More often than not we rode around the bush-covered ridges and flanks of Mt Porcupine, where it was a treat to see a kangaroo, wallaby or wombat – they were much less plentiful and shyer then than they are now. Indi came along if she was at home on school holidays. Grandfather’s memory was omnipresent when we were riding and Mum really wanted riding to be a family thing as it had been with her father and siblings, but it wasn’t quite like that with us. Granny had been the one exception in the Chauvel family, having grown up in Brisbane and lived in cities for almost all her life; she had never worn trousers and didn’t ride. In our household, Harry didn’t really like riding, but with two grandfathers who were all but born in the saddle and loved horses, it would have been difficult for him to say so. Maybe he knew that Dad didn’t really like riding either, something he never openly admitted. If Dad was at home, Harry went to the workshop rather than joining us on a ride. When John was old enough, Dad took him to the workshop too and taught him how to weld.
As we rode, Mum pointed out and explained things around us. Sometimes we ventured high enough to play among the acacia trees we called the wattle house. In spring, when the wattle was in bloom, the trees formed a beautiful natural enclosure of gold, with feathery green-blue leaves forming the walls. We watched, too, for wedge-tailed eagles swirling high above all worldly cares on currents of air. Their nests were large, ungainly structures of sticks and as the young eagles grew the nests looked top-heavy and insecure; it seemed a miracle that the branches supporting them didn’t break in storms.
As my riding ability and confidence improved, Mum, instead of walking alongside me and Toby, would ride her bay mare Snip. Toby was really Harry’s, but just as Chikko the cat didn’t really belong to me, Toby didn’t really belong to him. I already had a pony called Sunny that Dad had bought for me when I was five, a beautiful chestnut Welsh pony with a silvery mane and tail. He loved mustering, working with cattle and jumping but initially he was too strong for me. Mum and Indi rode him more often than I did and, rather like Chikko, he didn’t seem to belong to me. I couldn’t do much about that until I was stronger, so Toby was the only option. Every time we stopped he put his head down to graze, whether I liked it or not.
In Chauvel Country Mum explained: ‘On horseback one could go a long way – not ride 10,000 days and nights, but see strange sights, melt into the seascape, the landscape. With a pony and the open country, I was a person: an explorer, a soldier, a crusader, one of Arthur’s knights, or even Mowgli riding on Baloo [the bear].’1 For Mum, horses were an important key to adventure. They were also friends whom she loved dearly, fed and spoke to every day. Including Snip, Sunny and Toby, we often had five or six horses in the paddock beneath the homestead on the northwestern side and on the hill behind the house.
Some of my happiest times at Towong Hill were when Mum took one or more of us riding in the paddocks, with saddlebags and quart pots strapped onto our saddles. We hitched the ponies in the shade while we made a fire and boiled the quart pot for tea. Mum would identify bird calls and songs, and point out the ones she could see. Being slightly short-sighted, I couldn’t pick out many of their distinguishing details. Later we would return home smelling of wood smoke, tired from a combination of fun, fresh air and sunshine.
If Dad was not busy or away on political business he occasionally joined us but usually he came by car, saying he was too busy to ride. Anyway, his dun-coloured horse, Moth, was too nervous to ride quietly and comfortably on family outings. He was likely to shiver and shy, dumping his rider and taking off to the other end of the paddock. Dad only fell off on one occasion that I remember, but he had many uncomfortable rides. Moth was a gift from Aunt Hon and Dad wouldn’t hear anything bad about him. When I was sorting Mum’s archive, I found an article in People in which the unidentified writer remarked that Dad ‘looked as if he has been born and bred in the metropolis and would be more at home in an armchair in his club than in the saddle of a horse’.2
By contrast, Mum was a keen show rider and competed in the dressage events in the local agricultural shows at Corryong, Jingellic and Tallangatta. She loved the weeks leading up to the shows, patiently exercising, grooming, feeding and talking quietly to her mare and helping us with our ponies. Indi also enjoyed the shows and pony club gymkhanas, and was a keen, able and game show jumper. Mum portrayed the excitement and pleasure of those days in Kingfisher Feather, where the twins compete in their local show. Mum told us how her father had taught her to groom and look after her horse, and how he organised riding lessons for her at the Remount Depot in Melbourne. ‘Always look after your horse first,’ Mum said. ‘It doesn’t matter how tired, hungry and thirsty you are; having carried you, your horse will be just as tired, if not more so. Groom him and make sure he has plenty of water and food.’ Mum’s advice would have come straight from Grandfather.
At the 1959 Jingellic show, Mum led the final competitors’ parade on Snip. I can’t remember whether it was then or a year or two later that Bill Waters, the son of one of our local family friends, on his big bay horse Stanley was paired with me riding mischievous little Toby in the grand parade at the show. It was a most enjoyable case of little and large and all things great and small, with Bill saying, ‘Come on, Honor, keep up!’ Toby was determined not to stir his little legs beyond his own comfortable, stubborn Shetland pony pace! At least he didn’t rush for the nearest tree. It would have been at the Corryong, Jingellic and perhaps even the Tallangatta shows in 1961 that Mum was preparing to show her beloved mare Snip for the last time, as she wanted to get her in foal before the next show season.
Riding in the paddocks at Towong Hill with Ossie Rixon, an old family friend and near neighbour, was another memorable treat. He had been a jockey for the Mitchell family when they had a thoroughbred stud at Bringenbrong and he had assisted with the training of Trafalgar, the family’s most successful and record-winning racehorse. In 1910, and much to the family’s surprise and disappointment, Trafalgar was only just beaten in the Melbourne Cup by Comedy King. There was a rumour that the jockey (not Ossie) had pulled Trafalgar, but I don’t think anything was proven. Ossie had a beautiful seat on his old grey horse. Dressed immaculately in jodhpurs, a sports jacket and shirt and tie, it was as if the kindly old gentleman and his horse belonged together. He always told us that he thought he had survived the First World War’s Somme battles because he was so short he could stand comfortably in a trench with his head still beneath the parapet. ‘The bullets just flew over my head!’ he squeaked, as if in perpetual surprise that he had not been injured and was still alive.
Dad and Mum often invited Ossie to family dinners, at which he always wore a suit with his RSL badge proudly fastened on his lapel. His conversations with Dad and Mum spanned almost a century of history, and a unique sense of wise contentment seemed to walk into the room with him. Mum and Dad were never happier than when he was around and the conversation sparkled as they yarned about the old days. He was one of the few friends who remembered both Dad’s parents and many, if not all, of the people who worked for them and about whom Dad often told stories. Along with Dr Willie Littlejohn, Ossie accompanied Mum and Dad on their jeep trip in February 1948 when they drove 125 kilometres across the Alps from the Upper Murray to the Chalet at Charlotte Pass in five days, some eight years before the Alpine Way was built. It had been such a tough trip that Mum contracted pneumonia on their return home, just one of the many epic adventures that took place before I was born.
18
Undercurrents
The first few strokes of dog paddle I took were with Mum at the old wooden Bringenbrong Bridge over the Murray River, just a couple of hundred yards beneath the point where the Swampy Plains River and the Indi River meet to form the Murray. Jutting out from the bank on the New South Wales side of the river was a sandy willow- and scrub-covered peninsula. Downstream was a shallow backwater with very little current, an ideal place for a child to learn to swim. I had had some good lessons with Miss Scott in Melbourne
, but ultimately I learned because I fell in and had to swim. Mum was close by and saw me take the first strokes, ready to help and full of encouragement. I never looked back. At last I had found something I could do and enjoy, and as a bonus I had also pleased Mum.
Mum also taught Bob Salter, whose parents lived and worked at Towong Hill, to swim. This was an even greater achievement as Bob’s mother, Dot, was very nervous around water and most reluctant to agree to the lessons. Normally a calm, sensible person, Dot must have had good reason for concern as she didn’t swim herself. Although Mum was very sensitive to her feelings, she regarded swimming as one of life’s essential skills and admired Dot for letting Bob learn, and Bob for learning. Mum also gained a sense of personal fulfilment from Bob’s progress and enjoyed both his company and that of his mother.
Mum’s childhood friend Edith Wood sometimes brought her youngest daughter, Ros, who was about Indi’s age, to stay during our summer holidays. I enjoyed these visits, although apparently on occasion I drove everyone mad by insisting on saying the Lord’s Prayer in Latin in a slow monotone! It now seems a strange tale as I have never had the distinction of being so learned, although I did know parts of the Latin grace Dad said at Jesus College, Cambridge, so perhaps I irritated them with that. Edith Wood was older than Mum but very game, cheerful and kind.
Just as our family christened our paddocks and hills, we also had names for some of our swimming lagoons, and for many years Indi Island was a favourite. A small oxbow lake at the end of a runner, or tributary, of the Murray River, the swimming hole at Indi Island swelled into a reasonable-sized pool just before the runner reached one of the old courses of the river. Indi Island itself was a little peninsula sandwiched between two lagoons in the middle of which was a graceful river red gum. When we were not there cows gathered in its shade, and there were always plenty of fresh cowpats. Some nails to which we could hitch our ponies’ reins had been hammered into the gum’s trunk. More than once, as I mounted or dismounted, I either landed in a cowpat or my pony nuzzled me into one. Tortoises laid their eggs among the tussocks and longer grass on the island. Dad had an empty tortoise shell that he’d found near Indi Island on the wall in his workshop.
Mum and Dad considered that one lagoon ‘belonged’ to Indi Island and was our swimming hole while the other one did not ‘belong’. It was shallow and filled with tepid water and reeds, and there were probably snakes too. We found a fish trap filled with dead yabbies and slimy willow branches, and the smell was enough to deter me from wanting to swim there ever again. Water from the runner fed the lagoon where we swam so it was cleaner and clearer. In one corner there was a willow and in the other an overhanging river red gum branch on which we sat high above the water, and from which we could dive.
At one end of the swimming lagoon there was a short, straight channel linking it with the course of the old river. Clear water flowed through it and we built fortresses alongside it on the bank as if it were the Rhine. The shallow end of our swimming lagoon at Indi Island was oval-shaped and neatly surrounded by reeds. The shape was so perfect and the reeds grew so evenly that it looked to me as if someone had made it that way. I did not yet understand that such phenomena can be miraculously and perfectly formed by nature without humans doing anything. In the shallow end we found a plentiful supply of skipping stones. Mum could skip stones effortlessly from one side of the lagoon to the other, while my skippers nosedived a few plops away from my feet.
The old watercourse marked the state border. (A network of billabongs and runners or streams hinted at the different routes that the river had meandered in big sweeping curves across the valley floor during its long history.) In winter and early spring it ran ‘a banker’ – when the flood level reached the top of the riverbank – like the present river, but by midsummer it was little more than a trickle between a series of shady pools, mud, reeds, willows, sandy banks and river red gums. The remains of a tree protruded like a giant, ugly black snake from a muddy bank above a dark pool on the opposite bank from Indi Island. Once in early summer, when the river was flowing and reasonably full, a boy visiting the family climbed onto the protrusion and jumped into the pool below. Years later after I left school I saw him again, but I was too shy to tell him that I thought he’d been a show-off jumping from what Harry and I had secretly decided was a symbol of virility.
The old river divided Indi Island from the ‘islands’ on the New South Wales side of the border. It seemed a treat to cross the interstate border without having to get into the car or get our legs wet above our knees. The islands were like a forgotten corner of bracken-covered and willow-filled wilderness where I thought the ghost of Dad’s cranky Uncle Peter might have hidden after his home at Bringenbrong was sold. And the islands had other things to offer. If we were lucky we saw a kingfisher flash among the trees, and once Mum and I saw a white kookaburra. Ossie Rixon suggested it might have been an albino, but we hadn’t seen it for long enough to know for sure; one had been sighted in the 1930s at Upper Towong. Although I never saw them do so, brolgas were said to sometimes dance on the sandy banks of the runners.
The only occasion I saw Mum disciplining someone else’s child was at Indi Island, when the young son of a family friend pushed me underwater and held me there for a bit too long; I could see the sun’s rays shining through but I wasn’t able to fight my way to the surface. Mum reacted quickly, pulling me out of the water and smacking the boy on the bottom. I had never seen her so angry; she too must have had a very bad fright. I coughed and spluttered, and thought that drowning must make you choke horribly and panic, the world spinning until you knew nothing anymore. Mum never spoke to me about it and it was as if nothing had happened, but I never forgot it.
Mum was always looking for possible new swimming spots. We often rode along the river and its lagoon banks as far as the growth of willow would allow our passage. Mum had a bird’s-eye view from horseback, and safety was always the main consideration in judging a new swimming hole – it should contain no dead timber, or snags. After the spring floods she would inspect the previous year’s swimming places thoroughly. Having done her Bronze lifesaving certificate in 1941, Mum took water safety very seriously. I was already frightened enough of the underwater world and didn’t need Mum to instil further fear about slimy snags.
Mum’s favourite swimming hole was the scimitar-shaped lagoon below the house, which at one time had been a very deep river bend in an old watercourse. Some water still flowed through it from Battery Creek and from an anabranch of the Murray River. Willows surrounded the lagoon, their shade helping keep the water deliciously cool in summer, and there was a sufficiently large clear area away from the trees to be able to swim for at least one hundred yards at a stretch. Mum swam about half a mile if she had time in the mornings, and then took the family swimming in a less challenging and safer location in the afternoons. It was one of the ways she could combine a family outing with something she enjoyed.
Sometimes she floated on her back to watch birds flying back and forth across the lagoon and among the surrounding trees. She imitated the call of a whistling eagle very well and occasionally succeeded in bringing one of the huge birds to circle over the lagoon. She kept diary records of all the kingfishers she saw and also made notes when she saw brolgas, swifts, robins, owls and bronze cuckoos, recording any differences in populations and behaviour she noticed from one season to the next. Years later I visited the naturalist Gilbert White’s house and the Oates Collection near Selborne in Surrey, England, where I saw that Mum had kept her diary in a similar way to the Reverend Gilbert White, whose work she had admired for decades. Mum was a keen amateur ornithologist and botanist, and the bookcases in the front hall and sitting room were filled with volumes on birds and wildflowers. She didn’t collect specimens though, preferring to view birds in their natural habitat.
Occasionally Granny came to the lagoon too and sat in the shade wearing her straw gardening hat. She belonged to a generation in which few women swam,
even if they knew how. I suspect the only swimming costume she would ever have considered would have been a neck-to-knee affair. The only time Mum saw her in a bathing costume was on a summer holiday at Bognor Regis in England in the summer of 1916. Some fifty years later there was no chance of seeing her thus clad – as ever, there was the matter of dignity to be considered.
By midsummer almost all the lagoons were filled with strands of slime intermingled with rotting logs, cowpats and other floating debris as there was often insufficient rain to flush them out. The insect life – the dragonflies, in particular – was fabulous and fascinating to look at through a magnifying glass. Although we looked for cleaner places to swim, we just accepted a certain amount of slime, duckweed and mud as being the price we had to pay for being able to cool off on a hot day. Granny didn’t agree and viewed the colour and composition of the water with disapproval; she didn’t have to say anything for us to know her thoughts. It probably smelt and we might have done so too, having swum in it so much. ‘Don’t you know, Mummy,’ Mum remarked mischievously, ‘cowpats are good for the complexion.’ There was a faint hint in Mum’s remarks that Granny might care to try it too! Granny’s reply was lost in gales of raucous, naughty laughter.
About this time Granny tried to insist on everyone drinking boiled water. For a time she boiled it herself and kept it in large jugs shrouded in net covers weighed down with beads. She eventually gave up when she realised she couldn’t stop Harry and me drinking from a garden hose or tap. The homestead water was pumped up from the pumping lagoon and the garden taps often coughed up bits of slime and cowpat. The quality of the water may well have been responsible for some of my tummy troubles.
Riding and swimming on these long, warm and wonderful summer days provided Mum with the inspiration to write Kingfisher Feather; our summer activities were very similar to those of the Dane family in that book. But we never met the Aboriginal woman driving a sulky who made tantalising suggestions about meeting the challenge of a flood and finding kingfisher feathers and dragonfly caves, though I was always looking for that elusive gleaming blue kingfisher’s feather once I read the story.