Granny Chauvel’s last gift and message to me before she died in 1979 was a copy of Alec Hill’s biography of my grandfather, Sir Harry Chauvel. In spidery writing, she inscribed it inside the front cover: ‘To Honor Chauvel Auchinleck with her grandmother’s love.’ My choice of middle name and the fact that I had married an army chap must have been okay with Granny, but I never saw her again to thank her properly. The memories of her wise guidance, support and encouragement when they were really needed stood out like beacons, just like the memory of Harry breaking the ice on the trough and scraping the cowpat off my trousers on a winter’s morning long ago.
3
Cranky Ghosts
Initially I found it hard to reconcile the discord surrounding my name with the beautiful home in which I grew up. Naively, I thought beautiful places were supposed to be happy, or at least that people who lived in beautiful places had happy lives in the end, just like in fairytales. When people remarked how lucky I was to grow up in such a wonderful home – or told me I had a beautiful name – I usually agreed. But it wasn’t entirely like that.
I began to realise that very little about our house fitted together logically. It was an anomaly – a large, urban-looking, two-storey house built of homemade bricks at the turn of the twentieth century, and tucked away on the edge of the bush and the High Country far from Sydney and Melbourne. Naturally, there was a story behind it.
Dad’s father, Walter Edward Mitchell, or Granddaddy M, as even Dad respectfully called him, was one of eight children and of three surviving sons, the others being Peter Stuckey, who lived at Bringenbrong, and John Francis Huon (Jack) who lived at Khancoban House. Granddaddy M had two older sisters: Elizabeth, born in 1853, and Mary Annie, born in 1862. There were two younger sisters: Emma Isabella, known as ‘Pinkie’, born in 1867 and Henrietta Eveline, or Eva, who was the afterthought, born in 1873. Dad hardly spoke about Elizabeth and Mary Annie, but he said his Aunt Eva was wild. She put someone’s good English hunting saddle on a steer and when she tried to mount, the steer bucked her off and vanished into the bush. The hunting saddle was never seen again.
In accord with the times, it was only Granddaddy M and his two brothers who inherited land from my Great Grandfather Mitchell. Except for tales of Aunt Eva’s daredevil doings and some fond stories of Granddaddy M’s favourite sister, Pinkie, it seemed that once the girls married, they faded from the immediate family story.
Dad said that Granddaddy M had the house designed and built by his sister Eva’s husband, Soley Peck. Granddaddy M wanted a family house in which Granny M, the Paris-trained violinist from a distinguished banking family in Sydney, might be happy.
I know some of the story of Winifred Dibbs’ and Walter Edward Mitchell’s unlikely courtship. Granny M was twenty-seven when she met Granddaddy M in 1902. Granddaddy M’s sister Pinkie, who was married to Dr Willie Chisholm, introduced them at her house in Macquarie Street in Sydney. It seems Pinkie thought it was time to find a suitable bride for her brother. Perhaps Granny M was attracted to the sensitive, thirty-seven-year-old bushman with a singing voice ‘of some range’.1 They were married on 28 April 1904. Granny M’s matchmaker sister- and brother-in-law became lifelong friends, and friendship has flourished between subsequent generations of Chisholms and Mitchells.
In the early years of the last century there was a strong umbilical cord linking Towong Hill to Sydney. Just like Granny M’s family home, Graythwaite in North Sydney, the front of the house and one side elevation at Towong Hill are surrounded by verandahs and balconies, and almost all the main reception rooms and bedrooms have fireplaces with wooden surrounds of shelves, cupboards and mirrors. Granny M had tried to create her own oasis on the edge of the bush. Her home became a house of contrasts between the realities of country life and the dreams and desires of a woman who had lived in a city mansion overlooking Sydney Harbour, studied in Paris and travelled widely.
The house Granddaddy M built was an uneasy one. It was the second house on the site, the first one having been a prefabricated structure erected by a previous owner, James Findlay, over about four years from 1868. It was in fact two smallish houses with verandahs that stood roughly on the site of the present house and garden. Dad said that Mr Findlay lived in one house while Mrs Findlay lived in the other, thus unwittingly setting a precedent. By the time Dad told me the story, Mum and Dad were living at different ends of the house. There were also reports that mighty battles used to take place between the Mum Findlay faction and the Dad Findlay faction in the open space between the houses. The differences of opinion between Mr and Mrs James Findlay continued after they both died, because they don’t lie side by side in the old Corryong Cemetery. Ultimately even more distance separates my parents’ final resting places, with Mum buried in the Lawn Cemetery in Corryong and Dad’s grave on the ridge overlooking the homestead at Towong Hill.
The second house at Towong Hill – our home – was one of the first two-storey houses in the district to have a staircase with carved railings and posts. There was a septic tank for sewage and acetylene gas lighting. Ornate chimney pots and carved finials rather ostentatiously topped the gabled galvanised-iron roof. The house alone set the family apart as being different. Beyond the garden were spectacular views of the Dargals Range and the western face of Australia’s highest peaks on the Main Range.
When I saw Granny M’s violin in a junk cupboard in the linen room, Mum told me that after her marriage Granny M’s hands had become rough from domestic chores and gardening, and she never played her violin again. It might have been her way of coping with regressing ability, but I wonder whether she regretted sacrificing one of her greatest sources of pleasure and interest. Instead she turned her attention to running the house with what Mum saw as absolute and terrifying perfection; fifty years later her beautifully handwritten inventories of bed and table linen and the tasks for household staff were still pinned inside the doors of the linen room cupboards.
While there were few neighbours with whom to socialise, Granny M had a busy household with extended family and friends coming to stay and travellers needing beds and meals. Just like her mother and her sisters in Sydney, Granny M was immersed in running the house and bringing up her children, but she also had an excellent business brain. She was not only a wise adviser and staunch source of support for the cattle station and thoroughbred horse stud Granddaddy M had set up, she was also a dedicated nurse in times of illness. Mum often said that Granny M loved people to be ill so that she could look after them. Unfortunately her skills were called upon all too soon.
In 1913, immediately prior to the First World War, Granny and Granddaddy M travelled with Dad and his sister, Honnor, to Klosters in Switzerland in search of a cure for Granddaddy M’s ill health. He was suffering from terrible headaches accompanying Bright’s disease, a degenerative kidney condition; he was also devastated at the way his brother and business partner Peter was treating him. Apparently Uncle Jack had warned Granddaddy M that Peter would let him down. Dad never told me exactly what happened, but the P. & W. Mitchell Partnership was dissolved in 1915–16, just a year before Granddaddy M’s death. As a result, Peter Mitchell took the family homestead at Bringenbrong, across the state border from Towong Hill in New South Wales, while Walter Edward (Granddaddy M) took Towong Hill and a property called Indi near Biggara. Encouraged by the resolute Granny M, he arranged for someone else to bid for the well-known and jointly owned racehorse Trafalgar at public auction for 7500 guineas2 so Peter would not know that his estranged brother was the buyer. The hurt from the falling out with Peter exacerbated Granddaddy M’s headaches and on one occasion a doctor in Albury told Peter that his bad temper and harsh business practices were endangering his brother’s health.
After the division of partnership assets, Granddaddy M had large weatherboard stables built for the thoroughbred stud at Towong Hill; though no longer used as stables, they still stand today. Over the main door he had the date ‘1916’ painted – the date the two brothers comple
ted their separation.
‘Dad, did you ever meet Peter?’ I asked him one time when I was in my late twenties and we were passing Bringenbrong homestead in his noisy truck.
‘Only once,’ Dad shouted. ‘He was sitting on a shooting stick outside some stockyards. When I asked Granny M who that foxy-looking old man was, she replied, “He is your Uncle Peter and if he speaks to you, you must be very polite.” He never spoke to me.’
‘So why didn’t Granddaddy M and Great-Uncle Peter get on?’
‘The fundamental cause of the change in Peter’s nature was a love affair,’ Dad replied, apparently not wanting to go into too much detail. ‘Peter fell in love with the daughter of one of the local landholders, a worthy kind of girl, reports said, but the stern old Thomas Mitchell, my grandfather, said she was not good enough for Peter and the marriage was called off. Granny, your Great-Granny Mitchell, ruled the family with a rod of iron right up until her death in 1897. Peter brooded and over the years became more and more egocentric, thoroughly eccentric and selfish. He was cranky, too. He could quote the Bible and Shakespeare and he liked fast women.’ I was married when Dad told me this, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned fast women.
‘The Bible and Shakespeare couldn’t have been that bad, and fast women were probably interesting and good fun,’ I suggested, playing devil’s advocate in my attempt to get to the bottom of this story.
‘It wasn’t like that with Peter – he was an unkind troublemaker,’ Dad retorted. ‘He spread rumours about people and wrote anonymous letters and then sat back to watch what happened.’
I went on to ask Dad how much he thought Peter might have felt upstaged by Granddaddy M’s marriage in 1904 and the wonderful house he had built with the help of partnership money. Dad explained that Peter could have afforded to do what he wanted with the homestead at Bringenbrong, but he didn’t do much. All the same, he didn’t seem to want Granny and Granddaddy M to have a nice place either. Nothing that Dad told me really explained why Peter was able to pour so much acid on Granddaddy M. Perhaps Walter was simply too much the gentle, sensitive, hard-working bushman, though I did wonder if Granny M – the slim, talented, determined, well-educated and well-connected city girl – disliked her brother-in-law and whether the feeling was mutual.
Granny M stayed at Bringenbrong during her first visit to the Upper Murray before she was married and again while the house at Towong Hill was being built. Peter had ruled at Bringenbrong since his father died in 1887 and his mother ten years later, and maybe he didn’t want competition from anyone, let alone his younger brother’s competent, highly organised new wife. An album dating from Winifred’s visit in 1903, about a year before she married Walter Edward, holds a sepia photograph of a beautifully dressed Granny M killing a snake in the Bringenbrong homestead garden. She doesn’t look like a lady with whom to tangle.
Dad told me that for his Grandfather Thomas, my great-grandfather, Sunday was a day of rest and he wouldn’t let the family play cards. Mrs Scammell, who cooked at Towong Hill, once told Mum that Thomas Mitchell was so religious that he wouldn’t let his children do anything but read the Bible on Sundays and later, as a result, none of them would go to church but they could all spout the Bible backwards. Old Thomas Mitchell had moved the family to the Upper Murray from Tangambalanga in 1875 when he bought Bringenbrong from the Douglas family. Apparently he was a hard-working, rather cranky disciplinarian. No wonder Peter was cranky too. According to the not particularly objective John T. Francis, author of Lives of Romance, which was facetiously known by Mum and Dad as ‘the Family Bible’, Peter ‘was short and stout, clean shaven, with bluish grey eyes and straw-coloured hair – not exactly an attractive personality to most women’.3
On 24 April 1908, four years after attending Granny and Granddaddy M’s wedding, Peter was married in the City Hall in Manhattan to New Zealand-born Jeannie Watson Muir, or ‘Tui’ as she preferred to be called. Some said the unworldly Peter had thought he was courting a widow rather than a divorcee who was reputed to have been a barmaid. Whatever the truth, the marriage divided the two brothers more profoundly than the Murray River filled with snowy floodwaters could ever have done. So by the time I arrived in the world, discord was no newcomer to our family.
John T. Francis also had an opinion about Tui: ‘From her youth, Jeannie was a born schemer and adventuress, whose sole aim was to get rich by entrapping some wealthy man as a husband, or as a protector.’4 Francis’s family history was paid for by Tui’s sister’s husband who coincidentally was called John Mitchell, but was no relation of our family. Louise, John’s wife and Tui’s sister, had run away and scandal ensued. Contemporary convention required Granny M to call on her new sister-in-law at Bringenbrong homestead. Granddaddy M was opposed, and in any case Granny M refused to call, thus deepening the rift still further. Whatever happened, Great-Uncle Peter and I share birthdays and I have more than a passing interest in him. I wonder what his side of the story was?
Granddaddy M died on 18 September 1917 when he was only fifty-two, a month short of his fifty-third birthday. Dad was eleven and Aunt Hon was nine. The cause given on his death certificate is chronic nephritis. He and Granny M had been married for only thirteen years. On hearing the news Uncle Peter is said to have remarked ‘Poor Wally!’, indicating he might have had some residual affection for his brother. I never thought to ask Dad if his uncle attended Granddaddy M’s funeral or if he contacted Granny M. Granny M, together with Aunt Hon, soon moved to Sydney to be close to Dad (who was shortly to start at the newly opened Cranbrook School) and Granny M’s family. Granny M owned a house in Wentworth Street, Point Piper, just a short distance from the school. During the summer holidays the house at Towong Hill was ‘opened’ and the family returned.
Stories about life at Bringenbrong and the house at Towong Hill were eccentric from the outset and I loved them. Dad colourfully recounted how both his parents were ‘crack shots’ and maintained the shape of the macrocarpa tree by sitting in chairs on the lawn and ‘shooting off any protruding branches and twigs’. Aunt Hon was a good shot too, only she didn’t stop at pruning the macrocarpa. She also trimmed some of the gargoyles and finials on the house.
4
Working in a Wild Museum
When Mum and Dad moved into Towong Hill in January 1936, after their wedding on 4 November 1935 and their honeymoon in New Zealand, the second house on the site had not really been a permanent family home for any length of time since 1917. Dad had had a long association with the house and surrounding property, and the family assumed that, as he had inherited it, he would ultimately make it his home. But it was his Uncle Jack’s Khancoban Station, where he had spent a number of school holidays, that he knew best.
My great-grandfather Thomas Mitchell was so incensed when his son Jack married his cousin Fanny that, with exception of the acreage at Khancoban, he disinherited him. Khancoban had no house, no yards, no fencing or stock. As a result, Uncle Jack owed money to the bank for the rest of his life. He was a bucolic man who swore like a trooper and he became a surrogate father to Dad. In Dad’s eyes he could do no wrong. Uncle Jack taught Dad all he knew about bushcraft, cattle, working in the forge, plaiting stockwhips, using a lathe to carve wood and loving the land in a way a city dweller never would have done.
I loved listening to Dad’s stories about Uncle Jack and Aunt Fanny and their house at Khancoban and he loved telling them. He had already written about them while he was in Changi, in his unpublished memoir ‘Midway Peak’. He had such a good memory that once he had written something down, he knew it by heart. He told me the stories so often that I can easily draw on my memory of the conversations, and repeat them almost word for word.
‘Khancoban House, as Uncle Jack called it, was the usual sort of bush homestead, with a verandah that ran round four rooms and a central passage down the middle,’ Dad would say. ‘The kitchen was a separate building at the back and connected to the main house by a small side verandah. The dining and sitting
rooms were in the front on either side of the passage.’
‘What was it like staying there?’ I used to ask, not that Dad needed any prompting.
‘The house was old. You only needed the slightest breeze to lift the roof iron off the white-ant-eaten rafters, and when the wind really blew there was a hell of a racket of loose iron rattling around. I reckoned Uncle was lucky not to lose some of that roof. It was a bit risky getting up there to hammer down nails and there wasn’t enough money to do many repairs. When you came in from a long day’s work on the place, you didn’t want to lean against the back verandah posts as you took off your boots or you were apt to find yourself sprawling in the garden on a cloud of white-ant-eaten splinters and Uncle Jack’s curses,’ Dad would go on.
‘And of course we had to help Aunt Fanny bring the roast from the kitchen, often in the pitch darkness of a wet winter’s night – remember, there was no electric light in those days – and you had to negotiate a couple of steps, then dodge the wood box and any loose boards. At the door you had to balance the dishes on the corner of an old treadle sewing-machine table and with hand and knee manage to get both the wooden door and the wire door open long enough to dash through. If you were not quick, one or other slammed on you. If you were lucky someone heard you and opened the dining room door; if they did not you had to draw up one knee, balance the dish on it, and grope for the door handle as best you could. No wonder my cousin Colin Chisholm wanted to build a decent house after he inherited Khancoban Station.’
Dad always blamed himself for Uncle Jack’s death. ‘During the term before I was due to spend the spring holidays at Khancoban, he wrote to me at school saying he’d bought a mob of Queensland bullocks and wanted a hand with them,’ Dad said. ‘I reckoned we’d have trouble and I was a bit apprehensive. I could almost hear his curses as I read his letter. Aunt Fanny was a real dear, like Mother – she always told me that his bark was worse than his bite but I couldn’t get used to it.’