Outside the two big windows in my room there was a balcony, and just beyond this were tall trees in the garden that prevented the sun coming in. The dark brown painted wooden balcony railings were rotting and needed replacement in parts, making the balcony unsafe and a bit scary. Indoors, apart from two large brass bedsteads that were occasionally polished, the room was dark and the furniture was heavy, but I thought it was dignified and not ugly. There was a dressing table and the same large wardrobe with the squeaking doors and rattling mirrors that were so central to my nightmare when I stayed at Towong Hill after Mum died. There was also a washstand with blue and white basins and jugs decorated with the maritime scenes that had been fashionable some fifty years earlier. Mum may have thought the furniture was in bad taste, but the longer I lived with it, the more I liked it.
Dark though it might have been, it was a room with its own appeal and stories. Dad was born in the brass bed closest to the window, the only baby born at Towong Hill. He described to me how, on 11 November 1906, when the house was still relatively new, his father had sat plaiting a stockwhip in the corner furthest from the window while he awaited the birth of the baby. Two years later Granny and Granddaddy M travelled to Sydney in good time before Aunt Hon’s arrival. The journey to Albury must have been an epic one for a pregnant Granny M on rough tracks and roads, with few and sometimes inadequate bridges.
At some stage in the months after my birth in 1953, my cot and I were deposited in one of the lighter corners beside a window looking out onto the balcony. Once I could stand up in my cot I could just glimpse, between the garden trees obscuring my northward vision, the river winding its magical way through avenues of river red gums and willows. It was a beautiful view, but nothing like as spectacular as the one from Mum’s or even Indi’s bedroom on the other side of the corridor, with southward views towards the Alps. Eventually the cot vanished and Mum moved me into what had been Granny M’s brass bed. It felt very grand and spacious, even if it rattled a bit when I turned over and the horsehair mattress was thin and bumpy.
One winter’s evening, before Mum read my bedtime story, she spread a black and white poncho over my bed for extra warmth and said, ‘Dad and I both had one of these, and we wore them when we rode through the snow as we crossed the border between Chile and Argentina. The snow was over my knees sitting on the horse and it was pouring into my boots. The bamboo and monkey puzzle trees there were all bent and humped under the weight of the snow. It looked so strange to see bamboo in the snow.’
There was no bamboo at Towong Hill, but there was a monkey puzzle tree in the garden outside my window. On moonlit nights its strange silhouette resembled spooky witches’ houses under snow. That night my dreams of mountains and galloping horses were all muddled up with horses shying and rearing when they saw these strange witches’ houses. In the morning I was relieved when I looked out into the garden and saw that the spooky houses had vanished and the view had returned to normal. Despite the nightmare qualities of the monkey puzzle tree, lying beneath Dad’s poncho was like being covered with an extra layer of adventure. The poncho was like a magic carpet designed to take my dreams beyond my known world to steep-sided volcanoes puffing flames and smoke, deep lakes and snow-covered mountains.
Once, downstairs in the sitting room known as the Den, I had seen a leather folio of Mum and Dad’s photographs of Chile, and later in Dad’s Weasel Hole I saw some of the black-and-white photographs he took while he had a dislocated shoulder and was unable to ski and Mum was in bed with a broken leg in early 1939 in St Anton, Austria. Dad mentioned that he and Mum had met a ski instructor called Hannes Schneider who was in trouble with the Nazis. ‘Mummy and I knew about the plot to get him to the United States,’ Dad said. ‘Nobody in St Anton could relax until we heard Hannes was over the border.’ Fantastic though it all sounded at the time, I never forgot it. It would be a while before I found out what Mum and Dad had been doing in South America and in St Anton.
Dad spoke, and wrote in his unpublished memoir, of Granny and Granddaddy M as having been wonderful storytellers, describing how when he and Aunt Hon were children, Granny M told tales of the sea, and of her grandfather and grandmother and the adventures they had trying to evade pirates while sailing their ship, the Lady Mary Blackwood. He said, ‘Granny M had the knack of telling a tale simply and quietly, with an unconscious choice of words that made the picture grow before your eyes,’ while Granddaddy M told them about the bush birds, animals, cattle and of his early childhood at Tangambalanga, near Wodonga. ‘He told us about the brolgas, the kangaroos, possums and where to find the white, leathery eggs of the walking tortoise. He made it all appear as a fairy story, a real, live fairy story that was actually happening all round us.’
Dad also always enjoyed telling the story of Neddy Wheeler, a local Aboriginal man who taught Granddaddy M and Uncle Jack all he could about the lore and language of his people. Dad also spoke about the Jai-ita-mathang or Gillamatong tribe who passed through the Upper Murray searching for bogong moths. He told us how they fought battles with other tribes as they wandered up the valleys towards the mountain source of moths for their feasts, and how they sometimes tried to steal another tribe’s women. He told lively stories about Skerry, the Aboriginal stockman at Bringenbrong, whom he admired immensely for his horsemanship, his ability to find stock lost in the bush and for catching fish without a rod.
Dad also told me of his ancestor Gabriel Louis Huon de Kerilleau, who vanished in 1835 while walking from Bungonia near Goulburn to Campbelltown some eighty miles away. The only trace he left was an enigmatic note saying ‘Going East’ (though there is some dispute over the direction given on the note), which he had wrapped in a piece of bark. Later, only his spectacles were found by the search party. Like many unsolved mysteries, this one was never far from the surface in the family imagination. Incomplete stories teased the minds of successive generations who were always looking for fresh clues or new information. Years later, my relative and friend Jennifer Hume MacDougall took Mark and me to see the gorge in the Shoalhaven River where Gabriel Louis is thought to have perished. Gabriel Louis was the source of a dramatic family tale by getting lost, but I knew that you didn’t have to get lost in the bush to feel lost. You could feel very lost in places you knew best.
In the winter after Dad returned from the war, when Mum was pregnant with Indi, he wrote down many of the stories that his father and mother and various station hands had told him. He called the collection ‘Gillamatong’ at first, and then ‘Towong Tales’. In 1947, with writer and family friend Ethel Anderson’s help, he tried to find a publisher for ‘Midway Peak’, the autobiography he had started to write in May 1942, a little more than three months after he became a prisoner of war. Unfortunately, both ‘Towong Tales’ and ‘Midway Peak’ were rejected by the Australasian Publishing Company and by Angus & Robertson. Apparently the reader at the Australasian Publishing Company remarked rather acidly that ‘Midway Peak’ was largely the recollections of a playboy and, while the manuscript had some merit, they doubted it would sell. The words were still stinging Dad when he told me over thirty years later. I knew from a young age that if anybody in the family had playboy tendencies it was Dad’s Uncle Peter, so I thought the criticism was an insult. Later I realised that Dad could also be seen as a bit of a playboy when chatting to the ladies, even if as the local member of parliament he was only trying to be friendly.
In early 1946 Dad was appointed as one of the official historians for the Malaya campaign, but he could not complete the task because he was elected to the Victorian Parliament in June 1947. ‘Towong Tales’ was also put on the backburner. In the decades that followed, Dad published articles from time to time in the Corryong Courier, but otherwise he left writing to Mum. Fortunately he continued telling me his stories as often and sometimes more often than I wanted to hear them. In my memory I can still hear him saying, ‘The tide of civilisation left this quiet, mountain-ringed corner of Australia virtually undisturbed for alm
ost a century, and there can be few districts in which so many stories from the past still survive and have yet to be told.’1
On their early expeditions to the mountains in 1936, early 1937 and then again in 1939 and early 1940, immediately prior to the outbreak of war and Dad’s departure in the autumn of 1941 for Malaya, Mum and Dad shared stories around the campfire as they ‘talked down the sun’. Dad told stories of skiing at Kitzbühel, Austria, and of riding out to Pretty Plain with Uncle Jack and his cousins Malcolm and Colin Chisholm.
They would have planned future expeditions too. In 1936 and 1937 Dad was showing Mum the country he loved: Findlay’s Lookout, Pretty Plain, Broadway Top, Geehi, Hannel’s Spur and the Chalet at Charlotte Pass. By 1939 and 1940 they were making the best of the time they had together and covering some new ground on the Dargals and Mt Pinnibar. Back at Towong Hill they wrote up their winter expeditions for The Australian and New Zealand Ski Year Book, to which they were both regular contributors.
In 1941 and 1942 Mum continued collecting stories, recounting them to Dad in her letters and recording them in her diaries. Mr Herbert, then the manager of Towong Hill, George Lloyd, who also worked at Towong Hill, and Emily Scammell, who cooked for Mum and could weave stories out of anything, were also prolific storytellers. By the time of my first memories, Mum and Dad mostly told their stories separately.
Some of the stories ‘Aunt’ Emily Scammell told Mum were about Black Mag, the last Aboriginal woman to live in the district. Mum wove one of these stories into Kingfisher Feather and it was the Aboriginal woman’s words in the opening pages that provided the catalyst for the plot. This ethereal character inspired the Dane twins to explore, to take on challenges and to try to understand the bush and the world in which they were growing up.
Years later I found out that Black Mag played a more mischievous role in Flow River, Blow Wind (1953), when Alice reminded her sister, Jane, ‘It was Black Mag, wasn’t it, that first spread the story of Mr Wilson’s father riding over the river to meet Peter Austen’s beautiful young wife? Surely she found them in among the willows near the Thowra boundary?’2 Of my parents, Mum was the romantic and sometimes mischievously imaginative storyteller. But each winter when I caught bad colds and invariably ended up in bed for a few days, it was Dad, if he was home, who kept me entertained.
Except for occasional guests, my room had been empty since Mum and Dad’s marriage in 1935. Sometimes during my childhood I wondered why Mum hadn’t at least put up new curtains or placed a new rug on the floor prior to making it my bedroom. Was it, I wondered, because even after they had died Mum still felt a certain awe for her parents-in-law? Perhaps she didn’t feel that the room or the house were hers to alter, and perhaps Dad didn’t want it done. I inherited the room just as it had been left some eighteen or twenty years earlier, with the same faded curtains, the dark floral-patterned carpet, furniture and pictures. As a concession to the arrival of me and my cot, Mum placed high up on the mantelpiece a dark sepia print of a rather scantily clad woman nursing a child. I didn’t like the picture as it reminded me of the circumstances of my tumble outside Mum’s door, but the picture was too high for me to reach to take it down.
Apart from that picture, my room was a treasure trove. Forever the practical housekeeper, Granny M had lined the drawers with newspapers dating from the 1920s and thirties. I learned words like ‘obituary’ and ‘unemployment’ from reading those old newspapers, and that ‘tender’ meant something other than gentle and caring, although I wasn’t entirely sure what. Surely ‘Wall Street Crash’ meant that a big wall had been knocked to the ground, but in the photograph there was no rubble and the streets seemed to be full of people, so the headline remained a mystery. I read and pondered the words all the same, not daring to ask for explanations in case I exposed my ignorance more than I already had with my schoolwork downstairs in the front hall. Plus I didn’t want Mum and Dad to think I had been prying, which was exactly what I was doing. I had been told that the chest of drawers belonged to Granny M.
Almost all the drawers were unlocked and most were still full of my grandparents’ grand-looking, old-fashioned clothes, wrapped in calico bags and filled with mothballs. It was as if Granny M and Granddaddy M had gone away, expecting to return like the immortal gods from Greek mythology. By then Granddaddy M had been dead about forty years. Dad spoke of him with loving kindness and of his mother with almost excessive deference, as if she were a great icon looking down through a hole in heaven in disappointed judgement upon my untidiness and slothful ways. From the time she died, just after my birth, Dad mourned for the rest of his life.
To begin with, I felt as if I were on foreign territory in that room. I envied Indi whose room was light and airy and had pretty pink curtains printed with circus animals. When I lay awake on winter evenings, watching the glow from the kerosene heater and the shadows of the nightlight playing on the walls and making mysterious shapes, I used to wonder if they were the ghosts of my grandparents carefully folding their clothes and putting them away as they got ready for sleep. I was terrified that they would find me in their beds and wouldn’t recognise me, and I would be thrown out into the corridor with nowhere to go.
In nightmare moments, I wondered why Mum had inflicted such a spooky place on me. Maybe she thought that, being of the next generation, I was sufficiently distant from Granddaddy and Granny M not to be bothered by their legacy. Gradually the ghosts became interesting, less threatening, and ultimately I began to wish I had known my grandparents.
Just as they did in Granny Chauvel’s house, possums added to my store of nocturnal fears. I heard them quark and squawk in possum language as they bustled around in the roof, the scratching sound of their claws loud against the ceiling. I was frightened that they would tumble through the ceiling above my head and land on my bed, fighting, scratching and squabbling, and then tear at me with their claws. A ladder leaning against the balcony outside my window was rather like a Jacob’s ladder linking the possums’ heaven and earth, and from my bed I could see their silhouettes flipping and flopping, scratching for a grip on the rungs. In my less frightened moments it was amusing to see how rude they were to each other, swinging half off the ladder as they overtook the slower ones.
One winter a mattress in my room caught fire because it was too close to the heater. Mum bravely rushed the smouldering bundle through my room and tossed it over the balcony railings onto the rose bed below. Until the house was repainted many years later, the skirting board near the door onto the balcony carried the splodgy scorch mark from the fiery cargo.
Ghosts and rowdy possums were not my only source of disquiet. One morning a kookaburra temporarily lost its balance and fell down the chimney into the fireplace. Fortunately, the fire was not lit and I was not in the room at the time as it would have been terrifying to wake to a fearsome, sharp-beaked bird madly circling the bedroom in a fruitless search for escape. Armed with a flimsy butterfly net, Mum opened the door leading onto the balcony and tried to shoo the bird out. I suspect it found its own way out in the end, but not before leaving a runny trail of droppings over carpets, furniture and those of my books and possessions I had left lying around. We discovered that kookaburra poo, like possum pee, if left untreated is fatal to the colour and texture of fabric, furniture and plaster alike.
Nevertheless, in time the room grew on me and became my favourite place in my childhood home. By then my presence had established itself sufficiently to give the room a different feeling. It was here that I first realised I was capable of learning for myself, and it was here that I began to write down some of the stories Dad told me about our family. After my nightmare in May 2002 after Mum died, these early scribbles were among the notes I bundled up from my desk and put into my luggage before returning to England.
13
The Coming of the Brumbies
Just as the Brumby stories were the inspiration for my solitary games on my bedroom floor, Thowra’s kingdom of snow, wind, blizzards and secret
places in the bush was inspired by the things for which Mum yearned. Mum was like Bel Bel, Throwa the Silver Brumby’s dam; she was a loner and a wanderer. Even so, during the first brumby drive, Bel Bel wishes ‘Mirri was still with her. Mirri was a good friend.’ Having been caught as a yearling by a stockman, ‘Mirri understood more about the habits of men. Mirri would know where they would build a yard in which to catch the wild horses.’1 This loveable bay mare and her son were dependable, wise and loyal characters who did not compete on any level with Bel Bel or Thowra. They had the very qualities that Mum valued in both people and animals, and once I realised this I began to understand her better.
If Thowra was a magical silver god, Yarraman, his father, was a sun-god figure. Yarraman was a powerful chestnut stallion with a magnificent golden mane and tail whose reign supreme only lasted while his strength surpassed that of his main adversary – a young, formidable grey stallion, the Brolga. Mum wrote much of the aggressiveness that she despised in human society into the biting, kicking, bullying Arrow and his mean-spirited mother, Brownie. In Silver Brumby’s Daughter it was Arrow’s full brother Spear who inherited these unattractive characteristics.
Mum portrays man as the disciplinarian, the bully and the invader, who upsets and disturbs the bush with cracking stockwhips, fires and hidden trapyards. In the first chapter of The Silver Brumby, Mum writes with wonderful empathy when Bel Bel urgently advises Thowra: ‘ “Never go near Man, nor his huts, nor his yards where he fences in cattle and his tame horses. Man will hurt you and capture you; put straps of leather rope upon your head, tie you up, fence you in, beat you if you bite or kick.” She was sweating with fear as she spoke, and the two foals’ trembling increased.’ 2