24
Typical Upper Murray Fun
Fire danger prevented many a summer expedition into the bush. Dad and Mum dreaded the north-wind days – we all did. I remember Dad called it ‘the fire wind, the wind that hits you in the face like licks of red-hot sandpaper’. He was quite right. When the north wind was blowing, he used to sit in his office, grim with anxiety, listening for the phone, or he would be in the wireless shack in case a message came over the bushfire radio. Occasionally he would tap the barometer in the front hall and then go outside to check for any change in the wind direction and strength.
Dad and Mum were acutely conscious that in 1939 they were overseas and not at home to fight the fires and help save the house. That year Granny M was either at Blowering or in Sydney, so Granny and Grandfather Chauvel, Eve, her friend Madeline Barrett and Roger Dunlop, a cousin who was staying with the family at the time, fought the fires for the Mitchells. Many years later, tucked in a book in the bookcase in my room at Towong Hill, I found Granny’s pencil-written list of tasks to be carried out in the house by family and guests, and her letters written to Mum after the fires. From these I was able to piece together some of what had happened.
Mosquito nets and bedding were to be brought in from the verandahs. Buckets and bedroom jugs from the washstands were to be filled and placed in the corridors. Blankets were soaked so they could be used to cover people, and all windows were to be closed. Hoses were to be ‘mustered’ and put ‘where required’, and Granny underlined the need to soak the woodpile and all the surrounding sawdust. Eve recalled Roger’s big feet being useful as he stamped out the small flames to prevent the fire spreading.
The fire started on Wednesday, 11 January near Walwa. A blaze was stopped at Tintaldra, but then on Friday the thirteenth it came across from Cudgewa. At about four in the afternoon the manager, Mr Herbert, received warning that the fire was coming, and it arrived about half an hour later. The men were watching for it. On 16 January, Granny Chauvel wrote to Mum: ‘I, having never seen anything but grassfires in Queensland, I could hardly believe that fire could leap so quickly – everywhere.’
Despite all the anxiety, Granny was still able to comment afterwards on what the females of the family wore to fight the fire. ‘Eve and Madeline were in jodhpurs – I wore the skirt of my coat and skirt!! It being the only woollen thing I had with me, & it is now at the cleaners!! – & they went under the taps and hoses at intervals to keep wet.’ Granny gave credit to all the firefighters.
On 25 January, Eve wrote a very spirited account of the fire in a letter to Mum: ‘I’m still alive, my eyebrows are beginning to grow again.’ Apparently Granny made Eve and Roger Dunlop tie wet towels around their heads! On a more serious note Eve wrote, ‘It is amazing how quickly the sparks caught just below the horse paddock and spread up the hill like a huge wave. In a couple of minutes it was right up to the fence in the lower garden.’ Later Eve reverted to a more humorous description, this time of her parents at dinner late that evening: ‘You’ve never seen such a sight as Mummy was, she looked just like an Arab woman, and Dad had a pathway of black right down his face from his eyes. We looked rather like the bushman’s tea party at Buckingham Palace.’ Eve concluded, ‘If it had to happen I’m glad I was there. Everyone says in amazement, “Were you really there all the time or did you sit in the river?” ’ Of course Eve was there all the time, as indeed Mum and Dad would have been if they weren’t overseas.
Mum often said 1939 was the year when their luck ran out. On Black Friday, 13 January 1939, while the fires were blazing through the Upper Murray, Mum was in bed with a badly broken leg on the other side of the world in St Anton, Austria. She and Dad had been away from Australia for almost fourteen months. As a result of a separate skiing accident in early January 1939, Dad had dislocated his left shoulder. War was declared on 3 September of that year. For Mum, I think the fires heralded a roller-coaster of challenges and changes that were unleashed in their hitherto extraordinarily interesting and carefree lives. Even a kind letter from Granny written on 18 January 1939 telling Mum ‘there is practically no loss of stock on Towong Hill’ could not really lessen her distress.
The 1939 fires burned extensive swathes of pasture and fencing, and some of the stable buildings containing buggies, harnesses, other horsedrawn vehicles and implements. The family was very lucky not to lose the house, the cottages that were home to families working at Towong Hill and the outbuildings. Granny’s letter enclosed a cutting from the Border Morning Mail telling of the plight of Corryong and how, late on the night of Black Friday, ‘two fires were burning, one sweeping over Mount Elliott on the eastern side and menacing about two dozen settlers in the Thougla Valley, and another advancing on Corryong itself from the Cudgewa end’. The article mentioned the less fortunate landowners whose houses had been destroyed, people Dad and Mum would have known.
When the fires of 1952 came, memories of the 1939 fires were reignited. Mum said that the summer of late 1951 and early 1952 were particularly ghastly. In an unpublished article she wrote, ‘Summer after summer fires become a greater menace, probably owing to the constant increase in superphosphating.’1 Presumably the fire danger was a result of better pasture as well as the hot, dry weather. In the summer of 1952 there was a lot of dry grass and a fierce north wind sprang up each day. Fearing the worst and in keeping with the recommendations of the Royal Commission after the 1939 fires, Mum and Dad prepared a dugout on the bank beneath the south-facing terrace in the garden in case the ‘red steer’ came.
One summer, as I was lost in my thoughts while raking up dry leaves in the lower garden, Mum came out to move the hose she had running on the strawberry patch. For a moment she stood watching me, also deep in thought. Then she said slowly, ‘I raked leaves in the height of anxiety during the ’52 fires. I was pregnant and lost the baby. He or she would have been born in October ’52.’
Later I told Dad what Mum said and he described the situation during the fires. ‘Your mother spent days raking up dry leaves while I ensured the fire engines were in working order and the fire beaters were kept soaked,’ he explained. ‘Seeing you raking all those leaves into piles might have reminded her of ’52, and we were pretty tired after it was all over.’ Dad said Mum lost the baby in April, but perhaps she simply hadn’t recovered from the stress and anxiety of the preceding summer.
‘It was tough,’ Dad went on. We thought we might lose the place. We kept the Union Jack flying at half-mast on the tank stand not just because King George VI had just died, but to show which way the wind was blowing. At night as it grew dark, we could see fire stretching from north to west. We prowled around, checking for fires coming closer, making tea and then prowling again. Eventually at about four a.m. the wind changed to a bitterly cold southerly.’
In her unpublished article Mum also described it: ‘For seventeen days we were ringed around with fires that leapt closer and closer as the mad wind blew, in spite of every man in the district being out fighting them. On 25 January Tintaldra Station was burnt out.’ In a note dated 28 January Mum wrote: ‘Tintaldra: “Deserts of all eternity” the bare, black ridges, the bare black right down to the river flats. Bits of fire burning everywhere. WIND.’ Both Mum and Dad would have felt the Mackinnons’ loss acutely; Ronnie and Jenny had been married the previous November near Holbrook. ‘I think that nearly everyone who was present at that wedding lost almost everything – stock, fences, grass, and many of them their houses,’ Mum told me.
In the davenport Mum bequeathed me she’d kept copies of her letters to Granny describing the strong wind, dust and lack of visibility. Mum wrote that ‘it was almost pitch dark outside, dark with a sort of ruddy glow, and the sun just a nasty red ball, fierce looking, and smoke about all morning, the sky was burnished red’. Later in the same letter she remarked, ‘If we hadn’t been so worried it would have been rather wonderful.’2 In a letter dated 2 February, Mum wrote: ‘I can’t really figure out what stopped the fire. Mr Knight says we w
ere saved by a wind change.’ Changing wind direction and good fortune also saved Aunt Hon and Uncle Moreton at Blowering Station.
‘I felt very guilty that we survived the fires when others didn’t,’ Mum said years later. ‘When we were in danger, friends who had lost so much were sympathising and offering to have Indi and Harry to stay in safety. Jenny and Ronnie Mackinnon, who just a couple of days beforehand had experienced such heavy losses at Tintaldra, were among the first to offer help.’
Stories grew from the 1952 fires. Dad missed one cabinet meeting; at the time he was attorney-general in the Victorian government. When the King died on 7 February, Dad had to travel the next day to Melbourne to swear allegiance to the new sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. It was a difficult journey. Telephone lines were down, bridges had been burned, and Mum needed Dad’s old truck in case she had to drive the family to safety. In any event, Mum gave him a ‘bushfire haircut’ and he set off for Melbourne, leaving Mum trying to contact the premier by phone. Eventually the telephone exchange operator got an emergency line through to Parliament House and the premier arranged to have Dad picked up at Wangaratta by the police and driven with sirens blaring to Melbourne. He scarcely had time to wash off the ash before swearing allegiance and getting straight back into the police car to be returned, at speed, to Wangaratta and the ‘waiting ring of bushfires’.
For the next twenty-five years, Dad strove to ensure that he played his part in fire prevention and protection at Towong Hill. He liked to think it was one of the best-protected properties in the district, and for a while it seemed that money was no object if it meant improving fire safety. Each spring the men who worked on Towong Hill ploughed firebreaks on the north side of the house. Dad insisted on regular drills to ensure that the fire engines remained in working order and he had one of the best available bushfire radios. Mum always noted the date and location of any fires in the district as if she was keeping watch over the whereabouts of an evil spirit.
During the summer months, Dad regularly checked the radios, fire engines and the water level in the tank. The bushfire wireless ‘scheds’, as he called the scheduled practices, were most important, and he caught up with some district news at the same time. There was usually some humour along with the seriousness, like when Bill Lloyd rescued his bushfire wireless aerial from a horse that was trying to chew on the new and unusual tree! Bill announced that he’d solved the problem and was back on the air, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’!
One north-wind day, Harry broke the silence in the sitting room like a thunderbolt when he shouted, ‘The lavatory won’t flush. There’s just filthy water.’ Mum had returned to her desk in the front hall just moments before and was on her feet before he had a chance to utter another word. Her manuscript and notebooks flew to the floor as she left the room. ‘It’s either the septic tank or the pump. And if it is not those it’s the electric light engine,’ she shouted as she rushed out of the house. It usually fell to Mum to detail stockmen or the local plumber to do the repair work. She might have added something about the Aga stove sometimes going out too! Somehow it always seemed that problems developed on weekends, and that it was a public holiday when fire danger was at its height.
Mum had inherited a difficult domestic legacy and she always remarked, rather dramatically, that if her heart should be opened when she died, ‘the words septic tank, pump and electric light engine would be found engraved upon it’. At the time I was particularly interested in British history, and I didn’t think that smelly things like the septic tank or rowdy engines were anything near as romantic as having the word ‘Calais’ engraved on your heart, as Mary I of England had claimed.
When the house at Towong Hill was built at the turn of the twentieth century, Granddaddy M said he was tired of ‘camping’ on a permanent basis. So Towong Hill was one of the first houses in the district to have ‘water laid on’. The problem was that the plumbing had not been replaced since then, and roots from nearby trees were beginning to break and block some of the pipes. The pump had already become a topic of conversation in the family well before the war. In January 1937 Mum’s aunt Lily Chauvel wrote saying, ‘I hope all is well with the pumping engine now and it will remain “Okey” as the Americans say.’3 Among Mum’s papers after she died I found an envelope labelled ‘Pumping Engine Business!’; given what had happened in earlier years, the envelope was strangely empty. Mum might have thrown it all out, trying to evict the problems that had plagued her for so long.
The water pump was a Southern Cross engine housed in a red galvanised-iron shed beside the pumping lagoon at the foot of the hill below the house. By the time of my first memories, station hand Billy was one of the few cheerful oracles who seemed to understand it. He proclaimed that ‘those Southern Cross engines might break down for a while when you don’t want them to, but they don’t break’. His repair work frequently involved what he called ‘a wee bit of bush mechanics and a bit o’ good luck’. On a hot summer’s day, this meant tinkering and swearing at it, mopping the sweat from his brow and yarning while he did so. After a while, the engine would usually, miraculously, chug into action again. If it didn’t, he would try a ‘bit o’ brutal force’! ‘Them screws and nails rattle loose down there,’ he explained on one occasion before beating them down with a hammer. ‘That there engine slips a bit and that’d be our problem today.’ During the war Billy had been invalided home from the 9th Division in North Africa, suffering from shell shock and respiratory problems. I don’t think he resorted to brutal force as often as we thought, as he didn’t like much noise.
The electric light engine was housed in a single-roomed brick structure on the other side of the backyard. It sat like an angry, filthy monster in the middle of an oil-slicked floor. Around the walls were rows of car batteries. Like all monsters it had a mind of its own, and it always looked as if it was about to spray oil, fanbelts and other loose, greasy missiles at anyone who came near. Electricity was important, but not absolutely essential – except for the fact that our electric light engine also powered at least one of the fire engines. We kept an ample collection of candles and hurricane lanterns on hand to cope with those occasions when the electric light engine refused to co-operate for any length of time. Dad painted a white line to represent a tennis net on the outside brick wall of the electric light house, and while the engine was chugging away generating power inside, one member of the family or other could belt a tennis ball against the wall for practice…and sometimes to vent frustrations!
Not long after we had mains electricity connected, we returned from Tintaldra to Towong Hill during a power cut to find Euan Littlejohn, Dr Littlejohn’s grandson, sitting in the darkness in the kitchen awaiting our arrival. He seemed very relieved when Mum found torches and lit candles; Towong Hill was too spooky to be sitting there alone without light.
The stories associated with repairing and maintaining the electric light engine, pump and septic tank were almost as colourful as the characters involved in the work. Dad once lost a pair of glasses when digging up the septic tank; some years later they reappeared when the tank once again needed attention. He irritated Mum by washing them off under a tap and putting them on before she could disinfect them. In all probability they were found well away from any offensive substances, but Dad seldom missed a chance to tease.
It all came under Granny Chauvel’s description of typical Upper Murray fun. Mum was frequently upset that she was the general dogsbody who had to cope while Dad pursued his political and other interests, which from her perspective always seemed to be given precedence over her work. Mum had her moments of extreme and frustrated feminism! She was not, however, a complete convert to the feminist cause. Burning bras, she remarked tersely in later years, was an urban luxury. Most country women needed them for comfort, particularly if they were doing hard physical work. Mum knew as well as anyone that the country–city divide in Australian society also found its expression in feminism. But whether you wore a bra or not didn’t have
any bearing on who did which jobs. Like many women, Mum wouldn’t have objected to some liberation, not necessarily from jobs seen as traditionally female but from the treadmill of more and more chores with less and less help. That was the unacknowledged grindstone.
Typical Upper Murray fun was not confined to incidents at Towong Hill. One afternoon in the hot summer of 1957 the Mackinnons invited us to Tintaldra for a family swimming party by the river, to be followed by afternoon tea. Mum was changing me into my bathing suit when either Dad or Ronnie Mackinnon saw a column of smoke swelling up from near the homestead. Irrespective of how much or how little clothing we were wearing, Ronnie, Jenny, Dad and Mum bundled us all into the Land Rovers and departed for the scene of the fire. The older generation grabbed fire beaters and filled knapsack sprays from hoses and a tap at the tank stand. Meanwhile, we children were left in varying degrees of undress – in my case, distressing near-nakedness – with ‘Aunt’ Sophie, Ronnie Mackinnon’s kind but terrifyingly elegant French mother. Later, once the fire had been put out and the children dressed and given tea, we heard that it was the kerosene refrigerator in the workmen’s caravan that had started the fire. At the time Dad and Mum had two kerosene refrigerators in the homestead, and I don’t think they ever felt the same about them again. Some of the then-modern appliances introduced new hazards and potential dangers into the postwar world.
Bushfires always strike at bad moments, and some are worse than others. In February 1966, Dad and Mum had just finished cleaning up the house prior to having Sir Rohan and Lady Delacombe stay on a private visit when a fire broke out. The slasher had hit a rock, setting off a cloud of sparks that caught fire in the dry grass, so instead of attending to the final preparations for their guests, they went out fire fighting. Dad sent Indi to intercept the Delacombes at Colac Colac with his apologies for what they were about to find. The newly cleaned windows were dirty and the house was covered in a thin film of ash by the time the Delacombes arrived. I was at boarding school at the time, but Dad wrote to me describing what a wonderful job everyone had done in fighting the fire. Indi, who had left school by then, was singled out for particular praise, and Dad and Mum were very glad to have her able hands at their sides.