If fires produced good stories, snakes produced even more. ‘The snakes we saw in the old days were as thick as a man’s wrist, bigger than the ones you find now,’ Dad often remarked. If you listened to Dad, most of the things he described were bigger and better in the old days! Mum had her stories too, sometimes writing to tell us about her adventures while we were at boarding school. In March 1968 she wrote:
Yesterday I was hastily eating an early lunch and dressed for going to the aerodrome to meet Dad when Mrs G [our cook] came running in, breathless, and gasped out, ‘Quick you take your gun, there’s a snake under the dunny seat.’ I got the gun and went out, laughing before I got there. There was old Tom [G] with a shovel. Couldn’t see the snake. He prised up the seat a little with the shovel and after a while a snake’s head came up through the right side of the hole! Couldn’t shoot without breaking the bowl. Tom and I were almost collapsing with laughter. Mrs G was hopping about in the background gasping, ‘Fancy having the [snake] nearly bite you on the bottom, just fancy!’ Then the snake wriggled round the rim of the bowl to the other side. I could just see a small arc of scales, but could not get a hit at it. The whole place was running water from the buckets of hot water they had tried to throw on said snake already. I asked for another bucket of boiling water then I put the gun down carefully, loaded both barrels, and feeling that I had a pair of jolly long bare legs, I went in and hurled the water sideways at the snake which came down wop on to the floor. I grabbed the gun and shot. When the splashes and flying bits and pieces had subsided, I saw the snake minus most of its middle still coming towards me, so I shot again and just about took half of it off. Then I grabbed the shovel to pull it out from under the door. As I pulled, the remaining front half, spitting tacks at me, came straight for me. I pinned it to the dunny floor with the shovel and sent Tom for something to hit it with. I just wish someone had had a camera because it really must have looked funny, with the front half of that snake biting everything but me! And the old fashioned dunny as background. Tom produced a mallet and donged it. Typical Upper Murray fun.
It was not the only time someone was lucky not to have been bitten. Once I heard Mum shouting for a broom, and when I found her, a tiger snake was ready and poised to strike the dog. I grabbed the dog with one hand and passed Mum the broom with the other. She took a swipe and slightly damaged the snake’s back. ‘Here,’ she said, passing me the broomstick, ‘you finish it off!’ With my left hand I held the dog that was struggling to get at the snake, while with my right I aimed at the snake’s head with the broomstick. As I swung the broomstick back, the head of the broom went sailing off down the hill! I was left with just the stick to deal with what was by then an extremely angry snake. Eventually I disabled it and, twirling it on the broomstick like a reluctant and struggling bit of bloody spaghetti, flung it down the hill before there was any chance of it slithering off and putting anyone’s life at risk.
‘You’ve done a good day’s work,’ Mum remarked as I returned to her. ‘Charlie Bingham, the old stud groom, used to say that if you killed a snake, you’d done a good day’s work!’
Mum was right. Over the years we damaged numerous garden implements in tussles with snakes. Often we thought it was a ‘them’ or ‘us’ situation, and we weren’t about to lay down our lives to snakes. Once Mum offered a recently dead snake to the kookaburras that she fed. Apparently they sat up a tree chuckling grumpily among themselves, as if they were insulted, then they gave the dead snake a further beating against the branch of a tree before they ate some of it. She never gave them dead snake again in case she offended their dignity.
Once when Mum was staying with Mark and me in Germany we received a call from Dad to say he had lost his false teeth and he wondered if Mum might be able to cast some light on where he could find them. Despite seeming a tall order some 20,000 kilometres and half a world away, it was a case of reality being somewhat better than fiction. At the time, Dad and Mum had a young pet magpie that lived in the garden and had become so tame that it took food from their hands. One morning, when Dad had fed the fledgling and then gone to the upstairs bathroom to shave and clean his teeth, he saw some currawongs mobbing the young magpie and stealing its breakfast. So he picked up the nearest thing to hand, an enamel mug containing his false teeth, and hurled it out of the window at the currawongs. When he went to retrieve the mug and its contents, he found his false teeth were missing. Mum suggested he might start by looking beneath the pine trees by the tennis court and in a number of other places frequented by their young feathered friend, but he never found his teeth.
Typical Upper Murray fun, with all its eccentricities and surprises, was sure to bring smiles almost right round the family. We all enjoyed reminiscing about it. Even when the fun was over, as indeed it must have been when the false teeth were replaced and paid for, Dad and Mum hugely enjoyed adding such stories to their already rich repertoire. Both of them were tough and eccentric, sometimes to extremes, and there were many more stories told than were ever written down.
Mum was often at her best when recounting an incident from the past, whether recent or not. Most of her tales ended with a roar of raucous delight, rather like a kookaburra singing up the sun at dawn. From the time he was about five years old, Alec Mackinnon could provoke further laughter among the younger generations with his extraordinarily good imitation of ‘Mrs Mitchell laughing’. When Mum’s face had become bronzed and lined with the years, she looked like a wizened walnut and sounded like a kookaburra!
The art of typical Upper Murray fun was to make light of some of the most anxious moments. In the event of fire, there was always an element of gratitude when nobody was hurt or property damaged. If anything continued to unite Dad and Mum, it was their courage in adversity and their shared wacky sense of humour.
25
Early Skiing
My introduction to the significance the snow held for my parents came from a series of framed black-and-white photographs hanging in the downstairs corridor at Towong Hill, depicting snowy landscapes and the Victorian and Australian ski teams. The people in the team photographs looked weird to me, as if they came from a land of make-believe where people wore strange dark clothes and did even stranger things in haunted landscapes. If someone had told me that those people in dark, flapping garments were imitating the devil, I think I would have believed them!
I had no idea that these photographs celebrated some of the pinnacles in Dad’s prewar skiing career, nor that Mum had won some important ski races too, notably the Canadian Downhill in 1938. In 1937 she was selected for the Victorian and Australian ski teams. The corridor photographs depicted Dad in the Victorian ski teams in 1931, 1932, 1935 and 1937 – in fact, he had been a member of the Victorian team six times and had an impressive national and international ski racing record. He was five times Australian national slalom champion and four times national combined downhill and slalom champion. He was also the New Zealand champion four times.
Except for a black-and-white photograph of both Mum and Dad taken outside the Chateau Tongariro in New Zealand, I can’t remember there being framed pictures of Mum skiing or of her with other members of women’s ski teams hanging in the corridor. Had I known that my initiation into that world was just around the corner, or what it entailed, I probably would have felt overwhelmed – those who claimed the Mitchell children virtually came into the world on skis were wrong where I was concerned.
Once I was old enough to ask questions and understand the stories behind the pictures, they began to represent a new and romantic world to a child who knew little beyond the familiar environments of Towong Hill, the Murray Valley and 49 Murphy Street in South Yarra. The photographs were part of Dad’s memorabilia from ‘the old days’, as he used to refer to that golden era before the war and the arrival of children. Later I discovered that the photographs were part of a much larger collection taken in the 1930s in Australia, North and South America and Austria, and that both Mum and Dad were not only wonderfu
l skiers but good photographers.
For my introduction to snow, Dad and Mum put me in a wicker pram on skis. While I cannot recall anything of the moment myself, it was spoken of in family circles and beyond; there is also photographic evidence showing me wrapped up against the elements and looking like a mummified and glum gnome in the pram, though in the picture there isn’t much snow around.
‘You were so lucky to have such an innovative father and to be take so young to the snow,’ visitors to Towong Hill used to remark. I would squirm with embarrassment at being singled out for such eccentric attention from my father. While Dad was proud of the fact that twenty years earlier he had won a national slalom event on the skis on which the pram was mounted, I wished they had never been part of such a bizarre contraption as the pram.
I probably screamed, yelled and was a complete pain until Mum removed me from it and restored me to more familiar and comfortable surroundings. Later, in 1958, Mum told Elva Breen at the Herald in Melbourne about that escapade: ‘It sounded all right in theory but in practice – “NO,” said Mrs Mitchell. “The skis drifted apart and the pram – and the baby – went flying. Never again!”’1 Dad might have told the story differently! My guess is that my parents must have photographed me before I began to yell.
In my mind I have an image of the contraption being unable to support the combination of my weight and the pram’s, and the skis drawing futher and further apart! It must have been draughty, too. Dad wasn’t easily going to admit defeat but I don’t think that the same experience was inflicted on John – a tacit acknowledgement of the experiment’s lack of success. The pram now holds a doll in the Man from Snowy River Museum in Corryong.
Just how the pram, family and ski kit were transported to a distant plateau called the Six Mile, I don’t know. As the entire load would seem to have been too much for one vehicle, Mum and Dad probably took the Land Rover and enlisted Pat Knight to drive another car up to the snowline and there help with getting the family onto skis. Nobody seemed to know exactly what the Six Mile was named for; ‘Aunt’ Emily Scammell, who cooked at Towong Hill for Mum during the war, ventured that it was because it was six miles from anywhere! In fact it is about thirty-six miles from Corryong; the Upper Murray Ski Club had a hut there from which, Dad said, members enjoyed skiing the logging trails on the peak behind.
The pram on skis was a typical Dad invention; he was a lateral thinker and keen inventor with huge energy. He had already improvised an electric eggbeater by attaching two beaters to an electric drill, not realising that a drill would spin the beaters at too great a speed to work; family history does not relate the no doubt messy outcome. Dad was renowned in family circles for his crazy schemes, and they were greeted with ever-increasing scepticism as we grew up, though perhaps we didn’t give him due credit for his successes, such as a clothes hoist suspended from the ceiling in the boiler room. Undoubtedly there were others too.
While it was a relief to be able to graduate from the humiliation of the pram to a pair of skis, I soon discovered that for me the eccentric school of hard knocks was only just beginning. The skis were wooden and dated from a Mitchell family trip to Klosters in Switzerland for Christmas 1913, just before the outbreak of the First World War. They had no metal edges and even back in the 1950s they would have made an acceptable artefact for a museum of ski history. But they weren’t in a museum as Dad had thoughtfully kept them for his children to learn to ski on. At one time Granddaddy M made his own skis so that he could round up cattle when the snow had come early in the mountains. If Granny M had had any say in the matter, the wooden skis he bought for Dad in Switzerland were probably the best available at the time.
For Dad the skis evoked happy memories of his father who died when he was only eleven years old. For me they became a symbol of challenge and torture. ‘It is best to learn on skis without edges because you learn to use whatever edge you have,’ he proclaimed, considering himself quite an authority on the subject. ‘It is character-building to have to work at it!’ He never admitted that we might have been justified in feeling irritated because he was teaching us the hard way, but he always said, ‘You’ve got to work hard for your fun.’
In 1913, on that Klosters trip, Dad’s father had said, ‘Go on, you little devil – ski!’ And that is exactly what Dad ultimately did. Being a rather stocky and determined athlete, he never understood that others didn’t necessarily find the sport as easy to master as he did. It was 1927 before Dad skied again during a university vacation from Cambridge where he had met the skier and artist Colin Wyatt and the explorer John Rymill from South Australia. These two men helped to sow the seeds of adventure and exploration for Dad.
Apart from Granny M, our Chauvel grandparents and Mum’s brothers who were serving abroad, the only member of the family to escape skiing was Eve. Even she did not escape entirely, having had one day with Mum in September 1944 near Mt Jagungal. Afterwards she was so badly sunburnt that she probably worked out evasive tactics to ensure she never went again, but she also never forgot her one and only day in the snow. Unintentionally Mum may have made matters worse in her attempt to relieve Eve’s discomfort by plastering Eve’s face with cream from the top of the milk jug. They might have kept the extent of Eve’s sunburn quiet in case Granny and Grandfather were annoyed with Mum for spoiling her younger sister’s complexion.
In the 1950s it was difficult and expensive to buy children’s ski clothes so ours were homemade from gabardine. They were problematic because as soon as we fell, which we did constantly on skis with no edges, we got wet and cold. At least I did. It was almost as if Dad was taking some sort of perverse delight in making things as hard as possible, particularly when we soon discovered that there were more modern skis with metal edges.
Dad ironed ski wax onto our skis with an old-fashioned iron he kept hot on the stove in his workshop. The smell of hot wax filled the workshop in winter and Dad entertained us with tales of his skiing adventures in the old days as we prepared for a ski trip. Dad had taught Mum to ski in his school of hard knocks, and he applied a similar approach to his children. In the 1950s when we started, there were no luxuries like ski lifts, at least not at the places Mum and Dad took us skiing. It took ages to climb a slope and then, if I didn’t fall, it took a matter of seconds to ski down before the process began all over again. There was no slacking off and no let up.
‘Your Aunt Hon could have really gone places,’ said Dad, speaking as a former champion and all-action man. ‘But she was lazy.’ Dad and Aunt Hon had skied together during the European winter of 1933 until Aunt Hon broke her leg. While she never said as much, perhaps this was the excuse she needed to phase skiing out of her life. In any case she had already met her future husband, Uncle Moreton, and her priorities were changing. Apparently Dad didn’t understand; at the time skiing was everything for him. Presumably winning the Ski Club of Australia championship and being runner-up Victorian champion in 1932, running the pastoral enterprise at Blowering Station during the war and subsequently creating a beautiful home were not really ‘going places’ for Dad. Perhaps he also forgot that she had played a role in founding the Australian Women’s Ski Club. Dad was very ambitious for his sister as well as for himself and his family. I thought Aunt Hon had done her bit and could retire gracefully if she wished, but I didn’t dare say so. If Dad’s obsession for ski racing in the 1930s was fuelled by not feeling sufficiently settled at Towong Hill, or indeed back in Australia, he never admitted it.
‘What you need is some fest Trainieren [Dad’s German-style expression for hard training] to get you into good condition,’ Dad told me.
By the end of each day’s skiing, I was exhausted and couldn’t really understand what Mum and Dad got so excited about. I can’t speak for other members of the family; some of them might have been stronger and more resilient and determined than I was. Indi seemed to enjoy it most, but I think Harry felt the cold like I did. On occasion, John struck it lucky and Mum got him up onto her back, skis an
d all. Perhaps I have forgotten that I too at some stage may have been as lucky. Fortunately, I didn’t hate it. Even if I had, neither Dad nor Mum would have understood the reasons and there would have been sparks, possibly spanks and scenes.
I can’t remember which year it was when those old skis of Dad’s were first clamped to my feet. It snowed at Towong Hill in the winter of 1949 four years before I was born and again in 1956. I was only three in 1956 and all I remember of that winter is the green Hudson car being towed by a tractor through mud up the drive to the house. If Mum and Dad took me skiing in 1954 in the pram, I don’t remember. Mum’s rather grainy black-and-white photographs from 1949 show thick flakes falling, erasing the details of the garden with a white blanket, the branches of the trees bent down by the weight of the snow. Dad and Mum loaded skis into the jeep and went skiing on the ridge behind the house. In the masses of photographs they took to record the event they wore the off-white gabardine parkas and baggy dark-coloured ski pants that the members of the Victorian and Australian teams wore in the photographs in the corridor at Towong Hill.
I used to have a colour photograph of Harry and me dressed in dull red gabardine ski trousers and jackets at Dead Horse Gap. In it I could just make out the banks of the Alpine Way in the snow; there is blue sky above and beneath the road is the tree-lined Crackenback River. Harry was sitting in the snow and I was standing beside a white wooden sign saying ‘Kosciusko 5m’. Mum or Dad took this photograph sometime in 1958 or 1959. In the heavy snow year of 1960 we started skiing at Thredbo as a family. It must have been after such a day spent skiing at Dead Horse Gap that Mum began saying, ‘I knew that, once again, skis were going to be the keys of the kingdom.’