The day my mother left home for the final time was the day I became a man. I was getting used to her leaving and coming back. It became part of the rhythm of our house. But my three siblings and I never thought the leaving would be final.
A still, cold June day. I’d come home from school. Dad was making dinner; my two brothers and little sister were playing around the house.
‘Where’s Mum?’
I looked at Dad. He didn’t need to answer. Harold Mitchell senior was a big, strong man, a sawmiller and bushman. He didn’t show much emotion, and he didn’t waste words. He held it inside, like so many of his generation. He was getting on with it, feeding the four of us. And while he was a hard man to read, I knew she was gone.
Without a goodbye or a hug, Mum had walked out the door that day and changed the lives of all of our family. With about an hour’s notice, my father had became a sole parent with four kids.
Dad showed me the farewell note she’d written, in her beautiful script. The other kids didn’t need to see it. I was the eldest, fifteen years old, the one Dad would sometimes take into his confidence, the one who protected the younger ones from as many of life’s hardships as possible. The words Mum had written are lost to me now, but the memory of that day will never leave me. I took the note to my bedroom and cried. I cried for her loss, I cried that us four kids wouldn’t grow up with a mother, and I cried for Dad.
And then I let her go, and started learning how to live without her. And I didn’t cry about anything else for years.
Later that evening, lying in bed unable to sleep, something strange happened. I realized that I didn’t feel sorry for Dad. He was such a strong character, and we had been brought up to be resilient, independent and uncomplaining, so I knew he’d be OK. Dad was a coper. Nothing fazed him. He would certainly have had moments in private, probably when we were all asleep in bed, when he wondered what would happen to us as a family, how he would juggle his four kids and his work. It was a struggle Dad had on his own. At sixteen, I wasn’t old enough to hear his concerns, to help work out a way forward for the Mitchells. I wasn’t equipped to give Dad advice, but I did vow to help him in any practical way I could.
Dad wouldn’t have been too surprised Mum had gone. Neither would my two younger brothers, Terry, thirteen, and Rodney, twelve, and little Vicki, at six a decade younger than me. We all thought she’d keep going and returning. After all, she had left three times and come back each time. Her pattern of leaving might have continued for all we knew. This last time, it was a year before we all saw her again. By then, she was largely out of our lives.
So I grew up fast. There was no choice, really. When you are sixteen years old, and your father is holding two jobs and your mother has bailed with another man and there’s not much money around, manhood comes to you quickly.
When I was little I didn’t really notice Mum’s leaving. I was too busy yabbying down at the local dam and building cubby houses out of fallen branches. Once we dug a tunnel and built a little cubby house underground. My father and I would fish in the Delatite River. We would often catch enough fish for dinner. Back at home, Dad would scale and gut them in front of his awed children, with blood and scales and fish heads and a great stink all over the place. We were all happy to be living in such a wonderland.
Spending time with Dad was great, but I also enjoyed being alone. You can’t be bored in the bush. Something is always happening. I was six years old when we lived at the foot of Mount Buller. It was a hundred degrees Farenherit, and I was wearing shorts and no shoes, the huge freedom of youth. I was running through the tinder-dry bush barefoot when I looked down to see that my foot was about to land on a snake. I shortened my step, and the next step was into a little pond where there were two steps to the other side. I don’t think my foot sunk into the pond at all, and it would be the first time in my life where I found myself running on water.
And, I can assure any of my enemies reading this, it was certainly the last.
I was born on 13 May 1942, in the small West Gippsland town of Trafalgar, 125 kilometres east of Melbourne. After a few days in hospital, Dad arrived to take Mum and me home. There was no car access, so the only way home was to walk along the railway track. While Mum walked beside him, Dad picked me up and carried me along the track back to our little house in the tiny town of Tanjil Bren in alpine Gippsland, on the way to the ski fields. It’s a striking image, this little week-old baby being carried by a strapping sawmiller, accompanied by his tired and proud wife, keeping half an eye out for trains coming in either direction.
We weren’t at Tanjil Bren for long, maybe two years. My first memories are of moving. Always moving. Pack the house, pack the car, let’s go. Dad’s work as a sawmiller ensured that we didn’t stay anywhere too long. We lived virtually an itinerant life. Dad would find a job at a sawmill, and we would all move to that town. The first mills he worked at were in the Victorian Alps. Later they were up in the mountains in tiny places such as Mirrimbah near Mount Buller. At Tanjil Bren there might have only been a dozen families. We rarely saw other people. It was a very insular existence. We lived in about twenty different houses. We never really settled down.
I had stopped noticing the moves we made as a family. New town, new house, the effort to make new friends. My early life was a blur of bedrooms, kitchens, gardens and saying goodbye to friends just made. I never minded. Kids get used to anything.
When I was in grade 5 we moved to Stawell, near Victoria’s Grampians, a booming gold-mining town of the mid-1800s whose glamour had long faded. Dad had found work at the local sawmill. We drove into town in a 1937 Chevrolet, the five of us and everything we owned, including two or three spare tyres. It must have been quite a sight.
My mother would leave us from time to time. We would sometimes wonder where she’d gone, but Dad didn’t talk about her, or where she was, or when she was coming home. We just got used to her not being around.
I didn’t miss her, but there was a gap. We were pretty busy just staying alive. Sometimes we were sent off to an auntie and uncle in Melbourne and we would see our cousins. I think that filled a bit of the gap. Each time Mum returned we accepted her back as our mother, unquestioningly. Strangely, looking back on it, there weren’t many questions asked of her. Like, for instance, where have you been, and didn’t you think we might have needed you? My memory is that it was a virtually wordless re-entry into our world.
Lorna Mitchell was a child of the Depression era. The daughter of poor dairy farmers in Gippsland, Mum grew up in an unstable family where the girls were encouraged to marry very young, and she did. She was eighteen when she married Dad, and had me when she was nineteen. She was still a girl herself. She had four children while still in her twenties, and if that wasn’t hard enough, life relying on a sawmill was not easy. Sawmillers were out of work with a week’s notice.
She was clever, nervous, often both kind and temperamental. Sometimes you had to pay attention around her. My sister often reminds me that she always knew the weight of a pound because my mother used to throw the butter at her, and when they connected my sister would get quite a good indication of how much a pound was.
I’ve always been grateful to these extended family members in Melbourne, who took us in temporarily, for the love and support they showed us. Each Christmas morning I get a list out and phone each of them, about a dozen. And each year, as their numbers dwindle, I have a struggle not crying. They all did so much for us. Even though families don’t stay together as much as they once did, what’s important is that the parents stay in touch and that there is a circle of support, and the kids will be OK in that cocoon.
Dad’s new life as a single parent was very tough for him, but he held it together all right. We had to have our clothes washed and ironed and dinner had to be made, and we had to be made ready for school. And then Dad would go to work. We all learned how to darn socks and iron shirts and do things around the house. Dinner, a rather fractured affair, not often a happy family meal, was always two chops and vegies. But the meal was always there. My father did a great job, against the odds. I think just being able to cope is quite an achievement. He held down three jobs: foreman in a sawmill, weekend work on a chicken farm and cutting wheat in the holidays.
In January 2009 the Age wrote about Dad. ‘I’d mend their shoes, darn their clothes, cut their hair,’ Dad told the paper. ‘I’d do young Vicki’s hair for her every morning before school.’
We didn’t have a lot of money, but I don’t remember minding. I learned at fifteen to patch the only pair of school trousers I owned.
It wasn’t long before Dad met Rose, and a good relationship developed between them. Rose worked at the same place my mother had, as a care worker at a school for invalid children. Rose was lovely. So, suddenly, we had a stepmother. That was probably more important for Vicki, aged six, than for the rest of us. She provided a female presence in a house that probably needed one. I left as she arrived, so I didn’t know her as well as my younger siblings. But I left knowing my little sister was going to be looked after. Stepmothers can be awful, but this lady was quite wonderful.
There were many costs to what had happened to us as a family. At the time there was a bit of a stigma attached to marriage breakdowns, or broken families as they were sometimes called. In the town I think we were suddenly social outcasts. I had a girlfriend who dropped me because of it. And I was working in a sawmill so my prospects weren’t great. I did have an idea of going back to that little town and meeting that girl and letting her know that I had done well, but I never did. Her name was Beverly. Not the Bevelly I married. I always wondered whether such incidents spurred me on. They probably did.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself after school, but Dad had perhaps inadvertently helped me along the path to a professional career. In Stawell there was the choice of two secondary schools, a technical school and a high school. My two brothers went to the technical school and I went to the high school, Stawell High. My father told me—many years later—he wanted me to go to the high school because he felt I would get a better job. And he didn’t quite know what all that meant. But I think that decision had a real influence on me. We learned about the arts rather than woodwork. It was a very good education, although I didn’t finish it.
I decided to leave school after year 11. I would have liked to have gone on, but it was obviously a disturbing time at home. I was just a little short of sixteen. In the late 1950s in Stawell, the only options for young kids out of school were jobs as a shearer’s mate or a labourer. I could not see myself being either for any length of time. I was fifteen and restless, and I felt myself to be a long way away from anywhere exciting. I knew neither sawmilling nor shearing were my destiny. Nevertheless I took the job at the mill, sweeping up, moving logs, doing whatever they told me to do. The older and more experienced guys pushed the logs into the saws. Me and a band of young labourers did everything else.
We worked with Australian gum for building houses. There was always noise, this screaming of the logs being pushed into the saws, dust constantly flowing about, and the splinters you get in your hands that stayed there until they were pushed out eight months later by new skin. It was really dangerous work, and I saw some horrifying sights. The men worked very close to the big circular saws, and often fingers were lost. I was told that sometimes this would be done on purpose. Some mill workers were so poor they would take advantage of a set formula for accidents—they would get paid on how much of a knuckle they lost or part of their body. So I believe some were losing fingers around Christmas time to get much-needed cash.
Sawmilling was a tough, sometimes brutal life. My brothers both worked in the sawmills, and followed my father to Orbost where he went for the work. For the eight months I worked there, at night I would come home exhausted, wipe the sawdust out of my eyes and pick splinters out of my hands. Surely this wouldn’t be my life? There must be something else.
And then I found it. I’ve heard friends tell stories of the moment they realized their lives had changed. One told me he saw a guitar belonging to the owner of a rented beach house in a wardrobe; he cautiously picked it up and played it, starting a lifelong love affair. Another remembers reading the Business section of the newspaper when he was twelve, fascinated by numbers and profits and the snakes and ladders of the stock market; he still had that habit at age seventy, after a long and successful business career.
My passion was discovered through a transistor radio.
We lived in quite a few different places around Stawell, including a converted shop. And then, in one of the houses we rented, one great day, I got my own bedroom. It meant that at night I could lie on my bed and listen to the radio. So, amid the monotonous drone of the cicadas, I would listen and dream that I was in the big city. I imagined those sophisticated adults sashaying into a radio studio and casually, confidently chatting to their thousands of fans out there.
I would tune into 3DB, for which we got great reception through a local station called 3LK Lubeck in Horsham, which was where the transmitter was. On 3DB I would listen to a confident, cheeky young radio performer called Ernie Sigley, who was just the coolest cat you could ever imagine. Ernie, just a bit older than me, seemed to know everybody. Or I’d sometimes be able to get 2UE in Sydney, which at eight o’clock would broadcast dance bands.
It was such an exciting world, with all these glamorous people saying witty things. It seemed so immediate, such a fascinating and wonderful world where everyone was enjoying themselves.
It was my escape from life in a mill town. And I wondered how I could become part of it. I’d been to Melbourne several times to stay with uncles, aunts and cousins, usually after my mum left home. Melbourne was where I wanted to go. It was my dream.
I decided radio was the answer. That’s where I would find a job. While working at the sawmill I started to write to radio stations all over the state, including Melbourne. I wrote to at least thirty. Everyone knocked me back. I don’t have the rejection letters any more, but I wish I did; they would make interesting reading. Strangely, I wasn’t disheartened. I remember thinking that if I keep positive and keep at it, my luck would turn.
One day in the Age I saw an ad for an office boy in an advertising agency in Melbourne. I thought that advertising would have something to do with radio. So I applied for the job. I made a long-distance phone call—a big deal in 1959—to the man, whose name was on the ad, Mr Alf Cheel. Mr Cheel was very impressed that I had rung long distance on a Sunday night.
‘Can you get down to Melbourne by, say, Thursday?’ Mr Cheel asked.
I knew the Overlander train from Adelaide to Melbourne stopped in Stawell at 4.45 a.m. to change drivers for the final four hours to Melbourne.
‘I can be there at nine o’clock tomorrow,’ I said.
The train pulled into Spencer Street station. Wearing the one jacket I owned, my one pair of long trousers, a shirt and my father’s tie I walked up along Spencer Street and turned right up LaTrobe Street, just as Mr Cheel had told me. I found my way to Mr Cheel’s office a bit after nine o’clock and announced myself to a woman at the front desk.
‘My name is Harold Mitchell,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Mr Cheel.’
Mr Cheel emerged from his office and shook my hand. He seemed like a genial man. He asked me a few questions—how long the trip had taken, a bit about the sawmill. He seemed impressed that I was able to get to Melbourne so quickly. We chatted for a bit, and he said he would let me know. I think he took pity on me because I came so far. I caught the train that night back to Stawell and went back to the sawmill the next day.
A week later the phone rang. It was Mr Cheel. ‘Harold, you’ve got the job because you came further than anybody else.’
I put down the phone, very excited.
‘Well done, son,’ said Dad. ‘When do you leave?’
Dad knew I’d never live with him again, that he was about to lose his eldest son and, in some ways, his main helper around the place. Not a sentimental man, he contained his emotions, as I did. There were no hugs or bottles of champagne or tears. Dad shook my hand. He understood completely. I didn’t feel as though I was abandoning Dad. He was such a strong person and so in control. I knew he would be OK and I guess he knew I would be.
The offer was a job as an office boy at an advertising agency called Briggs & James, one of the best in Melbourne. I didn’t quite know what an advertising agency was, but I was thrilled. It was 1959, I was sixteen years old and I was away! I’d seen an opportunity, and I was taking it. What I didn’t know was where it was about to take me.