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Book review: The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell
Apr. 17th, 2026 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterThis book is classic children's literature that has shaped every generation of Australian horse girls since it was published in the 1950s. I'm revisiting it now for the first time since I turned double digits old, but it all feels almost as fresh in my memory as if I last read it a week ago. It's one of those stories that really, truly sticks with you if you read it at the right age!
Thowra is a brumby (feral horse) living in the Snowy Mountains; he is passionate, wild and deeply in love with his bushland home, but attracts attention wherever he goes due to his unusually pale palomino colouring. He is beset on one side by rival stallions vying for his mares and territory, and on the other side by human trackers and stockmen eager to capture and tame him. But Thowra is extremely cunning, with an intimate knowledge of bush survival imparted since birth by his similarly attention-grabbing mother Bel Bel, so he is able to outwit all his enemies and retain his precious freedom.
The brumbies and other animals are semi-anthropomorphised: they talk among themselves, understand human speech and think in humanlike, analytical ways, but their behaviour, instincts and social structures are as authentically horsey as Mitchell could make them. I am not a brumby expert and can't vouch for the book's actual scientific accuracy, but Mitchell has clearly observed horses closely and tried to stay true to her observations, even when they are sharply at odds with human morality (mature offspring maintaining no relationship with their parents; murderous fights between stallions being accepted as the natural way of things; etc). She wants us to empathise fully with her equine characters while recognising them as fundamentally unlike us, and largely resists the temptation to project familiar human family values onto them as a cheap way of getting us emotionally invested. I'm not saying The Silver Brumby does a better job at teaching children the basic principles of cultural relativism than any Very Special Episode I've ever watched, but I'm also not not saying that.
The landscape of the Snowy Mountains is vividly described to the point of feeling almost like a character in its own right. Everything is snow gums and snow grass, rocky crags and howling winds and icy rivers flowing down from the mountains. As a child I once camped in the region during winter; I remember the cold being so intense that it became like a substance, a physical thing trying to shove me back when I climbed out of the tent. It hurt and it made me feel so, so alive. The whole book crackles with that energy.
I know I must have read every book in this series, but by some unhappy chance I only seem to own copies of the first and last; perhaps I took the others out of the library, or perhaps the rest of my collection fell victim to my mum's legendary garage sales of the early oughts. Tracking down the rest shouldn't be hard, but if possible I'd really like editions to match my battered, lightly foxed sexagenarian hardbacks with their torn or missing dust jackets. Nostalgia is at stake here! Clearly I'll have to do some secondhand bookshop scouting.
Thowra is a brumby (feral horse) living in the Snowy Mountains; he is passionate, wild and deeply in love with his bushland home, but attracts attention wherever he goes due to his unusually pale palomino colouring. He is beset on one side by rival stallions vying for his mares and territory, and on the other side by human trackers and stockmen eager to capture and tame him. But Thowra is extremely cunning, with an intimate knowledge of bush survival imparted since birth by his similarly attention-grabbing mother Bel Bel, so he is able to outwit all his enemies and retain his precious freedom.
The brumbies and other animals are semi-anthropomorphised: they talk among themselves, understand human speech and think in humanlike, analytical ways, but their behaviour, instincts and social structures are as authentically horsey as Mitchell could make them. I am not a brumby expert and can't vouch for the book's actual scientific accuracy, but Mitchell has clearly observed horses closely and tried to stay true to her observations, even when they are sharply at odds with human morality (mature offspring maintaining no relationship with their parents; murderous fights between stallions being accepted as the natural way of things; etc). She wants us to empathise fully with her equine characters while recognising them as fundamentally unlike us, and largely resists the temptation to project familiar human family values onto them as a cheap way of getting us emotionally invested. I'm not saying The Silver Brumby does a better job at teaching children the basic principles of cultural relativism than any Very Special Episode I've ever watched, but I'm also not not saying that.
The landscape of the Snowy Mountains is vividly described to the point of feeling almost like a character in its own right. Everything is snow gums and snow grass, rocky crags and howling winds and icy rivers flowing down from the mountains. As a child I once camped in the region during winter; I remember the cold being so intense that it became like a substance, a physical thing trying to shove me back when I climbed out of the tent. It hurt and it made me feel so, so alive. The whole book crackles with that energy.
I know I must have read every book in this series, but by some unhappy chance I only seem to own copies of the first and last; perhaps I took the others out of the library, or perhaps the rest of my collection fell victim to my mum's legendary garage sales of the early oughts. Tracking down the rest shouldn't be hard, but if possible I'd really like editions to match my battered, lightly foxed sexagenarian hardbacks with their torn or missing dust jackets. Nostalgia is at stake here! Clearly I'll have to do some secondhand bookshop scouting.
