Being one of the few relatively strong swimmers with a lifesaving qualification in the district, Mum offered to help teach children from the Corryong primary school to swim. One of her first tasks was to pull one of the schoolteachers out of Corryong Creek; apparently he hadn’t told anyone that he could hardly swim and must have panicked in the deep, dark water. Judging by the frisson of laughter among the onlookers, Mum probably told him he was a fool, or something similar.
‘Tell me what you said!’ I begged Mum in the car later.
‘Certainly not!’ she replied, much to my disappointment.
One afternoon, the rather glamorous wife of a Snowy Mountains Authority engineer invited Mum to take the family to swim in the new pool at Khancoban. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. The pool had the highest diving board I had ever seen, and I spent the afternoon diving and trying to overcome my fear of swimming underwater. I never became very proficient but from that time on I could jump or dive from almost anything, apparently undaunted. But I never forgot what it was like to be stuck even momentarily underwater, struggling to get to the surface for breath.
Dad was not such a keen swimmer as Mum but he did spend a lot of time down at the lagoon too. He rowed his dinghy for exercise and enjoyed entertaining visitors. One winter Dad’s brother-in-law Moreton Lodge helped him build two wooden boats. Dad already had a metal boat he called the Hesperus, which was supposedly unsinkable, and he taught us all to row in it. One afternoon James Mackinnon from Tintaldra Station and I did manage to sink the Hesperus. The Mackinnons’ black Labrador, who was in the boat with us, swam to the shore while James and I pulled out and emptied the hitherto unsinkable vessel. We weren’t popular, but I don’t remember getting into trouble.
Mum was not keen on rowing and sometimes resented the amount of space Dad’s boats took up in the lagoon and the clutter around the springboard. Her irritation became more acute when Dad invited the local Boy Scouts to boat on the lagoon more and more frequently. Dad was generous to a fault outside the family, and to any family member who was interested in scouting. Arguably, if ironically, while Mum wrote children’s books, it was perhaps Dad who enjoyed contact with young people most. Difficulties arose when his generosity intruded or created undue demands on Mum’s personal space and time. Mum felt she had already done her bit for the Scouts and Guides during the war when, along with Eve, she had accompanied a Girl Guide riding expedition into the mountains.
Dad could be dictatorial about his plans, which caused further friction and misunderstanding. Equally, Mum was unprepared to accommodate what she saw as his near-obsessive interest in Scouts and boating, and was also concerned that Dad was not a sufficiently strong swimmer and had inadequate lifesaving skills to take responsibility for other people’s children. One day, Dad retaliated. ‘I am going to leave the lagoon to the Scouts,’ he announced to Mum’s sheer horror. On other occasions he would say, ‘None of you is interested so I am going to leave the whole damn place to Cranbrook [his old school in Sydney].’ As children, with none of us permitted to play a real role at Towong Hill, the accusation seemed grossly unfair. Nobody had even been given a chance. When I later objected, he said, ‘Granddaddy M said I could play ducks and drakes with this place if I wanted to.’ He was just letting me know that he could do what he liked with Towong Hill and nobody could stop him. If it was his own inadequacy talking, it didn’t sound like it to me when I was a child. It was more like a god pronouncing an edict.
I didn’t really think he was serious but it was clear that there were times when he didn’t think much of us kids and, on occasions, me in particular. I had no interest in Brownies or Girl Guides. ‘You don’t know what you are missing out on,’ he said with admonishing disappointment in his voice. ‘You would meet other girls and you could give so much to kids who have much less than you. You don’t know how lucky you are.’ He turned and went off to the workshop. His expression and body language said it all and I didn’t feel in the least bit lucky.
Away from the tensions of the lagoon was Waterfall Farm, upstream on the Swampy Plains River from Khancoban township, where we could bounce our way across the swing bridge high above the swirling, rushing waters of the river flowing far beneath. A couple of hundred metres upstream from the bridge, the action of the water over thousands of years had carved perfectly circular rock pools and smooth shapes out of the rock lining some of the bank. Ti-tree, bush and tongues of fine grey sand stretched right down to the rock. Sometimes we took inflatable canoes to shoot the rapids. Afternoons at Waterfall Farm, especially when Mum brought her deliciously light homemade sponge cakes for our picnic afternoon teas, were the next best thing to heaven.
A couple of times Dad asked me to accompany him on a canoe trip from Bringenbrong Bridge to Towong Bridge. On at least one canoe trip Indi came too. Mum drove us and the canoes to Bringenbrong Bridge and then met us many hours later at the other end of our journey. The trip was eight river miles and took us all day, paddling between the river gum and willow-lined banks on the gentle stretches and then navigating the faster flowing water so we were not swept under the willows. Once we hit a tussock on the bank with a tiger snake coiled within it, and we paddled for all we were worth to get away before there was any chance of an angry snake landing in the canoe with us. I kept a keen eye out for snakes on the banks after that.
19
Beyond the Family
If Mum was often remote while she was writing and we were doing our correspondence lessons, she became more lighthearted and animated – as if a layer of worry and stress had slipped away like a restrictive, unwanted garment – once we were outside and away from the house.
Mum organised the social life we had as kids from the telephone in the front hall. We were often invited to tea with Mrs Knight, the gentle, kind, myopic wife of ‘Father’ Knight (who, behind his back, we sometimes called Knightie). Mrs Knight had lime juice for those who were too young to drink tea and there was always a delicious, freshly baked cake. I remember her fondly for her spoonerisms. Once instead of saying a length of cable cost a shilling a foot she said ‘a fooling a shit’. Ever since the son of one of the couples who worked for us had coached me in the worst words he could think of, I hadn’t heard anyone else saying ‘shit’. Mrs Knight was mortified, and Mum had to suppress her giggles.
The Knights’ house was surrounded on three sides by verandahs liberally laced with grapevines. We called it the bow-wow-miaow house: there were at least seventeen cats and a number of dogs of all sizes. Although it was walking distance from our homestead, the homeward journey was mostly uphill, which my short, fat legs didn’t like.
On other days, either the Mackinnon family came to tea with us or we went across to see them at their property, Tintaldra Station, about ten kilometres away. In the early 1960s, when the Chisholm family arrived at Khancoban Station (after Bruce inherited it), they joined our circle. Then there was Max Anderson, a Corryong solicitor, and his wife, Bessie, who had two children, Penny and David, similar in age to Indi and Harry. Sometimes we had tea with the Andersons in Corryong, where Mrs Anderson had beautiful blue hydrangeas growing in her garden, and sometimes they came picnicking with us. One afternoon, over at Tooma, I naughtily stepped on Betsy Paton’s asparagus plants to hear them crunch under my shoes, and tried to encourage her twins to do so too, until our parents stopped me. The Paton family might have gone without asparagus that season, thanks to my thoughtless mischief.
At pony club, which was sometimes held at Towong and sometimes on the sports ground near Tintaldra township, I saw Bill and Susie Waters and their cousins. We also saw the Herbert family, who lived on the other side of the river. The local policeman, Mr Ibetson, and Joan Boardman, who lived near Khancoban, came to club meetings and Mr Herbert instructed. All the Waters family were keen riders who helped and encouraged us all, making the pony club meetings into wonderfully enjoyable occasions.
For a short time the Mackinnon children also did correspondence schoolin
g, although I think they were too polite to ever refer to it as Crappy Days like I did. James and I told each other many things, sometimes sitting behind an agapanthus in the front garden at Tintaldra, but I didn’t dare tell him what I called the lessons until we were much older in case his parents heard about what I had said. The routines of our two families were similar, even if we were at slightly different stages due to our age differences. I suspect Ronnie and Jenny Mackinnon saw the weaknesses in the correspondence schooling, with the result that James and Annabel were soon sent to the primary school in Corryong. There they made some new friends and seemed to grow up while John and I were stuck in the same old lonely rut.
I loved visiting the Mackinnons. The weatherboard homestead at Tintaldra seemed serene and light, more relaxed and less spooky than Towong Hill. It fascinated me that in the 1950s the kitchen at Tintaldra was a separate building at the back of the main house, just like the one Dad had described at the original Khancoban House. The early stoves were fuelled with wood and fire was a constant fear. The logic was that if a fire broke out, only the kitchen would burn and not the whole house.
The children in our small social network went to each other’s birthday parties, and as we grew up our circle widened, as did the variety of our activities. Sometimes we barbecued on fine days in the autumn and winter holidays and, if there was no fire danger, in spring. Other times we went into the bush for picnics. One year, after a big storm had left a huge hole on the edge of the lawn at Tintaldra, the Mackinnons put in a swimming pool where we spent many happy hours. Annabel and I got into trouble when I persuaded her to go for a swim before her aunt’s wedding. Mrs Mackinnon was concerned that the chemical in the water would turn her daughter’s blonde hair a lurid green colour; understandably, Annabel’s aunt didn’t want her bridesmaid to have even a hint of green hair. Later the Mackinnons built a tennis court too. In retrospect those days we spent with the Mackinnons at Tintaldra seem so companionable and so much fun compared to our family life at Towong Hill. They were indeed the very experiences upon which we all built deep, lifelong friendships.
At our own home, whether it was Scouts or family visitors, Dad loved to organise activities. If he could, he ran everything, telling people what to do and how to do it. He was all noise and action. While guests seemed to enjoy it and thought he was a character, which indeed he was, within the family his dominance of social activities began to pall, and by the time I was a teenager I found it embarrassing on the few occasions I had school friends staying. I was very relieved that when the Governor of Victoria and his wife, Sir Rohan and Lady Delacombe, visited in 1966 I was at boarding school. I had already found, when the British High Commissioner to Malaya and his wife, Lord and Lady Selkirk, stayed some years earlier, that it was all too easy to put a foot wrong.
20
War Secrets
One January in the early 1960s, Dad took Harry and me to stay with Aunt Hon and Uncle Moreton at Blowering Station, near Tumut. It was one of the very few occasions that I went there. Mum hadn’t been to Blowering much since the war and this time she went to Thredbo where there was still sufficient snow to ski on some of the drifts. There had been heavy snow the previous winter and it had taken a long time to melt. Indi and John must have gone with her too.
Aunt Hon had a lily pond shaped like a rectangular swimming pool, only nobody swam in it; if they swam at all they went down to the river.1 Among the lilies in the pond there was a bronze frog that squirted water from its mouth. ‘Your aunt designed and made the frog!’ Dad told Harry and me proudly. Like the weathervane on the stable roof at home, that she had also designed, depicting a silhouette of a coach and horses with the coachman’s whip flying, curling in the air above the horses, to him it was another example of her wonderful talent.
My attention had already left the frog and wandered to the vista of sweeping lawns separating well-tended and colourful flowerbeds. European trees just outside the garden fence enclosed the scene, which subsequently became my vision of the biblical garden of Eden. The only things missing were the trees of good and evil and apples, though usually there were plenty of snakes in the paddocks. I reasoned that Aunt Hon and Uncle Moreton were too old and wise to succumb to temptation, so apples, serpents, and good and evil were irrelevant. Had I been older and confident enough to articulate my thoughts in a comprehensible manner, I might have received a bit of a dusting down from Dad about my interpretation of the scriptures.
Aunt Hon gave me a deliciously cool room that had a hat-shaped chimney set into one corner. The window looked out onto a shaded courtyard where vines grew on a pergola. The room was immaculately clean and tidy and the bed was beautifully made without a wrinkle beneath the bedspread. My bed at Towong Hill seldom looked so tidy and on the afternoon of our arrival I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make my bed at Blowering well enough the next morning. It was not just the bed but the entire room that looked very different from my room at Towong Hill; instinctively I knew that I couldn’t construct scenes from The Silver Brumby on the bedroom floor here. In fact I hardly dared move for fear of destroying Aunt Hon’s perfect handiwork. I had to be more grown up.
To my surprise, the following morning I discovered that my concerns about folding my clothes and making the bed were unfounded. Aunt Hon, sensing my disquiet, came to help me, patiently showing me how to tuck in the sheets with neat hospital corners. She was pleased when I did it for myself.
Uncle Moreton took us down to a bend in the Tumut River, which ran a short distance away in the valley below the house. There we shot the rapids on his aircraft wheel’s inner tube called Tweedle Dee, bouncing and spinning in the spray away from the rocks. (He had another called Tweedle Dum.) Nearby, Uncle Moreton paddled his army disposals canoe vigilantly but sedately, pursing his lips and chuckling, puffing and grunting beneath his floppy towelling hat.
One afternoon, Dad took us to Tumut to meet Maggie Wilson, who in 1909 had won the Ladies’ Ski Championships at Kiandra. Harry had not wanted to go, perceptively suspecting that Dad was using us as a foil for what was really going to be an interview with photographs for an article for the Ski Yearbook. Maggie was a sprightly old lady, with hair tied back in a grey bun. She welcomed us with a spontaneously warm smile and didn’t seem to mind my questions about whether the Chinese miners skied with pigtails hanging down their backs or if snow clung to her skirts and if they got in the way. Maggie chuckled away and was happy to talk about skiing and the old days at the turn of the century in Kiandra. Her stories were tinged with hints of tales from the Orient and Europe, and of places her parents told her about when she was a child. I’d have loved to ask her more but Dad wanted to hear about ski racing. Maggie had an ample bosom and I wondered how she managed to remain upright long enough to win a race, though I didn’t dare ask.
While she was humble about her own achievements and much keener to talk about her elder sister’s feats on the slopes, she proudly brought out the silver butter dish she had won in 1909. Dad cajoled us into posing while he photographed Maggie showing us the trophy. Over a year later the photograph was published together with the article in the Ski Yearbook, just as Harry had predicted.
That evening, back at Blowering, Aunt Hon had made a floating island pudding for our dessert. Before serving it she tapped the floating island’s thin toffee covering with the back of a spoon, making a soft echoing sound and adding her own magic touch to a memorable, interesting and enjoyable day.
Although we were honoured guests, the palpable generation gap at Towong Hill replicated itself at Blowering, and was probably amplified as Aunt Hon and Uncle Moreton’s daughter, Suzanne, was grown up and had already left home. I can’t remember being included or taking part in many of the conversations. There I was a child who was to be seen and not heard and, for the short time we were there, I managed to play the role. And how the grown-ups talked! There was an excited and almost breathless quality to their conversation. Apart from being brother and sister, there was a friendship be
tween Dad and Aunt Hon that I had never seen before and didn’t believe could exist between a brother and sister. Blood was definitely thicker than water with those two. Many conversations were about people and places Harry and I didn’t know and that were difficult for us to imagine. If I had been scared of putting a foot wrong, I couldn’t imagine Mum feeling relaxed here. And yet I knew that once, during the war and before I was born, she and Aunt Hon had been close friends who wrote letters, telephoned and visited each other. Mum even dedicated her book Soil and Civilization to Aunt Hon, but their relationship had become strained.
Why on earth had they argued about the spelling of my name and the musical designs Aunt Hon had drawn so carefully and beautifully for my christening robe? While I could easily imagine Aunt Hon getting cross, I couldn’t imagine her having a ‘tongue like a fishwife’ as Dad said she did when she was annoyed. Possibly the christening robe designs were only part of a deeper problem. I suspected Dad was stoking the fires of difference between the two by comparing Aunt Hon’s efficiency to Mum’s relative lack of interest in domestic matters. Dad would have preferred the house at Towong Hill to have been clean and tidy, like Blowering! And the fact that Aunt Hon was not only Dad’s beloved sister but had always been his best friend too couldn’t have helped.
Dad later told me that Granny M had written to him at Brisbane when he was returning from the war on the hospital ship SS Largs Bay, warning him that Mum had become ‘swollen-headed’. He added that Aunt Hon had had ‘a harder war than Mum’ as she had a child to look after and only had one stockman, Potter, to help with the running of the pastoral operation at Blowering. Uncle Moreton had enlisted in the Royal Australia Navy in October 1941, and while he had not been a POW like Dad, he had been away for much of the war. Aunt Hon not only had outdoor work but also had the books to keep, while Mum was fortunate enough to have the manager, Mr Herbert, to look after those tasks and to make major decisions. The loneliness and sense of isolation must have been all the more intense for Aunt Hon. Dad said she always kept a rifle handy, and after the news of the breakout of Japanese prisoners of war at the camp in Cowra she armed herself with a revolver and wore a cartridge belt.