Honor Auchinleck - Elyne Mitchell: A Daughter Remembers

To Mark, Sarah and James with love and gratitude

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

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

Authors 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.

My mother, Elyne Mitchell, was already an established writer before I was born. By then shed had six books published and a number of articles, but her big break hadnt 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 dont 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 Brumbys 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 didnt 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 Ruskins remarks:

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

Mums 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 Brumbys 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 childrens] correspondence school courses and lifting the baby out of the biggest puddle. 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 Mums 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 struggling 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: