In my attempts to understand Mum’s ideas through the early Silver Brumby books, I traced how she drew on her own experiences and on her previous work in writing them. During the big brumby drive in The Silver Brumby, when Thowra was a foal, Bel Bel thinks, ‘The men will have made a yard somewhere,’ because this was not the first time Bel Bel had been caught in a big hunt when the stockmen came after the brumbies.
In Australia’s Alps, Mum wrote of a trip up to the tops and riding from Dead Horse Gap to the Cascades: ‘Just over the other side of this hill were the burnt remains of a round yard with two very long wings. Before the bushfires this had been the best yard in the mountains for catching brumbies.’3 The experience gained through riding and skiing in the mountains provided her with the inspiration as well as the essential background knowledge with which to write The Silver Brumby.
In the winter of 1941, after Dad left to serve in Malaya, Mum skied out to the Cascades with their friends George Day, Curly Annabel and Colin Wyatt. This expedition out to the ‘Brumby Run’, or the Cascades, and the yarns they told around the campfire in the Cascades hut must have foreshadowed the writing of The Silver Brumby. In an Australian Ski Yearbook article of 1942, Mum wrote of the Cascades as being ‘a place of which few travellers in the Alps have ever heard’. In Australia’s Alps she describes how she, George, Curly and Colin saw a small mob of brumbies near the hut and how the three men lassoed a yearling colt.4
In her novel Black Cockatoos Mean Snow there are more clues to her experience:
‘Been after the brumbies much this year?’ asked Arthur.
‘Yes. It’s been good sport. I got one quite good colt; but there’s a beautiful white stallion running near the Cascades. Lots of us have seen him…’
‘He’s a wonderful mover,’ said Ray, ‘and shining white.’ 5
In The Silver Brumby the story is told from a horse’s perspective:
There had been a time once, years and years ago, when four people had come whizzing down the snow-covered ridges with great wooden boards on their feet, and one of them had a lasso and had roped a bay colt; but they had been laughing, laughing – mad, in fact – for all they wanted was to cut off some of his tail to wear plaited and pinned on their coats. This was a legend among the wild horses, a tale every foal heard…but it had happened a long time ago, and Man was not expected in the Cascades until the herds of cattle came for summer grazing.6
The tension between the free world of wild mountain horses and native animals and the domestic world of men and their tame horses and dogs is a recurrent theme throughout Mum’s writing for children. In Silver Brumby’s Daughter this tension is still very intense, but as a solitary stockman observes of Kunama, ‘she’s born to be wild and free’.7 In Silver Brumbies of the South, man the invader appears in a very different form, building roads and wandering around the mountains surveying. While these activities did not cause the same fear among the brumbies as the stockmen did, there was a definite feeling of uncertainty and a need to move ‘South’ to where there was more space for wild horses away from men.
In a similar way to The Silver Brumby and Silver Brumby’s Daughter, Silver Brumbies of the South tells the story of the changes in the High Country. In the first chapter Thowra tells his old friend Storm that “‘Along the Crackenback they make a track wide enough for six horses […] In the daytime there is a great noise. Benni, the kangaroo, told me, so I went out one day, and heard and saw.”’8 The track wide enough for six horses was the beginning of the Alpine Way and Thowra’s description would have been based on Mum’s observations in the mid 1950s. Initially Mum didn’t approve of the roads. She felt that the only way to see the fauna and flora properly was from horseback or on foot. Later in the book, Thowra explains to Cloud, the rather gentlemanly light grey stallion who welcomes the silver herd to Quambat flat, “‘Men make roads in my mountains […] It is time that our herds came away – and I, I just wanted to wander like the wind from whom I was named.’”9 As I read the books I could visualise the progress of the roads being cut through the hills.
In Silver Brumby Kingdom, the threat of man is largely replaced by that of the elements and of other horses, while in Silver Brumby Whirlwind there is evidence of man, but man is no longer so threatening to Thowra: ‘When he looked downstream he could see a host of twinkling lights all scattered round the foot of Paddy Rush’s Bogong. Only men could light those lights, but for some reason, he could not feel any danger.’10 Later he sees car lights as ‘two eyes’ that ‘seemed to follow him, blazing and seeking out his own eyes, blinding him’.
He stood still, beside the boulder, his eyes filled with the terrifying, aching light, unable to see anything.
Above the noise of the engine a voice called, and the words flew on the wind.
‘Look! Look! There is a silver horse.’
But the lights let go of their blinding hold on Thowra’s eyes, and he bounded off.
Thowra stopped bounding, and stood still to watch, and the thunder of his heart quietened, but far back in him memory was stirring the sounds of men’s voices…the men who had owned Golden, who had hunted him.11
Mum needed her refuges, her metaphorical secret valleys, not just a geographical place where she felt safe but also a private and creative area of her life. More often than not the bush and the mountains served as her secret valley or paradise. In Silver Brumbies of the South, Baringa and Dawn had to search for their own secure refuge; this time the threat was not so much from man but other horses – perhaps above all from the older, stronger, covetous Lightning, who was keen to have Dawn for his own herd.
Baringa and Dawn had to leave Quambat Flat and the security and company of running with other horses and strike out on their own in unknown country – not an easy challenge for two young horses. They ultimately found a deep, little-known canyon tucked away beyond the cone-shaped mountain called The Pilot. There they were to discover hints of a mystery – that of the Hidden Filly who ran with an ogre of a stallion, the Ugly One. The Secret Canyon was never quite the same paradise that Thowra found in the Secret Valley. The Ugly One knew about the Canyon, and Baringa had to fight for his life on its steep, dangerous, shale slopes. The body of another horse was washed down the stream after the fire – that horse must have known about the Canyon too. The Canyon was never strictly Baringa’s preserve as the Secret Valley was for Thowra. By the time Baringa was a three-year-old it didn’t provide him with the space for which he yearned. Mum knew that not every secret place remained undiscovered by others, and that man and animal alike have to battle for their space and privacy.
Just as Thowra had to win his prize, Golden, three times, Baringa had to help his mother’s brother Lightning three times before he could begin to feel that his mares were safe from the covetous stallion. Mum always believed that the reward could be rich for those who explored their environment and worked hard to create their own place in the world, and Baringa, the Silver Brumby’s grandson (whom Kunama had named for light), was indeed richly rewarded. He not only found a safer place in which to hide, but he also won the silver mare he called Moon through a hard and cunningly fought fight. Since Mum was a keen mountain explorer and worked hard at everything she took on, it is little surprise that her main characters should share these qualities too. The rewards of exploration and challenge were as worthwhile for her equine heroes as they were for Mum.
In the summers of 1961 and 1962 two riding trips to the Tin Mines and Quambat Flat (now called Cowombat Flat), organised by Jean Finlay, who had a riding school near Thredbo, provided Mum with the inspiration for Silver Brumbies of the South and Silver Brumby Kingdom. I was not yet eight when Mum went on the first expedition and almost nine when she went on the second. In Towong Hill: Fifty Years on an Upper Murray Cattle Station she explains that ‘At the head of Quambat Flat we saw two beautiful light-grey brumbies who became Cloud and Cirrus in the third and fourth Brumby books, while the deep canyon of Dales Creek became Baringa’s Secret Valley.’12 In Ch
auvel Country Mum wrote: ‘I rode out to the Tin Mines – and two whole new stories seemed contained in that country.’13 When Mum first projected the slides from those trips onto the screen in the dining room at Towong Hill, my eyes scanned the images for silver brumbies – for Thowra and Baringa, and for Cloud and Cirrus. It was a thrilling moment to be involved in a story as it was being conceived, and some compensation for the disappointment of being too young to have been included in the expedition.
Silver Brumbies of the South and Silver Brumby Kingdom became my new bedtime stories. I had been reading independently for almost three years by the time Mum began to write Silver Brumbies of the South and I waited impatiently for each chapter as it came off the typewriter, just as Indi had done with The Silver Brumby in earlier years. Such was my impatience for the story that sometimes I read the chapters twice as I could not wait to have the next instalment.
Despite her success with the first two Brumby books, when the moment came to send Silver Brumbies of the South to Miss Tomlinson, who edited children’s books at Hutchinson in London, Mum was concerned about its reception. Once she had received confirmation of the publisher’s acceptance of the manuscript on 11 November 1963, she wrote with relief to Miss Tomlinson, saying how glad she was that she had liked the story. Mum added, ‘Honor kept assuring me that it was very exciting!’ She was quite right – I thought it was thrilling. Of course I was delighted when I discovered that Mum planned to dedicate this book to me.
After lessons were finished, Mum and I would go out riding or walking and discuss the development of her latest plot. John was not as interested as me in riding or walking, nor in the Brumby books. Even when he was with us he was fairly quiet, and Indi and Harry were away at boarding school.
‘Wouldn’t it have been better for Baringa to fight Lightning for Dawn?’ I remember asking Mum.
‘Lightning would have been stronger,’ Mum said. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t do for members of the Silver Herd to fight each other.’
The equine characters were our friends. We talked about them as if they and their problems really existed; we discussed how they might feel in certain situations and what they might do and why. I could not have wished for a more inspiring collection of bedtime stories and reading lessons, or a better relationship with Mum at that time. She had created a magical world in which I felt I had a role.
Mum also wrote short stories and illustrated them for John and me. She sewed their pages together at the spine and made a cover out of blue corduroy so that they resembled a little book. Very occasionally she made little certificates too, to encourage us with our schoolwork.
Just as the ‘faint idea flitted through Thowra’s head that perhaps something had to be won three times over before it was freely owned’,14 Mum didn’t put away her typewriter after her first success. Throughout her life she continued to strive to achieve more, and each book was hard work. In her diary on 11 March 1963 she mentions finding it hard to know how to finish Silver Brumbies of the South, and whether to leave space for another book or to close with Baringa as King of Quambat. She didn’t finish it until 28 April that year, referring to it as ‘the cut version for the size [the publishers] want’. She went on to say, ‘I do not know whether it is a harmonious whole.’ I knew that she was disappointed that she had no luck in the Children’s Book of the Year awards considering how hard she had tried. Many women and mothers would have been content if they had been able to do a mere fraction of what Mum managed to achieve.
In the first four Brumby books Mum had given literary form to the inspiration that was to be her salvation. The Silver Brumby series was one of the biggest steps in Mum’s effort to find her own voice, and it demonstrated how she could reach out of herself and excel, perhaps far beyond her dreams. It was the breakthrough that provided much needed fulfilment and pleasure in Mum’s postwar world. I wonder if she felt that, like Kunama, she had drunk at the Pool of the Moon and dreamed of freedom, and to an extent that dream was coming true.
It was only when I was assembling Mum’s correspondence archive that I realised the role Melbourne bookseller Margarita Webber had played in helping Mum achieve her dream. The Littlejohn family, who were old Chauvel family friends, had introduced Mum to Margarita, a neighbour living near Scotch College in Hawthorn. After The Silver Brumby was rejected by both Hodder & Stoughton and Oxford University Press, it was with Margarita’s encouragement that Mum eventually sent The Silver Brumby manuscript to Hutchinson.
A note in Mum’s papers paid tribute: ‘Margarita’s shop [then in Little Collins Street in Melbourne] was an oasis of civilization, during the War, a place where the value of things of the mind and spirit [were] cherished and nurtured. To Margarita Webber, I owe so much, and there are a great deal of other people who must feel that it would be fitting for her to receive recognition of the service she has done for us all.’
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Mum resolved to do something worthwhile for her country. Had she been a man she would have had the choice of taking up either the pen or the sword, or perhaps even both. Born as she was in 1913, she didn’t have that choice. If she wasn’t going to knit socks for soldiers, the pen was her only option, and she was desperate for the challenge. Once she remarked to me, ‘If I wasn’t writing, life wouldn’t have any purpose.’ She obviously did not understand that, for me, this comment was thoughtless and hurtful. I thought she was indirectly saying that having a family had given her little or no sense of purpose. For a sensitive person, frequently her own children’s sensitivities mattered least of all.
Mum meant to continue as a novelist for adults too. ‘I just want to write a cracking good yarn,’ she told me on a number of occasions over three decades. But unlike her children’s books, with her writing of adult fiction she was concerned about what other people, and especially initially her parents, would think. Perhaps she’d been affected by criticism of her first two novels, Flow River, Blow Wind and Black Cockatoos Mean Snow. A neighbour referred to Black Cockatoos Mean Snow as ‘Black cockatoos fly backwards’. While she may not have admitted it, Mum was also mindful to an extent of Dad’s views, and later she did give thought to how her children might react. Occasionally Dad told me that he thought Mum was doing very well with her writing. Sometimes he commiserated with us and interceded with Mum if she had been very taken up with writing and unavailable when we needed her. Otherwise he was quite silent about his feelings concerning her writing. If he said more to Mum behind closed doors, I never knew about it. Of course there were occasions when he was very proud of her.
A body of correspondence with Paul Hodder-Williams at Hodder & Stoughton Ltd indicates that Mum was worried that a proposed adult book would ‘shock the children’.15 She was very concerned about how appropriate it would be for her older children and their friends to read a book dealing with a family with some resemblance to ours, which she knew, if it were published, they would almost certainly do. Despite her tough, ‘to hell with it’ exterior, Mum minded criticism – explicit and implicit – very much. The book was not published. In the 1980s she wrote a ski thriller and another novel based on Mitchell family history, but neither of these were published either.
On occasions when she thought I was too young to understand or that I wasn’t listening, I heard her admit to friends in jest that she found it difficult to bring up teenagers when she ‘knew how to break every rule in the book’. It would have been interesting to know more about just how and why. Some of her male friends were rather close, but mostly it was impossible to tell how close. But if Mum knew how to break rules, she also kept her own secrets and mostly, if not always, those of her children too.
14
Out of Eden
Two gardens surrounded the house at Towong Hill, one cultivated, the other overgrown. A bank covered with trees, periwinkle and a fence divided the two U-shaped layers that followed the contours of the ridge around the house. Rose-covered archways and shaded stone or brick steps joined the two gardens. James
Findlay, who had owned Towong Hill for about thirty years in the latter part of the nineteenth century, had been a friend of the renowned German botanist Baron von Mueller. Under the good baron’s tutelage, Findlay laid out beautiful gardens and had them filled with a fine variety of European trees. Those trees gave the garden a feeling of distance from the microcosm of the front hall.
The top garden closest to the house was where we rode our tricycles, and later our bicycles, round and round the paths. We played on the lawns while Mum kept an eye on us as she read and wrote at her desk in the front hall, or worked in the garden. ‘There are tiny wee gentlemen in my sandpit,’ John exclaimed one hot summer afternoon. Dad had blocked off the shady corner of a path near the verandah for a sandpit. Much to John’s surprise, some frogs had hopped in and were enjoying the cool shade. From her desk in the front hall Mum was able to witness the discoveries, pleasures and tribulations of her offspring.
Indi had a beautiful garden where she had a secret tree. It was the sole surviving macrocarpa tree from what was once a hedge, some of which had been burned in the 1939 bushfires. More were damaged and uprooted in a tornado in 1954 when I was less than a year old. Apparently the family was driving back from swimming at Bringenbrong Bridge when the tornado struck. Mum said I huddled down with Indi and Harry on the back seat and she threw towels over us. The trees were uprooted by the time we arrived back at the homestead. I don’t remember anything about it, but I do remember huge wreaths of wisteria covering the sole surviving tree in spring. Later, in the summer, the wisteria’s flowers formed a fabulous mauve tent that was filled with bees and spread over most of the macrocarpa’s branches.
Honor Auchinleck Page 11