Before the Alpine Way was built when Indi was almost a year old in 1947, Granny came to look after her so Mum and Dad could ski for a few days. But they soon realised that without a road into the mountains, the distance to Charlotte Pass was too great and it would mean too long away from the baby and from Dad’s newly acquired political obligations. By 1966, only about ten years after it had been opened, the future of the Alpine Way was already uncertain and Mum lobbied to keep the road open from her hospital bed in Melbourne where she was recovering from a snapped Achilles tendon.
One of the places Mum liked best on the journey up the Alpine Way to Thredbo was the Pilot Lookout. She loved the view towards Mt Pinnibar and the tall, graceful mountain ash trees, and she photographed some of the detail on their tall trunks. One of the photographs showing sunlight streaming through the mountain ash forest under sparkling fresh snow was published, together with her poem ‘Mountain Ash’, in her 1988 book, A Vision of the Snowy Mountains. Even though the poem made its first appearance in Riverlander, a local journal, in 1983, the inspiration had taken form almost twenty years earlier during one of those many trips up to Thredbo.
We used to stop at Leather Barrel Creek too. Sometimes we would drink a handful or so of the beautiful ice-cold, crystal-clear mountain water, and Mum and Dad would tell stories about riding up Little Mick and Big Mick and down into the Leather Barrel on their way to Dead Horse Gap. Apart from the fact that Little and Big Mick were both steep slopes and Little Mick was reputedly steeper than Big Mick, I never really knew which they were; the route we took in the car on the Alpine Way was a little different from the one they rode. Among the yarns about the riding and skiing expeditions, they discouraged us from drinking too much snow water and warned us that it might cause tummy aches.
Mum was also fond of Tom Groggin, and when we passed the turn to the homestead, driving to or from Thredbo, she told stories about some her own riding trips and the bushmen she’d met. The station was once home to Jack Riley, who Dad reckoned was Banjo Paterson’s inspiration for his famous poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’. Because of conflicting evidence, for Mum ‘The Man’ was a composite character whom Paterson created from his knowledge of riding with a number of mountain men. As well as Jack Riley from the Upper Murray, there were the two Spencers (father and son, both called James), ‘Hellfire’ Jack Clarke from Jindabyne, Lachie Cochran from Adaminaby and a number of other characters.
About a decade later, in the acknowledgements in The Colt from Snowy River, Mum explained that Banjo had written to Dad saying that ‘the idea for his poem had been given to him by stories around the hut fire when Dad’s father Grand Daddy M took him on the long day’s ride out to Tom Groggin, and they spent the night camped with Riley’.4
However, Mum went on to say that in ‘August 1936 Banjo Paterson told Dad that Riley was the Man from Snowy River’.5 Banjo Paterson used to stay at Bringenbrong homestead. Both Dad’s father, Walter, and his uncle Peter knew him, as did the Dibbs family in Sydney. Mum and Dad met Banjo in 1936 at a cocktail party given by Granny M at the Australia Hotel in Sydney. Mum said Banjo looked like a shrivelled walnut.
Dad often gave a very spirited and dramatic account related to him by the late Will Findlay of Jack Riley’s last journey and his death on 16 July 1914 at Surveyor’s Creek. I have no doubt that Dad was convinced that Jack Riley was ‘The Man’.
Geehi would have been on Jack Riley’s route to and from Tom Groggin. Many other stockmen would have ridden that way with their cattle, just as Mum did in her early years after she was married and first arrived in the district. She found the descriptions of the daring mountain riding hugely exciting. As we drove to and from Thredbo past Tom Groggin and Geehi, I think she felt as if we were travelling a route paved in fabulous campfire yarns and legends.
Although Mum enjoyed the advantages of being able to drive into the mountains and up to Dead Horse Gap and Thredbo, she missed the intimacy of riding through the bush and the mysteries of Geehi on the route to Tom Groggin. She also missed seeing the Geehi Walls, the spectacular views of the Western Face and our early family trips in Sirius the Land Rover over the Geehi Wall. Quite apart from the formation of the Kosciusko National Park in 1967 and the withdrawal of large tracts of the High Country from grazing, with a growing family and a busy writing career Mum simply did not have the time to ride in the bush.
29
Skiing the World
Mum’s love of skiing was in part a longing to regain her youth and at least some of the adventures she’d once enjoyed. Her experiences were all the more remarkable as she learned to ski in even tougher and more primitive conditions than my generation.
Her induction began in 1935 at Mt Buller in the winter before she and Dad were married. Like us, Mum learned on wooden skis with no edges and no safety bindings; that much was understandable as skis with steel edges were not widely available in the southern hemisphere until 1937. Harder still, apparently Dad wouldn’t even show her how to put on her skis or how to stand up when she fell over. He merely gave her skis and left her to struggle to work out the basics alone while he went off and had fun. By then Dad had been skiing for eight years and had extensive experience at Europe’s best ski resorts. As well as being a tough taskmaster, it seems as if he had forgotten what it was like to be a beginner.
Mum’s spirits must have plummeted when Dad told her, ‘This is my life’, the implication being that she was expected to mould her life entirely to his. Even by the standards of the day Dad expected a lot, probably too much. It is a wonder she put up with it, particularly as she’d already had cold feet and briefly broken off their engagement in July only weeks earlier. Dad was playing with fire; perhaps he thought skiing was either going to make or break his engagement once and for all. Undoubtedly Mum was feeling ambivalent, but there was a part of her that was already rising to the challenge.
When Mum finally returned to Melbourne from Mt Buller she had a sprained shoulder, a sprained knee, a sprained ankle and was covered in bruises. Having successfully concealed her injuries from her parents, she went hunting the next day with the Findon Harriers. Unsurprisingly, she found her knee was too painful to properly grip the saddle. A fall and concussion only added to her problems. Mum had told her mother she was ‘quite all right’ to go out hunting! It was typical of Mum.
Granny and Grandfather were annoyed when they discovered the extent of her ski injuries and uncovered enough to divine how harshly Dad had treated their daughter. His behaviour was scarcely what they would have expected from a loving fiancé. But Mum loved physical challenge and with her grit and determination she wasn’t going to let skiing beat her. Her doggedness was probably one of the essential ingredients that prevented her and Dad’s relationship foundering before they even reached the altar. I have often wondered whether Granny and Grandfather were so determined that she should marry an ostensibly very eligible bachelor that they had a swaying influence.
Only when Mum and Dad went skiing in New Zealand on their honeymoon did she really begin to enjoy it. Dad insisted that they should pack ski clothes in their honeymoon suitcases ‘just in case’. At the time, Mum said nothing – she was dreading it and praying that all the ski-able snow would have melted by the time they arrived. Dad didn’t like ‘helpless, clinging females about the place’, and Mum felt very alone, wondering how she would cope. Mum said that almost the only reason she began to enjoy skiing was that George Lockwood, a solicitor from Christchurch who was a friend of Dad, was perceptive enough to realise that she could hardly ski. He invited one of his friends named Nell Lovegrove, also a relatively inexperienced skier, to join them and Mum immediately felt happier and more confident, and skiing became much less lonely.
But there were harder times to come. In the winter of 1936, almost twenty years before the Alpine Way was built, Dad decided that he and Mum would make the first journey across the Great Dividing Range, riding over the Geehi Walls and up Hannel’s Spur until snow prevented them riding any further
. They continued on skis around Abbott Peak and into Wilkinson’s Valley between Mt Townsend and Mt Kosciusko and then on to the Chalet. Mum said it was a wonderful experience but added that they only survived by the grace of God. Apparently, she was disappointed when a few days later the weather was too bad to ski back and they had to return by road to Towong Hill.
I never thought that Dad had given Mum much credit for her tenacity until I read his book about ski technique, Ski Heil, the first handbook on the sport to be published in Australia. As it was published in 1937, Dad must have been writing it at the time of their marriage and he dedicated it to Mum. He explained to me that Mum had had to listen to him talking about it and helped him check the manuscript. She probably typed it for him too. If he’d ever thought Mum had been long-suffering over the book, he was wrong. She had already begun to find joys and mysteries in the world of skiing and the mountains that no map ever marks.
Indeed, by 1937 Mum was in no way a long-suffering wife but a determined young woman already reaping the benefits of a whole winter’s skiing and instruction from Ernst Skardarasy, the first Austrian ski instructor at the Chalet. Fortuitously, during that same winter Dad and Mum were to meet the visiting American ski team. They were racing in what Mum referred to as ‘the triangular match against USA and New Zealand’, skiing off Townsend Spur into Lady Northcote Canyon. Mum’s meeting with Jay (James) Laughlin IV of New Directions Publishing, who sponsored the American team, was the beginning of a lifelong and most extraordinary friendship. Among other things, Jay and his publishing house were responsible for the inspiring collection of the latest American literature that in later years was to form our loo reading in the upstairs bathroom at Towong Hill!
As early as August 1936, good fortune had begun to smile on Mum. According to The Argus of 12 September 1936, ‘Mrs Mitchell who has only recently taken up the sport came second’ in the Interdominion Slalom at Ruapehu, New Zealand. (Mum and Dad had returned there especially for the races.) Her prize was a copy of the famous British mountaineer, writer and poet Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s 1927 book On High Hills. She valued it all her life. Along with another pioneering British ski writer, Arthur Lunn, the author rapidly became an inspiration to Mum. After the war she sent him a copy of Soil and Civilization.
By winter 1937 it seemed that fortune was really favouring Mum rather than Dad. As the United Australia Party candidate for the local seat of Benambra, he had the double disappointment of unsuccessfully contesting the Victorian state elections on 4 October 1937 and missing out on most of the ski racing at Charlotte Pass and Mt Buller due to his commitments to his political campaign. Meanwhile, Mum had been selected for both the Victorian and Australian teams. She won the Ski Club of Australia’s Adams Cup and, racing for Australia, won the Interdominion Slalom, thus proving that she could do it without Dad’s coaching. Before she raced she used to pray, rather irreverently, ‘God be in my legs and in my understanding!’ As Dad was not going to be in parliament that term, and also perhaps because of Mum’s new enjoyment of skiing and her success in the winter championships, they decided they would travel overseas and ski the world. To Mum, ‘overseas’ meant Europe, all the countries that Dad and his skiing friends talked about so much. There was apparently no thought of starting a family just yet.
Granny M, who at least to an extent held the purse strings, had been told that Dad was going overseas to study farming and forestry, and international relations at Harvard. Mum, if not Dad too, had some very different ideas, and initially she didn’t even want to go to Boston. To give Dad his due, he did visit ranches and agricultural ministries and ultimately he went to Harvard for a term – when they were not skiing! Dad never admitted it, but clearly skiing came first. His agricultural pursuits seemed to be a sort of foil to keep Granny M happy. Also, Dad said that by 1937 ‘Mummy was going places’, which indeed she was. Mum had her eyes firmly on skiing and travelling in Europe, so initially she was disappointed when she discovered the plan was to go to Hawaii and North America. Her feelings about the destinations were to change.
Dad and Mum embarked on the Royal Mail Ship Aorangi from Sydney on 25 November 1937 and arrived at Honolulu on 10 December. Meanwhile, Jay Laughlin was making arrangements for a trip that was to far surpass their dreams. Mrs Loder, a cousin of Jay Laughlin’s married to a US naval officer in Hawaii, looked after them during their stay. Mum wrote of Mrs Loder in her typed travel journal: ‘Her own enormous interest and affection for the islands helped us feel so much more part of the scene.’
Dad remembered with regret that Hawaii was one of the few places they visited where they were unable to ski on account of the snow coming late that year. But on 11 December they met Charlie Martin, president of the ski club, who, according to Mum’s travel journal, ‘laid out maps of Moana Kea where they skied last winter and told us about it at terrific length’. He even ‘spoke of the possibility of getting me into an Army bomber to see it. (By this time I was ready to believe anything as Mrs Loder had told me how the navy had sent the ships for a tour of the other islands complete with the officers’ wives and children and their motor cars because the families needed a change of air and to get into the cooler and higher country!!!) Anyway we arrived back with our heads simply spinning with the plans of possible skiing we might do etc.’
Only a week later on 18 December, Dad and Mum ate a thrilling lunch at the Volcano House hotel on the rim of the crater of Moana Kea. In her journal Mum wrote: ‘The pit [of the crater] is about 1000 feet deep. It was quite quiet and just looked like a floor of badly poured black asphalt but Campbell [with whom they were lunching] had seen it just molten fire and bubbling!’ She had already noted that Moana Kea ‘might easily provide good skiing’. Unfortunately it didn’t snow on the higher volcanoes in Hawaii until after they had left for the United States.
In early January 1938 they met W. Averell Harriman at Sun Valley, Idaho. He was president of Union Pacific Railroad, and had been a founder of the fledgling Sun Valley ski resort two years earlier. Later he became US Ambassador in Moscow and then briefly in London. Mum and Dad arrived in Sun Valley on 28 December 1937 intending to stay for three days but remained there a month, thus making it possible for Averell Harriman to have them included in various exploratory expeditions. They spoke about these experiences for the rest of their lives. Mum used to say it had been ‘Wunderbar’. The excitement of being at the inception of a grand new venture, which Sun Valley was in 1938, was clear. ‘Mr Harriman,’ Mum explained, ‘had been in Europe and he had decided that America should have a big winter sports place of the St Moritz type and that Union Pacific would run it.’ They made several first winter ascents of peaks in the Sawtooth Range, often climbing on skis. Harriman’s ‘gentleman sportsman’, Count Felix Schaffgotsch from Salzburg, who had selected the site for him, took them on the first exploring trip up Bald Mountain where Mum discovered that ‘[s]kiing in deep powder snow is pure joy…if the turns hold!’1
As Mum explained in Chauvel Country, they became part of Harriman’s public relations campaign to promote Sun Valley with the Pathé Newsreels photographers recording their exploits – even eating lunch. According to Mum, ‘Everyone was so hungry that they kept finishing lunch before the film was starting and there was a perfect wail for another hamburger on the film or “quick! another slice of bread”, and we had a somewhat superior lunch as a result.’2
Mum’s successes continued at Mt Norquay near Banff in Alberta when she won the Women’s Downhill in the Canadian Dominion Championships on 5 March 1938. On the previous day when the Slalom was held, Mum recorded in her journal that she had a headache and ‘an increasingly awful cough’ and felt ‘less like racing than a tortoise’. Fortuitously the following day she ‘felt more like a hare!!’ On 9 March The Gazette in Montreal reported: ‘Surprized realization that the Canadian Rockies and the Alps have not a “corner” to Mrs E K Mitchell’s great showing in the recent Dominion women’s championships.’ The following year the editor of the Australian Sk
i Yearbook pointed out Mum’s success: ‘Mrs T W Mitchell gave us, last year, Australia’s first win in a major event abroad.’
In June 1938 Mum and Dad went to Chile and from there crossed through thick snow on horseback part of the way to Argentina. Later that year in the southern hemisphere winter at San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina, Mum raced against fourteen other women and won a cup and a small gold ski brooch in the Women’s Argentine International Championships. Dad said Mum ‘caused a furore amongst a large crowd standing about the flag-decked finish and got a special burst of applause and a roll of drums from the Argentine military band who were drawn up at the finish’. Later during a bored moment at the prize-giving she picked up an accordion and inadvertently won the hearts of those with Nazi sympathies in Argentina when she played the Horst Wessel Song! Her audience didn’t appreciate that Mum thought it was an innocent German folk song. Later, she always said that the Nazis had ruined a perfectly good German melody.
From Bariloche they returned to the Chilean ski village Farellones where they expected the national championships to be held. Dad claimed to be furious when they discovered that the race meeting had been postponed, ostensibly due to inadequate snow. In any event, back in Santiago they had ‘a hell of a fine time’ being entertained by the Edwards – a prominent family – and both the British and American embassies. Of this time Dad noted in his diary that the Nazi influence in Chile and South America generally was not as strong as it might be ‘because they do not like either Hitler or his system’.