I was becoming increasingly uneasy about my future. I knew Mum and Dad didn’t expect me to get brilliant results in my exams but I was likely to get something more than straight passes. One afternoon when we were in the kitchen putting a roast in the oven for dinner, Mum said, ‘You will have to do something. You can’t stay here.’ On another occasion, she remarked, ‘But you shouldn’t go too far away so that you can come and help us if we need you.’ Again I felt the bars of the golden cage closing in. Dad was less prescriptive. He told me, ‘You will just have to make up your mind. I will help as much as I can, but with the cattle market in the state it is, I can’t do much.’ I knew the sort of help I could expect, if I was lucky, from Indi’s experience in trying to win over Dad’s support to take up a place at Monash University to do an Arts degree. If it wasn’t cattle prices, there would be some other reason, I was sure of that. I would have to work things out for myself.
‘I am so delighted. You have done so well,’ Mum said as I told her my results. But her patent relief undercut her enthusiastic words: I read the subtext of her response to mean that I hadn’t done as badly as she feared I might; she knew I got nervous before exams. I couldn’t find Dad out at the workshop so Mum and I drove down to the lagoon in the Land Rover. Some time later Dad appeared in his station wagon and parked immediately behind us. He didn’t say much when I told him my results. They were okay, but not good enough to impress a Jesus College, Cambridge, alumnus.
Dad spread his towel in front of the Land Rover and dozed off in the sunshine, then refused to move when it was time for Mum and me to return to the house to make lunch. As the Land Rover didn’t have very effective brakes, my concern was not to roll forward in case I him; instead I backed too suddenly and fast and went straight into one of the headlights on his car. I was almost beyond caring; it seemed as if things couldn’t get much worse. Dad must have sensed my feelings. He looked annoyed but didn’t say anything, in the same way he had remained silent all those years before when we reported that the Land Rover had skidded off the road and turned upside down in a creek on the Alpine Way.
It seemed my results were good enough to qualify for some university courses, and for some extraordinary reason I received a scholarship to study at Swinburne College of Technology (now Swinburne University). Mum and Dad invited Annie and Bill to the homestead for a drink to celebrate.
Later Mum said, ‘I don’t think you will be able to cope with university.’ I should have stood firm but the carpet shot from under my feet: Mum was encouraging me with one hand and holding me back with the other. I ended up not accepting the place at Swinburne.
On another occasion Mum said that Aunt Hon and Uncle Moreton educated my cousin Suzanne, only to find that she hardly ever went home again. She didn’t want me to have a similar escape ticket. Aunt Eve once said that during the war she had heard Grandfather and Mum arguing about who needed her most – Granny and Grandfather in Melbourne or Mum at Towong Hill. Eve said, ‘I then asked myself what Eve wanted to do.’ Eve was the second daughter, just as I was, and the family had expected her to always be around to help them. But after the war, Eve began to travel.
Finally Dad agreed to support me at university, provided I did any ‘reasonable’ job he requested of me at home. The vision of Dad asking me to do masses of inconsequential tasks came rushing to mind – I couldn’t bear the thought of all that ‘character building’. As it turned out, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. If I were lucky he would simply ask for a cup of ‘strong, black and hairy tea’ made in his Changi mug, a pannekin upon which a dentist had engraved his name while in Changi, and a yarn. Somewhat surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed his reminiscences about the Upper Murray, family history and of his travels both before he met Mum and then after they were married, even if they were not helping me much in deciding on my future.
One afternoon Barbie Waters, who lived further down the river towards Jingellic, telephoned, asking if I had any idea what courses her son Bill, who’d been at Geelong Grammar, might be able to apply for. He was away at the time and Barbie was trying to make sense out of the careers literature. When I suggested that with his results he could do theology, Barbie responded with a wonderfully mischievous giggle at the thought of Bill being associated with such a serious subject and perhaps ultimately wearing a dog collar. I started laughing too – this lighthearted Barbie had taken me by surprise. I don’t think my parents would have viewed any flippant discussion of my future favourably.
A few weeks later in February when we stopped at Dead Horse Gap for a quick picnic lunch on our way to take a look at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I’d also been offered a place as an Arts student, Mum said, ‘You could always write.’ The implication was that she didn’t think I would need to go to university to do it.
‘What a joke,’ I replied sullenly. ‘I haven’t gone anywhere yet. There’s nothing for me to write about that either you or Dad hasn’t already written about. Or are about to write about.’
Where was the space for my generation among the gods of the previous generation, I wondered? I had read about the ’68 student demonstrations in Paris and of the mock crucifixion one Easter at Monash University. The demonstrators had a point: our parents’ generation seemed to have all the heroes from the war and all the answers to the extent that there was little or no room for anyone else. Though to me some students had gone overboard in proving their case: those who staged the mock crucifixion seemed to have forgotten that millions of people sacrifice aspects of their lives for others, even if it is just helping someone else in the smallest way.
Rather than listening to what Mum was saying, I walked over to the area where there had once been a yard for stockmen to keep their horses. I thought of how in The Silver Brumby Thowra managed to jump into those very yards where I stood and persuade the beautiful mare Golden to take that incredible leap into the unknown and gallop off with him through the snow to the Secret Valley. If the Secret Valley had provided a safe haven and home for the Silver Brumby and his herd, it had provided a metaphorical haven for Mum too. I searched for something similar in my own imagination, but nothing would come. Golden returned once to her master when her first foal, Kunama, was born before once again cutting her ties and choosing freedom and running with Thowra. My home and upbringing held a far greater sway over me than Golden’s master had over her. I knew I could not turn my back on my childhood home forever without looking back.
Perhaps if I had given Mum the chance to warm to her theme I would have heard how she had taught herself to write, and I might have responded more positively. But I hadn’t given her a chance to talk about her chosen career as a writer – the thing she loved perhaps most of all and really knew how to do. Many years later I understood what she had been trying to tell me when I finally found the keys to unlock the drawers of the davenport desk she bequeathed me. It was stuffed to overflowing with cuttings, correspondence and her early attempts at writing stories – if I had ever thought her path to success had been a smooth one, I was entirely wrong. She always said she hadn’t liked school and didn’t perform well, so she had done better in her life than she ever expected, or indeed admitted. I’d lost my chance to say that I understood and to thank her for her advice, example and, above all, for sowing seeds of inspiration.
I accepted the place at ANU and began the term wondering whether I had made the right choice. If I’d ever thought I was breaking free from my family, my choice of majors in political science and Australian history with a sub-major in English was a dip into the individual and collective interests of both my parents. Looking back, I am glad now I made the choices I did. During the decades I lived overseas, my understanding of Australian history and literature helped me appreciate the country and the era in which I had grown up.
On my first evening in the queue for dinner in the Ursula College dining room, I met the tall, bubbly Jude McGrath and we had dinner together. Later in the courtyard we met Jan Kronborg, whose father, Eric,
later stood against Al Grassby in the seat of Riverina in the 1972 elections. Gradually, as I began to relax and enjoy the company of others, I discovered some of them had very similar concerns to me about whether they were coping. My Australian history tutor, Mrs Penny, gave me a pass for my very first university essay and for the first time it seemed as if there was a glimmer of hope.
36
‘A Man Who Would Have Sons’
Once during the summer after I left school, Dad was yarning about his and Mum’s wedding day. ‘Numerous telegrams were read,’ he recalled, ‘but one was unsigned, bearing the Corryong postmark. It said, “May all your worries be little ones,” and was not read at the reception.’ Almost thirty-seven years later, at the end of May 1972, it was as if a bad fairy’s wish had become a reality.
On 29 May 1972 our manager, Bill, and his wife, Annie, kindly drove me back to the ANU in time for me to begin the second term of my first year. They had not been to Canberra before so after they dropped me off they were going to visit the Australian War Memorial. I was feeling as unsettled as I had at the beginning of the first term, again questioning whether I should be there and, indeed, whether I should have returned. Something didn’t seem right and I hadn’t felt so lonely since my first days at boarding school.
After starting to unpack, I went in search of the friends I had made in the first term to hear news of their vacation. I had had an exciting holiday, beginning with a week of intervarsity tennis in Hobart. In Launceston Jude McGrath had invited me to stay and meet some of her schoolfriends before I flew back to Melbourne and returned to Towong Hill for the last couple of weeks of the break, which included a combined celebration for Harry’s twenty-second birthday on 26 May and my nineteenth, which would be a couple of weeks later.
It was maybe two evenings after the party that Harry, Mum and Dad had an argument. Beforehand, Harry came to my room to say goodbye and give me a birthday present as I would be returning to Canberra the next morning. He told me he was intending to visit friends near Orange he had met on his overseas trip earlier in the year, and perhaps stay with them a while. Indi heard some of the angry exchange between Harry and Mum and Dad, but I was upstairs packing and tidying up in preparation for my departure with Annie and Bill early the next morning.
When I arrived very few people had returned to Ursula College and the campus seemed bleak and empty. By late afternoon the sunshine had vanished and the sky was overcast and threatening rain. I wanted a friend to talk to, but with nobody around I knew, I returned to my college room to finish unpacking, find my books and plan my timetable for the week ahead. I remember the events of that afternoon and early evening down to the finest detail. Having said that, I don’t know precisely what the time was except that it was after dinner when I heard a knock at my door. Rather than a friend coming for a yarn, as I had hoped, it was Monsignor Burke, the college chaplain, asking if he could come in to talk to me. I felt myself tense. Something wasn’t right.
I can’t remember what words he used to tell me that Harry had been killed in a car accident near Lithgow, and I don’t know if I even replied. I do remember thinking that dying in a car accident was so shockingly violent and must have hurt terribly.
Later, others told me the details of what had happened but I couldn’t remember what they said either, only that Harry was dead. I don’t remember any more about that night except that I kept waking, seeing Harry’s face flickering, like frames of a black-and-white film flashing before my eyes.
I sat up in bed thinking I hardly knew him and, if it was true that he had died, I no longer had a chance to. I lay down again, feeling ill. I had lost the brother who had broken the ice on the trough and then wiped the cow poo off my backside by scraping me against a wire fence. I had lost the brother who, like a mischievous leopard, had leapt in and out of bed in his short blue pyjamas with brown spots all those years ago in St Andrew’s Hospital. I had lost the brother who laughingly pointed out that Dad had probably swallowed the crucifix from the Christmas pudding. Surely what Monsignor Burke had told me was a nightmare and hadn’t really happened? I wanted to go home and find Harry there. I wished Bill and Annie hadn’t left already.
In another moment of horrible understanding I realised that I didn’t really know anyone in my family. I suppose I knew Indi best from when she had helped me buy clothes and had me to stay in her Melbourne flat for some weekends away from school. But Indi was almost seven years older than me and although we had skied together quite a bit in the year after she left school and before I went to boarding school, I didn’t feel as if we had shared enough for me to know her well.
Next morning one of the nuns who lived at and helped run Ursula College must have told me that Bruce Chisholm, Dad’s relative and good family friend, was coming over from Khancoban Station to collect me. If Bruce was coming it must be true that something terrible had happened to Harry, but I still didn’t really believe it. I can’t even remember if I packed any luggage or if someone else came to help me, or what I did while I waited for Bruce. Nor do I remember much about the trip, except that we drove over the Alpine Way and the chill of the late autumnal mountain air nipped me as it always did. At Leather Barrel Creek Bruce offered me a nip of brandy or whisky from his hipflask. It turned out the flask was empty, but he suggested the smell of something strong might help anyway. I dreaded arriving home and finding that the nightmare was true.
All I recall of arriving at Towong Hill is that Barbie Waters had given Mum a liquidambar tree that could be planted in Harry’s memory. Apart from being quite sure that Harry would walk in the homestead’s back door at any moment, I can’t recall anything else. My next memory would have been a few days later standing numb at the graveside, bleak clouds squashing us down into the earth, burying us with Harry in the Corryong Cemetery. Only I still didn’t believe that he was in the coffin.
Friends told me who was at the funeral a few days later; all I can remember is the congregation singing the first lines of Psalm 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ From the Anglican Church in Corryong we could see the bush-covered hills surrounding the Corryong Valley, but the mountains were invisible beneath shrouds of cloud. I hadn’t wanted Psalm 121 in the service as I knew that not even the mountains could help a family who had only ever wanted the best for their eldest son and brother. It was too late to correct misunderstandings and misplaced ambitions; nothing could reverse this tragedy.
Mum and Dad told me what had happened and Indi did too, yet still I couldn’t consciously comprehend what they said or wrote to me. I started to dream about a hill, a grey Mini Minor and a truck. I saw Harry lying on the ground with his head on a kind, middle-aged woman’s lap as she talked and comforted him. That woman was Enid O’Dowd, and she wrote to Mum and phoned her each Christmas and on the anniversary of Harry’s death for the rest of her life. Once I answered the phone when she called, and when I heard her warm and gracious words about Harry my voice seized up.
One year, around the time of our birthdays, Harry and I had speculated about what we would be like in the year 2000, when he would be fifty and I would be forty-seven. It had never occurred to either of us that one of us might no longer be alive then.
The sun never shone properly at Towong Hill again after Harry died. It was always glary and hazy. The purity had gone out of the light, just as innocence had been ripped from our lives.
Just as I had read Flow River, Blow Wind and Black Cockatoos Mean Snow to learn more about Mum, I tried to remember Harry and understand his relationship with Mum through re-reading Winged Skis many years later. Mum began writing the ski thriller in 1960 especially for him. I tried to recall and find out as much as I could about events surrounding the writing of the book as, while I knew Harry had not enjoyed the Brumby books if indeed he had read them at all, he, like me, had probably always wanted Mum to dedicate a book to him.
Following the publication of The Silver Brumby and Silver Brumby’s Daughter, Mum w
as enjoying the fruits of her success as a children’s writer and, as by then we were all able to ski, could for the first time since having a family ski throughout the winter and for as long as the snow lasted. As she explained in a letter to Dorothy Tomlinson in reference to the new book she was working on, ‘Skiing is booming in this country and I hoped we would catch the boom.’
Mum imbued Barry, the hero of Winged Skis, with a love of skiing and the mountains that she hoped Harry either already had or would develop. I don’t know whether in fact he had discovered ‘the treasures of the snow’1 to the degree Mum would have liked. Perhaps, like me, he discovered some of them, but possibly at the time not as many as Mum might have wished. I think he enjoyed skiing because it was something he could do with his mother and family. Where Harry and his fictional counterpart were most alike was in their wonderful ability for making friends and winning the respect of other skiers. Particularly in the early sixties, Harry was renowned for his good cheer both on and off the slopes, and those days were probably among the happiest of his life. Sometimes Mum used to refer to him affectionately as ‘Happy’.
In Winged Skis Mum painted an idealistic world where Barry the hero satisfactorily balanced becoming a good skier and touring the mountains accompanied by his parents with his correspondence schooling. His relationship with his parents is almost too close, well-mannered and problem-free for a truly convincing story, but Mum would not have wanted to create a young role model with wild or undesirable characteristics and be held responsible for encouraging such traits in her own or anyone else’s family. She might also have wished that her own family was better mannered and less argumentative. Ironically, the Miltons didn’t seem to have the same high expectations of their Barry as Mum and Dad had about their offspring, and Barry didn’t disappoint his parents.