Late in 1996, I journeyed to Towong Hill Station just outside Corryong in Northeast Victoria to interview Elyne Mitchell, the popular author of the Silver Brumby series. First published in 1958 her first children’s book The Silver Brumby is still in print.
Elyne Mitchell, a weather-beaten but striking woman with a cultured voice, greeted me graciously in the drawing room of the homestead and I felt privileged to meet with her. She was busy as the Patron of the local Man from Snowy River Festival at Corryong. The interview ranged across not only her writing for children but her strong, passionate interest in Australian literature and her closeness to the Australian landscape. Towong Hill Station faces Mount Kosciusko with the Indi River flowing down the Upper Murray Valley, a picturesque setting for Elyne who wrote in her study on a daily basis, answering her abundant fan mail from children in Australia and overseas.
Elyne Mitchell belonged to a band of nationalists who were at work during the war years of 1940-1945, writing poetry and prose centred on the Australian landscape. According to Elyne, the literary mood was ‘up and surging’ (interview November, 1996) and a flood of books came onto the Australian market. In a reply to my question why such a change in the literary climate, Elyne said categorically, ‘we thought we might lose Australia and our lives because the Japanese were invading.’ In a letter to me Elyne said, ‘As regards Australia’s Alps (1942) and Speak to the Earth (1945), they were published when there was very little written in Australia and every adult was realising that their country had an enormous importance to them. Speak to the Earth was published in 1945, just as the POWs were on their way home. My husband [Tom Mitchell] saw his first copy in Brisbane. It sold out in a very short time.’ (Letter, December 1995)
Although Elyne was well known as the writer of the Silver Brumby stories, she was more in touch with the Australian literary scene, having high regard for Clem Christesen’s new venture Meanjin Papers (1940) and Judith Wright’s The Moving Image, first published in 1946, than she was with the children’s literature scene which was dominated in the 1940s and 1950s by British publishers.
Mark Twain, the writer of two enduring books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, toured Australia in 1895 and made a perceptive comment on our local literature. He said, ‘Australia is fertile in writers whose books are faithful mirrors of the life of the country and of its history. The materials were surprisingly rich, both in quality and in mass, and Marcus Clarke, Ralph [Rolf] Boldrewood, Gordon, Kendall and others have built out of them a brilliant and vigorous literature, and one which must endure’ (Twain, 1922). The Lawson-Paterson tradition was about to begin in 1895. The 1890s period, one of national ferment is well-documented in our literary history. But the 1940s was also a period when nationalist feelings brought forth many new poets and prose writers, with Elyne Mitchell, although isolated in Towong Hill, making her own contribution.
Writing in Meanjin in 1945, Elyne bemoaned the lack of awareness of Australians of their own country. She said, ‘we have failed to assimilate the idea of Australia, the reality beneath the differing appearances, so that by voice, poetry, prose, by our own lives the consciousness of all Australians to the land on whose rim they live is awakened. We have not told of the silver-mauve evenings that enfold the paddocks – the woolsheds, the yards… Nor of the depth of “belonging” that comes with utter tiredness after the giving of all one’s strength to the work with the land’ (Mitchell, 1945 p123).
HM Green, the nationalist critic, considered Elyne ‘a type of the poetically descriptive essayist’ and a ‘stylist… elaborate and rather self-conscious in her search after aesthetically effective arrangement of words and rhythms;’ (Green, 1961, p1195) not dissimilar to Judith Partridge’s recent comment, also valid, that Mitchell’s ‘enthusiasm at times leads to an extravagance of imagery’ (Partridge, 2001, p485). But for Elyne there was urgency in her mind to deliver a message, and over-emphasising that rhetoric comes frequently through her prose. Her preferences for using ‘natural’ prose was in keeping with a tradition set by Charles Barrett, in From a Bush Hut (1942) and Australia My Country (1941), along with Alec Chisholm’s Mateship with Birds (1922) and Bernard O’Reilly’s Green Mountains (1940) and Cullenbenbong (1944). Collectively they wanted to make a statement about their country for general readership, despite the tag of being self-conscious.
Marjorie Barnard, novelist and historian, recognised the imperial tendencies of outsiders and labelled their efforts as ‘onlooker books,’ prime example being Cobbers (1934) by the Englishman Thomas Wood. Barnard, writing in 1942, was emphatic about Australian literature and its future status. She said, ‘Colonists cling desperately to their old traditions and try to go on being imaginative in the world they left, but the new life always beats them. Imperceptibly the changed environment changes them, their imitations of their former selves grow more and more hollow, and a new entity creeps out from under the painted shell. It is resisted and ignored, but it means to live and it does live’ (Barnard,1949, p99).
Elyne was in tune with Barnard’s sentiments when she wrote in Australia’s Alps, ‘The spirit of these hills is one of remoteness... Unlike the European Alps, where the actions of our forerunners, their hopes and dreams, cling round each summit ridge, here we have only our dreams and our memories about which to build our own infinitesimal tradition’ (Mitchell, 1942, p3).
An anecdote related during the interview focussed on the Ern Malley affair, bogus poems written by poets McAuley and Stewart during war time to trip up the avant-garde poetry movement of the day and in particular the late Max Harris and John Reed, proprietors of Angry Penguins. The hoax broke in Sydney while Douglas Stewart of the Lawson-Paterson school was editor of the Red Page of the Bulletin.
On 25 June 1944, while Elyne was visiting Douglas Stewart in Sydney, the news broke in the Sunday Sun and he tossed the paper across his desk for her to read. Both had a great laugh over the matter now publicly revealed. For Stewart and Mitchell had much in common. They both adhered to the landscape school of Australian writers and they had many compatriots across the nation.
Against this background of the landscape aesthetic during and after World War II came Elyne’s need to write her first Silver Brumby story for her daughter Indi, mainly for two reasons. Towong Hill was isolated and lacked access to libraries, and Elyne was not happy with the reading matter available for her daughter, especially books, with a lack of Australian content. So she wrote The Silver Brumby using the mountains and brumbies as her setting and characters and Indi at age ten was after all, ‘crazy about ponies.’ It started off as a short story but soon Indi was ‘waiting at the typewriter for the next instalment.’
Getting the manuscript published became a saga worth relating as it clearly illustrates the colonial mentality at work in Australian publishing during the 1950s. Ethel Anderson, a poet and cousin of Tom Mitchell, was instrumental in having Elyne’s non-fiction titles published by Angus and Robertson with Walter Cousins, Managing Director at the time. Being conservative book publishers they showed no interest in The Silver Brumby. Elyne sought the advice of Margaretta Webber who ran a high class bookshop in Melbourne and she in turn showed the manuscript to Frank Eyre, Australian Manager of Oxford University Press who wanted to publish it immediately. But Elyne’s agent Curtis Brown had submitted the manuscript to Oxford University Press’s UK Office. Then according to Elyne, ‘there was a hell of a row’ between Oxford University Press London and Oxford University Press Melbourne. By this stage, 1958, Frank Eyre had ‘bent the rules’ and published Nan Chauncy’s novel A Fortune For the Brave in Australia. Eyre, prior to this, had no mandate to publish children’s books in Australia. That was the prerogative of the UK Children’s editor. A stalemate ensued and Oxford University Press London and Melbourne both rejected the manuscript. The colonial mentality of British publishers was firmly in place. Undaunted, Margaretta Webber submitted the manuscript to Hutchison’s in Australia who published the book, much to the relief of Elyne Mitchell (Interview, 1996)
When the Children’s Book Council of Victoria published their valuable Australian Children’s Books: A Select List (second edition, 1962), the compilers left out The Silver Brumby, ostensibly because the horses in the story spoke to each other! But Albert Ullin, who founded The Little Bookroom in Melbourne in 1960, thought otherwise and stocked the books because children were joining riding schools and pony clubs and could relate quite readily to the brumby story set in Australia’s high country.
Saxby (2002) made a valid point about critics labelling her characters as anthropomorphic in The Silver Brumby stories when he said, ‘the horses had names that help establish their personalities. They talk, even gossip among themselves in human terms, yet they always retain their equine nature’. Mitchell would have nothing to do with anthropomorphism, yet she convinces us that the horses observe their surroundings, understand them and communicate with one another – to a good purpose.’ (Saxby, 2001 p656)
Elyne Mitchell nee Chauvel was the daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Chauvel and Lady Chauvel. She attended St Catherine’s School, Toorak between 1924 and 1931 becoming a prefect and Boarders Captain in her last year. Although a loner at school, Elyne gave credit to her favourite teacher, Miss McDonald, for encouraging her writing, and she was in 1931 school librarian, having the authority to order books.
In 1935, after her marriage to Thomas Walter Mitchell, Elyne moved to Towong Hill Station, where she resided until her death this year. Recognition for her services to literature came from Charles Sturt University in 1993. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters. Finally, to quote Penelope Mortimer, BBC Children’s Hour in the 12th impression of The Silver Brumby ‘I am certain, absolutely certain that those of you who like horses will think – as my children did – that this the best book you have ever read….’ Australian children continue to agree.
Bibliography
Barnard, Marjorie (1942) ‘Our Literature’ in Australian Writers Speak. A&R
Green, HM (1961) A History of Australian Literature. A&R.
Mitchell, Elyne (1942) Australia’s Alps. Sydney: A&R
--------------. Letter to Jeff Prentice. (1995) 4 December .
--------------. Spirit of the Land (1945) in ‘Meanjin Papers’ (no. 2)
Partridge, Judith (2001) ‘Mitchell, (Sibyl) Elyne (Keith)’ in The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. Edited by Victor Watson. CUP, p485.
Prentice, Jeff. (1996) Interview with Elyne Mitchell. Towong Hill, Victoria, 15 November
Saxby, Maurice. (2002) Images of Australia. Scholastic Australia.
Twain, Mark. (1922) More Tramps Abroad. Chatto & Windus.
Jeff Prentice is Deputy Chairman of the May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust in Australia
