Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  As the local member of parliament for the state electorate of Benambra, Dad was one of the prime movers for the foundation of a ski resort at Falls Creek, and he wanted to carry his entire family along in his unbounded enthusiasm. Dad’s vision was to create ‘the winter playground of the Pacific’.2 The trip to Falls Creek I remember best took place in August 1963, the occasion of a vice-regal visit by Sir Rohan Delacombe, as he enjoyed skiing and had been invited to present prizes at the Victorian championships. Sir Rohan and Lady Delacombe were Mum and Dad’s personal friends so, instead of arranging for Granny to come and look after John and me at home, they decided to take us along as a special treat.

  The presentation was soon to begin, but there was one problem: Mum had forgotten to take suspenders for her stockings. Rather than seeking assistance from the local ladies in Mt Beauty where we were staying, the ever-resourceful Mum ensured her stockings stayed up by twisting threepenny pieces into the top of her stockings and then adding elastic bands for extra security. She practised her curtsy to ensure she could do it without the vital coins flying out from under her skirt and releasing her stockings into unsightly concertinas at her ankles – it was a wonder she didn’t get pins and needles and turn her legs white through lack of circulation. Relieved that the coins did their bit, she never admitted to discomfort and relished telling the story later.

  Mum and Dad enjoyed skiing with Sir Rohan and their old friend Willie Littlejohn, the governor’s aide de camp and the son of Dr Euan Littlejohn. Because I was rather stout, I was the butt of Willie’s mischievous remarks about rotund little girls having trouble bending down over their big tummies to lace up their boots and put on their skis!

  Shy and anxious to avoid the political limelight, Mum preferred to ski in New South Wales, so I never returned to Falls Creek. The opening of the Alpine Way in 1955, followed a couple of years later by the establishment of a fledgling resort at Thredbo, gave her an excuse to go there; Thredbo was closer to Towong Hill than Falls Creek. Skiing became the keys to rather different kingdoms for Dad and Mum. Dad came to Thredbo almost only in school holidays. In 1958 he crushed his leg in a sawmilling accident and he was becoming too lame to ski very much. While he was always keen to know how we were getting on and eagerly awaited the junior race results, his role began to fade and family skiing gradually became Mum’s domain. Thredbo, thrillingly situated in the Crackenback Valley, was near the heartland of the Silver Brumby stories. Although we seldom saw brumbies in those days, there was always the chance that we might spot one hiding in the scrub on Paddy Rush’s Bogong or Brindle Bull. It was Thredbo and the surrounding area that captured my heart at that time rather than the Victorian Alps.

  26

  Skiing Is Serious

  Only later in life did I realise that for Mum, beginning to ski again after having children was not easy. In a short piece of prose called ‘Beginning Again’ in A Vision of the Snowy Mountains, she describes watching the skiers through the plate-glass window of the Round House at Thredbo in the winter of 1960, realising ‘that a whole new technique had been developed, as well as different skis and new boots and bindings. All those skiers looked as though they were in a graceful ballet. Legs were together, the Arlberg crouch was no longer to be seen’.1

  Mum must have missed skiing and the camaraderie of other skiers who went to the Chalet at Charlotte Pass during the heavy snow year of 1953, the winter I was born. There was another bumper snow year in 1956. Although Mum and Dad skied when they could, Mum missed out on almost fifteen years, from the end of the war until 1960. Ski racing and overseas travel had passed her by and new champions were winning state and national titles. She missed being asked for advice about the building and development of alpine villages and ski lifts. Fashion, too, had passed her by almost completely, although she caught up quickly when she bought her first elegant, close-fitting sky-blue ski pants. In her matching Norwegian-style pale blue sweater with its design of white snowflakes across the shoulders and the tops of her arms she looked just fabulous.

  For their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1960, when I was seven, Mum and Dad gave each other metal skis, the latest and best available. Even though Dad was starting to feel the effects of the sawmilling accident more severely (though he wouldn’t admit it), they wanted to make a new and positive beginning for the rest of their lives. They hoped that skiing would play a bigger role than in recent years when the family was very young.

  The new skis were heavy. I tried to carry a pair from the Land Rover parked in the backyard at Towong Hill about fifty metres to the ski room in the outhouse. I just about made it to the ski room door, half-collapsing with them onto the edge of the concrete verandah. ‘Just put them down before you drop them!’ Mum’s piercingly anxious voice rang across the courtyard. From wanting to help, suddenly I wished I hadn’t touched them.

  Mostly, though, we were indeed lucky kids. More imported modern skis followed in 1963 for us. Blizzard skis were among our first, and then one of us – Indi, I think – was given Kneissl White Stars, with long thong bindings, which at that time were regarded as the best you could get.

  In the wake of the Second World War and the increasingly prosperous years of the early 1960s, skiing surged in popularity as a winter sport. It didn’t seem to occur to either of my parents, and Mum particularly, that for many people skiing was a luxury leisure activity. For Mum and Dad skiing was a necessity. Mum often said she enjoyed seeing perfectly trained physical action, and for her skiing embodied this: she loved speed on long downhill slopes and impressive technique equally. She saw the mountains as mysterious and little-charted lands and said that when you were in them, the squiggly lines on maps began to represent real geographic features. If you explored them you would learn something about their mystery and individuality and, more importantly, something about yourself. When Mum and Dad first married there were unmapped and hitherto unvisited places in the mountains above Towong Hill. They carried compasses and altimeters, took bearings and recorded the height of the peaks they climbed and how long it took them to do so. They took masses of photographs that they developed and printed in their dark room at Towong Hill. Then they wrote about their expeditions for The Australian and New Zealand Ski Year Book and other publications. They explored the mountains both in summer and winter, and little by little they explained what Mum described as the ‘mysteries of those skylines [that] began to hold memories of splendid days’.

  ‘The very effort of coping with rough weather gives me strength,’ Mum said. During the winters in the early 1960s, Mum took John and me skiing about three days a week. Indi and Harry were at boarding school at the time and must have felt that they were missing out, which indeed they were. We had some fabulous skiing. John was not always keen and sometimes stayed at home with Mrs Knight. He was thin and felt the cold. Being rather tubbier and better insulated, I mostly enjoyed it, although skiing in all weather conditions, as Mum insisted on doing, was hard. ‘Skiing is always at its best in big storms when the wind howls and the snow blasts down,’ she used to say.2 She liked the challenge. Being in a blizzard was like being in another world.

  I didn’t agree, but it was best not to say so; in blizzards I longed for warm, dry clothes. Mum didn’t seem to feel the cold – she wore the best quality clothing available and ensured we did too, it was just that I could have worn twice the number of layers. If I didn’t want to ski due to bad weather, Mum said I was being difficult. Her philosophy was that if you didn’t always enjoy it, you would learn to do so, as indeed she had done. Meanwhile, I was discovering my own likes and dislikes and learning how to cope with them.

  For Mum, nothing could compete with skiing. It was a tough obsession and a form of escapism that I have never witnessed to the same degree in anyone else, except perhaps Mum’s wartime skiing companion Jill MacDonald. Jill, too, was a free spirit with a lively and sometimes scarily acerbic wit. Mum and Jill enjoyed both skiing and the mountains together. They made few or no demands on one another and
remained lifelong friends, though as Jill had no children she had fewer responsibilities than Mum.

  As well as skiing two or three days a week throughout the winter, we also skied for almost the entire winter school holidays, which then fell during the last couple of weeks of August and early September. Each year, Mum booked three bunk rooms in Leo’s Lodge at Thredbo. Harry shared a bunk room with Dad; Harry slept in the top bunk and Dad in the bottom with his books and parliamentary papers on the bedside table. Their dark room looked onto the hillside, the cheap wooden panelling on the walls turning a yellow colour when the low-wattage light bulb was switched on. Dad and Harry didn’t open the window enough, so it was often airless and smelled a bit mouldy and damp. Indi and I shared another room, and sometimes Jenny Burnside joined us for a week. Mum and John always had the room with the view over the valley to the chairlifts and the snow-covered slopes and peaks of Crackenback. John usually slept in the top bunk leaving Mum in the bottom.

  I was jealous of the kids who stayed at the Ski Club of Australia and some of the other clubs scattered through the village. Each club seemed to have a social life of its own and the members and their kids got to know each other well. The parents cooked together, and the families ate and probably skied together. At Leo’s we didn’t seem to get to know others as well, though in about 1962 I met a boy named Stefie who was also staying with his parents at the lodge. Although he was profoundly deaf he was very adept at lip-reading and communicating, and I often wonder what became of him. He made skiing fun.

  As I slowly began to meet other families and make friends, I realised that not many other families spent all three weeks of the school holidays at Thredbo unless they had their own lodge or a share in a club. I saw too that they had different attitudes to skiing, and that it was a holiday for them in a way it wasn’t for us. Apparently there was no talk about fest Trainieren in other families.

  Sasha Nekvapil, a former Czech Olympic skier and lodge owner at Thredbo, organised the first ski races in which I took part. They were fun and gave me and many other children a taste of competitive skiing and a tremendous sense of achievement for having participated. The first NSW Junior State Championships were held a year or two later. I raced in 1962 and pleased my parents by coming third in the girls’ under-fifteen giant slalom. I still have the napkin ring I won and I was quite proud of myself too.

  Dad, perhaps more so than Mum, would have liked at least one of us to have been selected for the national ski team. Indi came closest to achieving their dreams when in 1964 she won the Ski Club of Australia’s Adams Cup. Her trophy was placed in Mum and Dad’s trophy cabinet on the wall in the stairwell at Towong Hill.

  ‘You mustn’t look as if you are trying to win,’ Mum advised me.

  ‘Why? If you want us to race so much, why don’t you want me to try to win?’

  ‘It isn’t the done thing. You race for the joy of doing your best.’

  ‘I guess you just cover your competitiveness with lots of laughter,’ I ventured.

  Mum was shocked and upset by my cheek. But she must have known that as I was then around eleven or twelve, racing was becoming much more competitive and serious. All the same, I reckoned Mum’s was an ambivalent message from such a fiercely competitive parent. To be fair, she believed that there was much more to skiing than racing and sometimes said that ‘it was the key that let you through into unexplored places’.

  It seemed as if both our parents believed that they had already given us their passions and interests through their blood, and all they had now to do was to teach us the skills we needed to enjoy them. I don’t think they ever sensed the tensions that their almost obsessive passion created among their offspring, or if they did realise, they had decided to ignore any dissent. Mostly I thought it wisest to keep my ambivalent feelings to myself. ‘You kids have opportunities beyond the dreams of others,’ Dad often told me.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do if I wasn’t skiing. I hadn’t seen enough of the outside world to know what I might like. All I knew was that racing would have been okay if it wasn’t so serious. I would rather have been skiing with friends for pleasure, although that would have been difficult as every other girl I knew my own age went to school.

  In 1963 I was one of the youngest members of the New South Wales Junior Ski Squad. While it was nice to have been selected, particularly because it pleased Mum and Dad, I was also becoming aware that my lack of competitiveness meant ski racing simply didn’t hold the thrill for me that it had for them. Mum would have understood more than Dad, who would have called me a squib. It wouldn’t have mattered how much I raced, I knew that all Dad would say was that I wouldn’t know what real ski racing was like until I had raced in Europe.

  During a ski lesson in August 1964 with Indi and my favourite ski instructor Sigi, I broke my leg. The following year I went to boarding school. Mum and Dad arranged for me to race in the winter of 1965, and I gained some respectable places in the under-fifteen category of the NSW Junior Championships and the National Junior Championships, but my life had already begun to change. It was challenging enough trying to settle into boarding school. And it was a perfect excuse to give up racing. After that I didn’t race again until intervarsity ski races in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, I began to ski for pleasure and for the thrill of doing something enjoyable with friends. Each winter before the school holidays in September, I looked forward to meeting up with the Swaney family from Melbourne with whom, over the years, an intergenerational lifelong friendship was forged.

  The Mackinnon family from Tintaldra Station came to the Round House at Thredbo, and there were many others whose infectious enjoyment of the sport made it all so much more fun. Mum had also become friends with the Swaneys and other families in the village and she began to understand that above all I enjoyed meeting people and establishing friendships. Dad was disappointed that there wouldn’t be any more Mitchells winning major races, or at least certainly not me. On the slopes I was finding my own direction and I loved every minute of it. Meeting other people was a big part of it.

  27

  The Magic of Summer Skiing

  Almost every summer in the early 1960s there was a long drift of snow on Etheridge Range just above Seaman’s Hut near the narrow dirt road that wound its way to the summit of Mt Kosciusko. Laurie Seaman and Evan Hayes perished in a blizzard in August 1928 and the hut was built by Laurie’s parents in his memory. Inside the hut I looked at the bare floorboards and the basic metal-framed bunk beds and tried to imagine how I might feel if I had to use it as a refuge from a blizzard. Even at the age of about seven I knew I would be grateful for the shelter, but I’d also be pretty frightened and uncomfortable.

  On a beautiful summer’s day Laurie Seaman and Evan Hayes’ story seemed to have a slightly unreal quality, but I already knew enough of how quickly the weather could change in the mountains to understand its significance. Mum and Dad had made sure of that, particularly on our trip to Dead Horse Gap with the Chauvels a summer or two before. As ever, Dad had been particularly vocal. Cold wintry winds could sweep in thick cloud and mist in seconds. You couldn’t be careful enough, and Dad drove the message home as hard as he could.

  The snowdrift stretched high up among the rocky outcrops of Mt Etheridge, but closer to the road and the hut it flattened out. The granular snow slipped away easily from our skis and it was much easier to manage than many winter snow types; you didn’t fall so much and, if you did, your pants soon dried in the warm sunshine. Skiing in summer was easier and far more fun than it had been the first time I went to Thredbo.

  Everlastings and other wildflowers grew right to the edge of the drift. As the snow melted and retreated, gradually more flowers would burst into bloom. ‘I have never seen the mountains like this, just a mass of bloom,’ Mum remarked, the pleasure of winter snow having been replaced by the wildflowers. She took many colour slides and photographs of flowers growing among the granite boulders and beside the translucent, jagged and icy edges of
a melting drift. If she needed to identify a flower, she took a cutting, wrapped its stem in tissues soaked in water and put it in a billy to take home.

  From Seaman’s Hut, Mum took us down to see and dip our fingertips into the icy headwaters of the Snowy River. The brave might have stuck in a toe too. Mum loved the wonderfully clear water through which we could see the large specks of mica glittering like gold in the summer sunshine. Another time we walked from Etheridge to Lake Cootapatamba, a shallow, oval-shaped lake. We discovered that, just like the Snowy River, it was icy cold, even in the hottest weather. There was not much paddling and no swimming there either!

  For me, Lake Cootapatamba was a welcome break from skiing. Better still, it was mentioned in Silver Brumby’s Daughter: ‘Kunama trembled as she stood there with only her forefeet on the strange frozen lake with its soft carpet of snow.’1 As at that time I had not seen it in winter, it was hard to imagine the lake covered in snow, but it was thrilling to see another landmark from the Brumby books. It was equally exciting to look down from the summit of Mt Townsend into the Murray Valley far beneath, just as the brumbies had: as they climbed, Thowra told Kunama, ‘We will soon see the valley where Golden says the feed is always good.’

  ‘“The valley of man,” Kunama said distrustfully.’2

  Ironically, while Lake Cootapatamba had been the scene of Kunama’s wonderful taste of winter freedom with Thowra, it also lay on the route along which the boy and the man took her to Grey Mare Hut and into captivity. Nowhere could the contrast between freedom and captivity have been more acutely portrayed than the scene in which Kunama is taken, fighting the stockmen every inch of the way, past Lake Cootapatamba: