manuscripts, notes, photographs, correspondence, shopping lists and all the other paraphernalia of family life.

  Cupboards all over the house were stuffed full. Mum’s sister, Eve, tells a story of how she and her husband, Ted, opened a cupboard in the spare bedroom downstairs (usually called the Bachelor’s Room) and a pile of rolled maps and papers cascaded down onto his head. Ted was a very precise retired army officer who must have found it strange to be accommodated in such a wild museum. Similarly, the cupboard in the sitting room was filled with a wonderful collection of brilliantly coloured embroidery threads. Again, they threatened to decorate the head of anyone who opened the cupboard. Beneath the chaos lay Granny M’s well-ordered possessions.

  When I was a child my writer mother’s possessive love affair with what she often referred to as ‘that resonant, dream-filled house’ and its surrounding countryside developed into a burning obsession. It was the epicentre of her world and imagination. Somehow, just as Dad had done when he returned after the war and Indi and Harry had done before me and John would do afterwards, I had to find a way to fit within the spoken and unspoken but nonetheless firm boundaries of Mum’s well-established and essentially self-absorbed lifestyle. When Dad was at home he had his own equally firm but sometimes different boundaries. For me it felt like trying to establish an identity alongside a couple of warring gods in a Greek play – a tragedy, ultimately – without getting any more than my tail feathers caught and a metaphorical and literal sore bottom from the crossfire.

  5

  Shards of Memory

  My earliest memory dates from August 1954 when I was just one year old. I was sitting in a pool of sunlight on the floor in the drawing room of my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Edward’s house, Danbury, in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill. There was a grandfather clock and sea-green silky curtains, the folds of which looked like gleaming, sinuous waves. My Uncle Edward, Mum’s brother, had not much hair, slightly baggy eyes and a kindly smile. Aunt Margaret’s brilliant blue eyes seemed to twinkle and dance merrily as she laughed and poured tea from an ornate silver teapot. The white walls of the house held some beautiful paintings and the sun seemed to pour in from the windows. It was so much brighter and lighter and like a tinkling fairyland compared to the sombre Towong Hill. But I can’t remember anyone talking, or, at least, talking to me, while we were in Sydney.

  ‘I am sure someone told you about the grandfather clock and the colour of the curtains,’ Mum remarked with disbelief when, aged about ten, I was talking about that trip to Sydney and mentioned my memories. ‘If you remembered the trip from Albury to Sydney at all you would remember Harry falling from the bunk in the sleeper on the train, right on top of you in your basket. You were too young to remember anything.’

  I longed to say something but I didn’t have the vocabulary to convey my annoyance that Mum should question the memories that were as clear as sharp colour photographs in my mind’s eye. If only I had remembered Harry tumbling on top of me; or the trip to the zoo; or having tea with Mum’s old aunts; or meeting our relative, the writer Ethel Anderson and her daughter, Betty Foott; or Mum collecting the gold ring set with three fabulous diamonds that she had inherited from Granny M, Mum might have believed me. Apart from Uncle Edward’s baggy eyes, his bald head and kind face, Aunt Margaret’s beauty and their drawing room, I didn’t remember anything.

  I don’t know how old I was when I realised that neither Mum no
r indeed anyone could dictate what I did or didn’t remember. And better still, I didn’t have to tell them.

  Crash went something hard and sharp-cornered into my head. Stars of pain jumped in front of my eyes. It was late 1955 or early 1956 – I wasn’t yet three – and Harry and I had a heap of toys out on the sitting-room floor. Suddenly he hit me on the head with a brightly patterned metal spinning top. Granny was playing patience on an oval table beneath a window. She might have been dozing as she scarcely seemed to stir when I screamed in rage and pain. I flew from the room as fast as my little legs would carry me towards the staircase where I had seen Mum carrying baby John upstairs a few minutes earlier. A lump was gathering into a bruise on my head and I wanted her badly. At the end of the narrow strip of thin green carpet in the upstairs corridor at Towong Hill, I had to turn left to enter Mum’s room. I slipped on the linoleum, failed to negotiate the left-hand turn and crashed in a bruised, tearful heap in the doorway.

  ‘Off you go downstairs to Granny. I’ll be down soon,’ Mum said before I could take another step. She could hear but not see me, though I could see in the mirror on her wardrobe door that she was sitting, propped on pillows on her brass bed, feeding the baby. It was the first and only time I saw Mum breastfeeding. Instinctively I must have understood but, in addition to the spreading sore spot on my head, it was strangely upsetting.

  Back downstairs Granny may not have been entirely aware of the incident that had propelled me to run to Mum in the first place. She began to tell me how lucky I was to have a baby brother, but I didn’t feel lucky at all. She tried to soothe me by explaining that Mum and the baby needed some peace and quiet away from our more boisterous games, but her words simply added to my feeling of injustice. I was learning fast that Mum was an intensely private person, although I didn’t know the word ‘private’ then. As a ‘terrible-two-year-old’ the lesson was tough.