The times when I flew from Corryong or Albury I thought I was missing out on the fun on the train. Years later in Europe, friends were amazed when I told them I had flown part of the way to school on a DC-3; I didn’t know how lucky I was. Fortunately, James and Annabel Mackinnon from Tintaldra, and later Harry and then Penny Chisholm from Khancoban Station, joined Harry, me and John, travelling on the same trains or planes, so I was seldom alone. On one plane trip James’s luggage containing his mother’s cake tins went to Albany in Western Australia rather than Albury. This incompetence by the airline surprised and amused us. Wasn’t it supposed to be run by grown-ups? James and I chortled to each other. Was Mrs Mackinnon going to have to find some new tins for next term’s cakes, I wondered?
Albury railway station was my favourite. Its very long platform and the tower over the station entrance made it seem like the kingpin of all country railway stations and so much grander than the one at Spencer Street. If he wasn’t travelling on the same train, Dad usually met us at either Wangaratta or Wodonga – both towns were in his electorate and he could combine collecting us with political business. Meeting us in Albury meant crossing the river and adding time to his journey. Granny was the only one of the family who managed to get out at the wrong station but, even then, someone recognised her and the stationmaster offered to phone Mum and get a message to Dad.
Dad enjoyed driving, particularly when he knew the roads well. ‘If I am alone,’ he told me, ‘I like to sing. Driving has the same effect on me as a bath does on others! Sometimes I sing “Wild Colonial Boy” if I’m thinking about my old Uncle Jack rattling in his buggy – a speedy model it was too, with solid rubber tyres – over to the council meetings at Tumbarumba. If I think the bush I’m driving through is looking particularly beautiful, I sing “The Road to Gundagai”.’
‘You must have sung almost every song you know a thousand times over or more when you’re driving to party meetings and to see people in different places in the electorate,’ I remarked.
‘I’ve sung them all and I wish I knew many more Australian songs than I do. I tried to learn a few more while I was in Changi. Some of the AIF boys had a pretty good repertoire.’
We were lucky that Dad didn’t sing when he had passengers. Instead, he told yarns about incidents that had taken place in years gone by on the route between Wodonga and Towong Hill. When we arrived at Shelley, for instance, he delighted in telling us about Granny M’s first journey to the Upper Murray, before she and Granddaddy M were married. She was chaperoned by her brother-in-law, Dr Willie Chisholm. She remembered this first trip best and perhaps she had enjoyed telling Dad and Aunt Hon about it as much as Dad liked to tell us. Dad described the road along which Granny M would have travelled as a ‘jazzed-up goat track’. They stopped at the pub at Shelley where the publican’s wife, who ‘was a real piece of old Ireland’, served the only dish available, rabbit and rice. Dad seemed tickled by the idea that the variation of rabbit and rice was rice and rabbit, and often repeated the story with all the drama possible in his voice as he drove. I could imagine Dad on stage – politics was probably the next best thing for him! Mum tells the story slightly differently in Towong Hill: Fifty Years on an Upper Murray Cattle Station, but it was Dad’s originally. He, too, was a great storyteller and Mum was a wonderful scribe.
From the day Granny M arrived at the Mitchell family homestead at Bringenbrong it rained for six weeks. The roof of the old house leaked, the Murray flooded its banks and the roads, such as they were at that time, were cut. Unless a stockman managed to ford the floodwaters and collect the mail from Corryong there was no communication with the world outside the station. For many years a post on the riverbank a few hundred metres downstream from where the Bringenbrong Bridge is now marked the ford. When the river was flooding it was not a crossing to be taken lightly. The Bringenbrong homestead smelled of damp and of wet clothing and saddles. When eventually Granny M was able to go across to Towong Hill, she was taken in the poison cart sitting next to an open can of rabbit poison. On her last evening at Bringenbrong before setting off on her return journey to Sydney, Granny M was utterly fed up and retired to her bedroom only to find that a wet sheepdog had beaten her to it and was curled up sound asleep on her bed. It could have ended the romance, but Granny M was made of stern stuff.
Not surprisingly, she yearned for a more comfortable form of transport and in 1911 insisted that the family should have a car. ‘Them Mitchellses is gettin’ one of them moti-cars,’ Dad used to narrate in a broad country accent of the times to me and anyone else whether we wanted to hear it or not. ‘The local people reckoned it would be the death of them all,’ he went on. ‘They said that their horses would bolt at the very sound of it!’ Lady Urquhart at Cudgewa Station already had a car and another in the district might have seemed too much.
‘Then Uncle Jack got a motor car – a Talbot, I think. This would have been about 1912,’ Dad went on, warming to his story. ‘Uncle Jack told Granddaddy M he thought that because they were both skilled in the forge and should be able to fix a car when it broke down they would be good drivers. Granddaddy M should be particularly good because he had a good ear for music and would hear when the car was going to break down. Uncle Jack might have been all right in the forge, shoeing horses, making carriage wheels and that sort of thing, but he didn’t have the right touch with those new-fangled machines, as they sometimes called cars in the old days.
‘The first time Uncle Jack and Aunt Fanny drove over to see Granddaddy and Granny M he ran into the garden fence before he remembered how to stop the thing. Then, when they left, they had to crank up the car. He climbed into his seat, found reverse and went slap bang into the rose which Mother was trying to grow. Uncle Jack swore terribly and Auntie Fanny sat there looking shocked and saying, “Jock dear, Jock dear, please…” Meanwhile, Uncle would be well into his next tirade. No sooner was Uncle back in the seat than he crashed into the other fence. He’d forgotten how to stop the thing again.’
I thought Dad was one of the most eccentric characters I knew but his stories had characters who were sometimes more eccentric. If we were giving others a lift I tried to discourage him from telling stories so he wouldn’t embarrass me. It was a mistake to think I could do so: my negative vibes seemed to encourage him to make the stories more colourful. Maybe it was only me who was embarrassed – quite possibly people enjoyed his stories, even though they knew he exaggerated a bit. Some people called him the Hon Tom but others called him Mr History, and the sobriquet was appropriate.
Mum welcomed us home from school with freshly made sponge cakes. Occasionally she made them in billies so they were very tall, rather like a cake version of Dr Seuss’s Cat-in-the-Hat hat, but without the red and white stripes. She greased the inside of the billy before scattering it with caster sugar, thus giving a delicious crunch to the cake’s texture. After Mum took a cake out of the oven she put it on a rack under a wire cover to cool and keep it safe from marauding flies. A wonderful aroma of baking would fill the kitchen.
On the first night back at home I would lie in bed, listening to the sounds of cattle on the river flats. Through the windows I could see the familiar silhouette of the trees in the garden and beyond them the outline of the hills surrounding the Murray Valley.
In my early years at school I looked forward to school holidays as if my life depended on them. Later I felt some ambivalence. In my diary for the summer of 1970 I described how, before the holidays started, Sally, a friend from western Victoria, had remarked that she hoped her dad would let her do some work with a tractor when she got home, while Penny, who came from Gippsland, would also be working outside on the property with her dad. I wouldn’t have minded if someone could teach me how to drive a tractor or to be useful on the property. I might have been able to plough the firebreaks that lay in huge ribbons across the paddocks on the north side of the house at Towong Hill.
In my last couple of years at school, James Mackinnon (who was at Geelong Gramm
ar) and I were often in touch, finding partners for each other for school dances and making arrangements for the holidays. Once James came to a school dance at Toorak College to be a partner for one of my friends. He took one look at our headmistress, Miss Cerrutty, with her ample bosom and skinny, pin-like legs, then turned to me and asked, ‘Honor, where is her broomstick?’ I never knew if Miss Cerrutty heard or not, but surely she must at least have sensed mischief from the ripple of laughter following James’s remark.
If I ever imagined that by going to boarding school I would be distanced from family friction, I was wrong. It cropped up at unexpected moments. Before my final speech day in 1971, Miss Cerrutty asked Dad to sit with the distinguished guests on the stage. Mum was not invited to sit with him. Luckily Indi and Harry had come down for the occasion and were able to sit with her, but Mum saw the lack of invitation as a slight and she was furious. Harry and Indi were cross about something Miss Cerrutty said, or should have said and didn’t say, with regard to me, though I can’t remember the details.
Cerri and I had not got on very well in my last few terms. Mum didn’t like her and I had had enough of school and Cerri, and Mum’s antipathy towards her. Despite the tension, it was good to have so many members of my family there. Indi, in particular, had been a kind help on a number of occasions during my time at school. Harry had also done exams for some extra school subjects he needed that term and it was good of him to come to my speech day. He had been living at 49 Murphy Street and Granny had expected him to talk to her in the evenings so it had been hard for him to study. He’d had a frustrating year.
In the same way that the age gap between Indi and I meant we were never at school at the same time, so John arrived at Geelong Grammar as Harry left. The physical barrier of Port Phillip Bay, which lay between Toorak College and Geelong Grammar, further divided brother and sister. We were all very different characters from birth and in many ways our paths diverged still further while we were at boarding school. Mum and Dad wouldn’t have wanted that to happen and before Christmas 1971 Mum was writing to Uncle Ian suggesting that Harry and I were at ‘cross purposes’. Harry said he thought I was lucky because in some ways I’d had a better time at school than he had and enjoyed sport more. I reckoned he was lucky because he was going to inherit our home, just as Dad had done. It upsets me now to think of this knowing that it wasn’t going to work out like that.
On leaving school there wasn’t to be the skiing trip to Europe that Mum had hoped we might do together. I think I realised at the time it was little more than a dream so it didn’t really matter. James Mackinnon and I had already been talking about meeting up to play tennis and the possibility of a woolshed dance at Lankeys Creek near Holbrook. Along with other friends I also had an invitation from John Darling, whom I had met while skiing at Thredbo and later at a dance at Geelong Grammar, to a party his parents were giving in Sydney and I was looking forward to catching the train along with James and other friends from Melbourne – it left in the evening after speech day. Mum had bought me a beautiful dress and I was excited about wearing it to the party. The fact that I would have very few other suitable clothes to wear while I was staying with Aunt Margaret in Sydney no longer seemed to matter on my last day at school.
Whatever it was that Cerri had done or said on speech day was not going to take away my happiness and, strangely, I didn’t feel the slights that my family had been conscious of. More importantly, freedom was only hours away. What I was going to do when I returned from Sydney was tomorrow’s problem. Never before, or since, have I been so carefree as I was that evening when Mum dropped me at Spencer Street station to catch the Sydney train.
One of the greatest gifts that Toorak College had given me was a love of freedom and some friends with whom to enjoy it. I could feel myself expanding into every inch of it. During various enjoyable occasions with the Swaneys and other friends I began to see possibilities and careers beyond school and the way of life I knew. At last I was moving on, breaking out of the golden cage that had been childhood.
35
The Time Warp
If I thought my bid for freedom and frivolity in Sydney just after leaving school would herald a problem-free spreading of my wings into adulthood, I was wrong. While I was never an angel, I returned to Towong Hill a tarnished creature. With a cigarette burn in my beautiful dress my halo was more non-existent than ever – not that I had smoked, but I had a feeling Mum didn’t believe me when I told her about the chap who had waved his arm backwards in a sweeping gesture and caught my dress with his cigarette. Mum said I had behaved badly and there would be consequences. But if there were, I already had other things on my mind and didn’t notice.
Back at Towong Hill after the party in Sydney, my apparent lack of gratitude to my family on speech day had caused some upset. Had I forgotten to thank them for coming down, I wondered? Mum said something to me, but I can’t remember her exact words, just the feeling I hadn’t endeared myself to anyone. I might have been on the cusp of adulthood but, humiliatingly, within the family circle various members seemed to still consider me a rather gauche child. If that were so, they were right, not that I wanted to admit it; it was synonymous with feeling like a nuisance, and I certainly had awkward memories about that. Was I so socially inept that every foray I made into the adult world was going to bring criticism, I wondered? The more gauche I felt, the more gauche I became. If this was what leaving school and growing up was all about, then it was an anticlimax. But there would be other opportunities for freedom and I tucked that comforting thought away in my mind.
Next issue: what was I to do back at Towong Hill? Mum enjoyed tennis so I knew we would play a lot and she would organise tennis parties. But with the rest of my life ahead of me, that seemed directionless. I dreaded the exam results as I didn’t expect to do well enough to be accepted into courses that I would be interested in and that my parents would consider worthwhile. There had never been much for me to do at home, and increasingly it felt like a cage. Having finally left school after many years away boarding, I felt as if I was stepping back into a time warp.
One day Mum said, ‘If you can roast a joint of meat, stew apples, make a good white sauce and a light sponge cake, you can cook just about anything.’ She had asked me to stir the white sauce to stop it going lumpy and there was a huge roast in the oven beneath. I nodded, knowing better than to say that I had seen my schoolfriend Penny’s mother making delicious desserts like lemon meringue pie with methods and ingredients that looked very different from those needed for a sponge cake or stewing apples.
Domestic life at Towong Hill had a character of its own. Menus didn’t seem to have changed much since my early childhood. Mum admitted that she had been married for six years before she cooked a meal on the ‘range’ at Towong Hill.1 Except for grilled chops, steaks, roasts, and her delicious sponge cakes, Mum still didn’t cook much, and neither did she like it. She hated onions, garlic, cream and chocolate, saying they all made her ill. The roast legs or shoulders of lamb and sirloins of beef she routinely prepared were huge. After the evening meal Mum would put the left-overs in the safe, an open cupboard covered in flywire mesh. The left-overs were then used as cold meat for lunch for a few days and a lot was fed to the dog.
For Mum, time spent in the kitchen was time wasted, and she didn’t encourage me to cook much either. She liked me to help her because it was an opportunity to talk, but she didn’t want to completely hand over any aspect of meal preparation. She liked to keep control and she didn’t like new ideas or different foods. Mum thought I was criticising her if I took any initiative, and responded with frosty silence. Apart from the Presbyterian Women’s Cookbook, the only other recipe book in the house was one by Constance Spry. Both editions had been published before the war and were very rarely referred to. Mum knew by heart the few recipes she wanted to use.
Mum talked about the stories that ‘Aunt’ Emily Scammell told her when she worked as a cook at Towong Hill during the war and h
ow they prepared food together to donate to the Red Cross, but I never heard about the meals Emily cooked. I have no idea whether her cooking was experimental or simple, but I suspect the latter. It wouldn’t have mattered to Mum so long as it was edible and contained plenty of healthy fruit and vegetables from the garden.
In the postwar years, it became harder and harder to find anyone to employ as a cook. We had one lady who braided her hair, wrapping the shiny plaits around her head, and arrived with a galah in a large cage. She didn’t drive and Towong Hill must have been very lonely for her. On her days off she sat in her sitting room and talked to her bird. I can’t recall whether the bird replied or not, but they both seemed too introspective for much dialogue.
Another cook was better at chopping down trees than she was at preparing food. She was too butch for Mum, and her husband, if indeed he was her husband, was too effeminate. He increasingly needed his wife to help him with the heavy jobs in the garden, which meant she did less and less cooking. Mum became frustrated with them while I became fascinated by their behaviour and near role reversal. While Mum could be devastatingly direct when talking to her own children, she agonised for ages before she finally sacked them.
Honor Auchinleck Page 25