As the debate builds, the writings of an author who contributed as much as anyone to high-country horse culture remain popular.  Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby books have been an amazing success story in Australian publishing.

A.B. "Banjo" Paterson’s epic poem The Man from Snowy River is known by many Australians and frequently recited at bush poetry events around the country.  Paterson imbued the mountain horseman with hero qualities to such an extent that many people today see horses – especially wild ones – as having a rightful place in the park.  Others however see these feral animals as destructive pests, damaging watercourses and vegetation and representing a real threat to the fragile alpine area especially.

But as much as Paterson, Mitchell contributed to the place that brumbies have in Australia’s modern popular culture and folklore, and in the beliefs that some protagonists in the brumby debate have today.

Born in Melbourne in 1913, Mitchell was the daughter of (later General Sir) Harry Chauvel, who commanded the Desert Mounted Corps in the First World War and was instrumental in the famous Light Horse charge at Beersheba in 1917. She grew up in a family where horses were part of the culture.  Chauvel had acquired his horse skills on the family’s cattle properties and he encouraged his daughter to ride.

After Mitchell married lawyer and grazier (and later Victorian parliamentarian) Tom Mitchell of Towong Hill in the upper Murray in 1935, she was soon riding the paddocks and local hills.  She went on to make numbers of long rides through the Snowy Mountains, and managed Towong Hill during the lonely war years when her husband was a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi.

Mitchell is remembered fondly for her wildly successful Silver Brumby books from the 1950s onwards.  But not only did she write children’s fiction, she also wrote a number of pioneering non-fiction works addressing Australians’ relationship with their environment.  In all her writing, place is central.  Mitchell's passionate connection with the upper Murray and the Snowy Mountains had a fundamental influence on her and her work.  In fact, she wrote of the mountains as being for her a symbol of "a profound belonging to the Australian land".

Her deep sense of place, commitment to the rural life, and close observation of nature saw her write Speak to the Earth (1945).  Her belief in the importance of tree cover in retaining soil led to Soil and Civilisation, published in 1946.  Her environmental awareness was on a par with American writers like Aldo Leopold  and Rachel Carson. Mitchell’s Australia’s Alps (1942) showed the depth of her attachment to the high country in winter and summer.  By the time she wrote Towong Hill: fifty years on an upper Murray cattle station in 1989, Mitchell's relationship with the environment had deepened still further.

Her close observation of nature over many decades marks her as a significant, and early, contributor to the genre of Australian environmental writing, albeit through a pastoral lens.

He husband's return from captivity and the birth of their children saw Mitchell venture into fiction, first with Flow river, blow wind in 1953.  Then came children’s fiction.  As daughter Indi (christened after the local name for the upper Murray River above its junction with the Swampy Plains River) was growing up and there was little suitable reading material available at isolated Towong Hill, Mitchell decided to write her own.  Anyway, much children’s literature in Australia was published by British publishers and lacked Australian content.

Mitchell wanted to engage Indi – who wasn’t much interested in available books - with stories about her Australia.  She based her new project on the wild horses she had seen in the Snowies during ski trips and other journeys.  Beginning as a short story that morphed into a novel, and dedicated to "Indi who loves horses" (Mitchell would dedicate books to all her four children), The Silver Brumby was born and became a treasured read for thousands of young - and not so young - people in Australia and overseas.  First published in 1958, it is still in print.  The brumby series of 13 novels spawned by The Silver Brumby was published in more than 40 countries.

It is interesting to look at the titles of some of those overseas editions to see how the title translated.  In German, The Silver Brumby became Der Silberhengst or The Silver Stallion.  So, the meaning of the vernacular Australian word ‘brumby’, (a wild, undomesticated, unowned, or feral, horse) is lost and replaced by the less specific "stallion".  In Swedish, The Silver Brumby became Windy, ledarhingsten.   Hingst like the German hengst, means stallion, but more interesting here is that name Windy.  In the English edition, the silver brumby’s name is Thowra, which in the book means wind.  So in Swedish, Thowra is called Windy.  The second book, Silver Brumby’s Daughter (which in the US was published as Snow Filly) is in Swedish, Windy’s dotter (Thowra’s daughter), and the third, Silver Brumbies of the South, becomes in Swedish, Windy’s vilda hjord or Thowra’s wild herd.  So, some subtle and not so subtle changes of meaning here and there overseas.

The key themes in The Silver Brumby are wildness and freedom, for it is Thowra’s life-long battle to remain free of the men trying to catch him – as well as to assert himself among competing brumby stallions - that are the main plotlines.  Although wildness in the book is symbolised  by an exotic, and not a native, animal, it seems to me that for Mitchell her brumbies represented so much of the wildness and freedom that she so enjoyed in the mountains.  A children’s story, yes, but the Silver Brumby books, for me, are also about what the high country meant to the author, and they were written from the author’s love of horses.

Horses – at once beautiful and powerful - have of course been used before in literature, sometimes to grasp the reader’s imagination or to convey a moral tale.  Whether it’s Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Rohirim in the Lord of the Rings, the horse as fictional device is a potent symbol, and Mitchell was a master in its use.

And in case you thought all her readers were young, and particularly young females, then drive through the back streets of Berridale, near Jindabyne NSW, and you’ll find Thowra Close – indicating that even some town planners were in thrall to Mitchell's equine magic!

The Silver Brumby books were closely tied to place.  The first six volumes (the series as originally conceived) have maps of actual areas of the Snowies in which the respective stories are set.  Although the story lines with brumbies as central characters are of course imagined, the stories play out in very real places.  Due to its association particularly with the first book, the Cascades area south of Thredbo is probably that part of the mountains that will remain forever most closely associated with Mitchell in the public’s mind.

As well as going through multiple editions and generating a series of novels, The Silver Brumby inspired a cartoon series, and a feature film in 1993 starring Russell Crowe and Caroline Goodall.  Last year, the centenary of Mitchell's birth, second daughter Honor Auchinleck wrote a memoir, and edited a selection of her mother's writings titled On the trail of the Silver Brumby.  A centenary edition of The Silver Brumby was also published.

Mitchell was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1988. Charles Sturt University gave her an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1993.  She won Children’s Book Council awards, was the patron of Corryong’s Man From Snowy River Festival and a year before her death in 2002 the Corryong Library was renamed in her honour.  A rural women’s literary award has since been named after her and fans have blogged on numerous websites.

Many of Mitchell's papers are held by the National Library of Australia and one of her typewriters is in the National Museum of Australia’s collection. Items of Mitchell family ski gear are held in museums at Corryong and Thredbo.

Today, environmental awareness has developed from the days when Mitchell was writing, and most environmental writers would not countenance wild horses as having a place in Kosciuszko.  Mitchell was both in advance of, and a product of, her own times and rural culture.

Meanwhile, people debate who was the real Man from Snowy River, and argue increasingly over whether feral horses have a place in our high country national parks.  It is through Mitchell and Paterson that the wild horse has a defined  - even if hotly contested - place in our culture. When those Driza-Bone-clad riders emulating The Man rode in front of the eyes of the world at the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony in 2000, some urban Australians might have viewed the event as a quaint spectacle conjuring up a half-remembered fiction, or even as a cultural cliche.  But around the mountains, that ride was viewed a good deal more seriously by many.  The high-country horse legend isn’t going away anytime soon.

Matthew Higgins is a Canberra historian and author and a former Senior Curator at the National Museum of Australia. He regularly bushwalks and cross-country skis in Kosciuszko National Park.