In the wake of Victory over Japan Day on 15 August 1945 and prior to Dad’s arrival in Sydney on 10 October, Mum wrote a series of long, loving letters to him, describing her life during the war and filled with excitement about his imminent return. These letters should have prophesied a happy postwar life. In an undated cable to ‘VX43577 Capt T W Mitchell 8th Divn HQ Care 2 Aust POW Reception Group Singapore’, Mum wrote: ‘Thrilled see your name in list longing your return try to inform me ships name and where meet you love Elyne.’ Dad said he thought about the ‘hell’ they would create together when he returned – meaning the sort of adventures and happy days of exploration they’d enjoyed in the mountains before the war.
While undoubtedly there were some happy family occasions, the seeds of controversies had been sown well before Mum and Dad argued about my name, and reached a zenith in the desperate arguments over Harry’s future. Mum had a keen sixth sense, perhaps greater than she ever realised. As early as 1943 she wrote about feeling a growing sense of doom after the fall of Singapore.
Apparently there were three urgent telegrams among the correspondence addressed to Dad on the hospital ship HMS Largs Bay in early October 1945. One informed him that his account had been credited with fifty-two pounds and a chequebook was being held for him by his trustees. He told me that he’d thought that fifty-two pounds (of his own) was a fortune after what he’d been living on. The second telegram came from Mum and was received by Dad when the ship called at Brisbane. It concerned her arrangements for meeting him in Sydney and advised him to consider ‘FEDERAL’, probably meaning federal politics. On another fragment, presumably relating to the same telegram as there is no signature on it, Mum goes on to say, ‘Situation very changed stop glad your strength improving stop so looking forward to seeing you all love… Elyne Mitchell.’
The third telegram was from Granny Chauvel, welcoming Dad and informing him that he would be met on the ship when it arrived in Brisbane by General Stanke.2 Also coming to meet him on the ship would be Brigadier Ronald Hopkins, who had been Grandfather’s aide-de-camp after the First World War and was a Chauvel family friend, and who would deliver a letter from Mum. (There would have been insufficient fuel available for Mum to travel to Brisbane.) Granny had activated her contacts to ensure that Dad would receive a good welcome.
Dad described the atmosphere on board ship after their departure from Singapore as quiet and thoughtful. He recalled that at one point soon after sailing they were served roast beef. Even though while in captivity he had dreamed of roast dinners, when the real thing was in front of him, his stomach had shrunk so much as a result of starvation he could hardly touch it, yet he hated seeing so much wonderful food going to waste. He also recalled ‘feeling flat’ and that it was difficult to be excited, as he worried that ‘he wouldn’t measure up in Mum’s eyes to the man he had been before the accident’ that landed him in hospital on 10 February 1942, just five days before the surrender of Singapore. I can only guess how the uncertainty, privations, hardship, rough treatment and suffering Dad experienced over the three and a half years he spent as a prisoner of war might have affected his attitudes as a man, a husband and a father. He didn’t discuss his wartime experience with me much except to tell each of us from time to time how lucky we were not to know hunger. Dad’s determined, dictatorial streak may have been exacerbated by his experiences as a POW. As a result of her wartime experience, Mum, equally, had become more independent and determined. Such strong wills were destined to clash.
It was a sobering thought, also, to realise that I owed my life to two atomic bombs – Little Boy dropped on 6 August on Hiroshima and Fat Man dropped on 9 August 1945 on Nagasaki. Had they not been deployed, Dad may never have returned from Changi. Yet the very event that indirectly made my conception possible killed over two hundred thousand people and brought immeasurable suffering for decades to many more. It didn’t seem to me that the hope expressed by General Douglas MacArthur in his address before the Japanese were invited to sign the Instrument of Surrender on 2 September 1945 that ‘a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past’ had come to pass.
In 1996 John Wyett, a senior staff officer in the 8th Division, wrote: ‘A whole generation of our people has grown up strangers to their own heritage, uninformed about crucial aspects of their history and deprived of the pride they should rightly have’ because of the veterans’ of the 8th Division’s ‘reluctance to discuss it’. He goes on to explain: ‘The enormous number of casualties, the hurt, the suffering, the infinite exhaustion and the final disappointment were all too much to talk about.’3 Dad’s reluctance to talk about his experience could have contributed to a number of sad misunderstandings in our family. But it may simply have been too dreadful and painful for Dad to speak about. It is not my place to pass judgement on a man whose sufferings were beyond my imagination.
Separation, uncertainty and profound loneliness would also have wrought changes in Mum. Changi – shorthand in our family for Dad’s prisoner-of-war experiences – could not be answerable for everything. In November 1944 Mum had written candidly to Aunt Hon:
I hope to hell Thos still thinks he made a good choice when he comes home! I don’t really know why, but for quite a while now the fact that in many ways I am changing and changing has got me by the short hairs. I expect I would feel even more disturbed if I thought I had not changed…gone forward…at all in these years but still… Of course I have mainly gone along the highways opening up from the tracks that Tom and I had already mapped out together and he wanted me to go on and on…confidently…on my own.
Those final words – ‘to go on and on…confidently…on my own’ – are pretty well what she did. Dad had shown her a road ahead and she took it, almost entirely without him, but never leaving him either.
After Dad’s homecoming in October 1945, Mum was more determined than ever to pursue her career as a writer. The house and property with its meandering river and lagoons and the mountains beyond had become an essential backdrop for her writing and she was doing well. Rather than modifying her ambitions, the arrival of babies seemed only to reinforce them, and it seems there was increasingly little room in her life for marriage and family as we children grew up and needed more of her time in many different ways.
In the weeks following Harry’s death I felt as if I had not only lost a brother but a part of both parents and of each sibling too. It was as if something from all of us went with Harry and we increasingly forged separate paths. John returned to school and I think Indi returned to studying for her law degree. I know I strived to recapture some sort of normality at university, but when I tried to laugh it felt false and wrong – nothing was the same. The bottom had fallen out of my world.
Mum poured her grief into her poetry and diaries. Just as she used to record our weights for the first year of our lives, she counted the number of words she wrote each day, as if she needed a progress chart of her efforts to ‘get cracking’ again. Harry had always been her blue-eyed boy; in death his stature soared and his memory filled every nook and cranny of Towong Hill. His room was left as he had left it when he set off on his fateful journey. In comparison, I had always found myself to be lacking a mysterious yet vital ingredient. Mum wanted to feel needed by her family but, it seemed to me, only on her terms. After Harry’s death she was often miserable and bad-tempered to the extent that Indi once told her not to forget that she still had three children – to no apparent affect.
Dad became more silent and devoted himself to political work in his electorate and at Parliament House where, among other involvements, he was a member of the library committee, which, thankfully, he enjoyed. While in Changi he had kept a bamboo stick on which he cut a notch for every week he spent as a POW. ‘When I think things are getting tough,’ he told me, ‘I rub my hands up and down the stick to remind myself of the weeks when things were really tough.’ I don’t know how often he sat with his stick in his hands; he probably would have never told me. One afterno
on he handed it to me so that I too could rub my hands along it, but for me there were no ghastly memories associated with the notches and I had no idea of his benchmark of pain. Instead I thought of the little girl with bandaged eyes in St Andrew’s Hospital when Harry and I were having our tonsils taken out, but my memory of her misery didn’t seem to be relevant to the pain I felt over Harry. For her there was hope of recovery and there was no such hope for Harry.
Silver Brumby Whirlwind was published in 1973, the year after Harry’s death. It was dedicated ‘To Harry, to all those marvellous mountain days’. The book was a great tribute to a much-loved son. Significantly, in her author’s note, Mum acknowledges that the book was inspired not only by the suggestion of Carol Clark, one of her American readers, but also Indi’s idea for the ending – Thowra’s disappearance in a whirlwind of snow somewhere among the Ramsheads, near his birthplace. It was Indi who had persuaded Mum in the late sixties, and again after Harry died, to explore the northern end of the High Country, thus introducing new landscapes into her wanderings and new direction into her writing.
Slowly but surely Mum began to write more, in memory of Harry and to thank God for his life and all his love and laughter. She dedicated Chauvel Country to Harry as well as her parents and her brother Edward, all of whom had by then died. For Mum these tributes were never sufficient; it was almost as if her beloved parents, brother and son became an inspiration, the stars to which she could attach her chariot.
If early in my childhood I felt there was little space or role for me, after Harry died the feeling was even more acute. Strangely, I reckoned Harry was the lucky one. I couldn’t compete with either his memory or Mum’s creative ambitions and I didn’t have the maturity to help Mum in the way Indi did, despite the fact that she must have found it very difficult to cope with her own grief. John tried very hard to help Mum in his own way too. Being now the only son and the youngest, perhaps Harry’s death was hardest of all for him. In his anxiety to make arrangements for his succession, Dad made John the new focus of his attention. It was a tough burden for such young shoulders to bear. It was not only sad for father and son, but for the whole family. I felt I had moved right out onto the edge of the family circle and, at any moment, I might tumble off the family map completely. Yet my parents had brought me into this world in which I had to live and I had to find a way of doing so.
In Silver Brumbies of the South, the hero, Baringa, grandson of Thowra, the Silver Brumby, knew he had to venture out and explore the world in order to find his own mares and his own Secret Valley or safe haven. Perhaps Mum had been trying to tell me that I would need to find a secret valley of my own and make my own life.
A few days after Harry’s funeral, kind friends Charlie and Remy came over from Canberra to take me back to university. I was tempted to withdraw for the year as I didn’t feel ready to return, but in the absence of an acceptable alternative plan, the wisest course of action seemed to be to continue as best I could. In retrospect I don’t think I would have forgiven myself if I hadn’t and I am glad I found the steel to do so.
I skied in the intervarsity championships that August and again the following year. Somebody clapped a pair of waxed skis on my feet and pushed me between the starting flags for the cross-country ski race about which I can remember nothing except that I never looked back and have enjoyed cross-country skiing ever since. My childhood was over by then and much of those early adult years after Harry died are blurred. Soon after, Indi was married and moved to Townsville. John became ill and was sometimes in hospital. I’d had stomach surgery but it didn’t provide the relief I’d hoped for and I didn’t feel I was making a good recovery. I knew I had to take control of my own life and I needed to get away to do so. Friendships were defined and redefined and some patient, loyal friends stayed with me. I am immensely grateful to them.
In June 1974 I celebrated my twenty-first birthday and coming of age twice: once with friends in Canberra and again with the family at Towong Hill. It felt like I had acquired few attributes of adulthood. With Mum and Dad preoccupied, the gilded cage against which I had plotted and fought for so long disintegrated, but at first I scarcely knew what to do with the freedom. Like the Silver Brumby’s grandson Baringa, in 1976 I chose to venture out and explore the world. For thirty-four years half a world distanced me from the trouble spots at home that the Second World War had left smouldering between Mum and Dad. For thirty-two of those years I have been married to Mark Auchinleck, who served for thirty-seven years in the British army before retiring in 2005.
Together we moved nineteen times, living in five different countries on three continents. We lived in Germany for the last decade of the Cold War and witnessed the country’s reunification. Apart from Mark’s operational tours in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War, Bosnia and Sierra Leone, I have accompanied him on every posting, with Sarah and James joining us on holidays from boarding school and, later, university. They were with me during the 1999 earthquake when we were living in Izmir, Turkey, and a few years later when Mark was defence attaché in Ankara we all lived through the 2003 bombing of the British Consulate-General in Istanbul and the early years of the war in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, both our children have worked in defence. We’ve now returned to live in Australia. We’ve called our part of the original Towong Hill holding ‘Baringa’, in gratitude for the inspiration of Elyne’s equine hero. Sometimes we all meet in the mountains to go bushwalking or to explore the snowy peaks on snowshoes.
Close to five decades separate me from my childhood now. In Towong Hill: Fifty Years on an Upper Murray Cattle Station Mum wrote: ‘Always remembering how important my own childhood memories have seemed to me, I hoped to give each child its own memories – something to build on, something to treasure for life.’4
Mum certainly gave me memories on which I could build and truly ‘something to treasure for life’. Although as a child I found Mum and Dad’s stories daunting, they ultimately gave me wings to find my life, which, in the words of Constantine Cavafy, has been a ‘long road full of adventure, full of knowledge’. It was not the sort of life Mum and Dad intended and nor did it have to be. That way I haven’t lived in their shadows and I have had a life apart – my life. And that is all part of another story.
Picture Section
Elyne Chauvel at about twenty-one. Mum was shy but loved parties and beautiful clothes. Before she married Dad she had a busy social life in Melbourne, thanks partly to Grandfather Chauvel’s distinguished service in the First World War, most famously with the Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba.
Dad was an accomplished skier, winning the Australian National Slalom five times, and the national downhill and slalom four times. He also won titles in New Zealand and races in Europe.
Mum’s hiking and skiing expeditions with Dad before the war were some of the happiest times in her life. Then, Dad was her hero and best friend as well as her husband.
Mum and Dad married in 1935. Their relationship was forged in the whirlwind of a few social meetings, and by today’s standards they scarcely knew each other when they announced their engagement.
Towong Hill, tucked away on the edge of the bush and the High Country. Elyne called it ‘that resonant, dream-filled house’.
Dad called his small, musty, book-lined study at the back of the house the Weasel Hole. When he and Mum returned to Towong Hill after their honeymoon, Dad had this desk installed for her.
By 1937 Mum had been selected for both the Victorian and Australian ski teams. Before she raced she used to pray, rather irreverently, ‘God be in my legs and in my understanding’! Dad, her teacher and first coach, was very proud of her, especially when she went on to win championships in New Zealand, Europe and America.
St Anton, Austria: Mum’s skiing days could have finished on 29 December 1938 when she broke her leg in eleven places. Six days later, Dad dislocated his shoulder while skiing. Dr Schalle and the Schwester from Innsbruck who expertly cared for Mum were vehemently anti-Nazi.
br /> The experience Mum gained riding and skiing through the mountains provided her with both inspiration and the essential background knowledge with which to write The Silver Brumby. Here, family and friends (Dad is second from the left) undertake a prewar winter expedition.
Elyne saw the mountains as mysterious, little-charted lands — if you explored them you would learn something about their mystery and individuality and, more importantly, something about yourself. Here she contemplates the view from the Dargals.
An article published in February 1944 in Pix, accompanying this photograph, stated, ‘Despite difficulties, Mrs Mitchell has been able to send about 700 fat cattle to Melbourne markets each year.’ Mum had Mr Herbert, the Towong Hill manager, to help her during the war, as well as a housekeeper and cook, but with Dad a prisoner in Changi, she was exhausted from hard work and anxiety by the time he returned home.
Mum had a wonderful ear for music and enjoyed playing Austrian folk and skiing songs on her accordion. Here she and Dad enjoy a postwar picnic near Khancoban Creek. The simple pleasures of the bush helped Dad’s recovery after the hardship of imprisonment.
Elyne and her four children with Granny Chauvel. Granny was a great raconteur and inspired Mum to write from an early age. Nonetheless, Granny sometimes tried to explain to Mum that her writing was coming into conflict with her family, and that her children needed her too.
Our twin white cats belonged to Indi and Harry and I longed for a pet of my own. I was jealous and sulky and felt my older siblings enjoyed privileges denied to me.