Snowy River Brumby

Silver Brumby - Extended #15

by Elyne Mitchell, Victor G. Ambrus (Illustrator)

The powerful stallion Buzz and his beautiful filly, Yarrawa, now have a handsome son. Nooroo is growing up to be even faster than his father when he meets with a terrible accident. Buzz races for the homestead and Mary Anne, hoping that the girl who reared him so lovingly will also be able to help his son.

Genres: Horses, Animals, Childrens, Young Adult

122 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 1980

About the author

Elyne Mitchell is an Australian author best known for her Silver Brumby children's series, which tells the story of brumbies that roamed the Snowy Mountains in the Australian Alps, in particular a pale brumby named Thowra.

In 1988, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for her services to literature, as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Charts Sturt University in 1993.

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is second in the series of tales about Buzz, Yarrawa and their colt Nooroo, in the Australian high country. They are set in the mid nineteenth century.

Buzz was a station horse which jumped the fence in The Colt From Snowy River. He has a colt foal with the lovely brumby Yarrawa, and in Snowy River Brumby that colt Nooroo is helped by the station folk and tamed by them, with the help of a white pony mare Honey. The third is about Nooroo in Brumby Racer. These books are well worth reading.

The two people we meet most in the series are James Reid and Mary Anne Reid, the oldest and youngest of four siblings. When I first read this I thought it was an obvious ploy to appeal to two age groups of young readers. That may still be the case but today we have the category Young Adult which didn't really exist in 1982. And these books are quite timeless and ageless, appealing to anyone who loves horses, nature and wilderness.

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something rather perfect about Elynne Mitchell when she gets going and this is a book in which she gets going. It is part of a series, though perfectly readable in its own right, and tells the story of a family of brumbies and their connection with a family. This is a bald summary and a poor one for it gives you nothing of the achingly wild and wistful richness of Mitchell's prose. There have been books of hers which I've struggled with and books which I'd immediately describe as classics and this, I think, is the good stuff. I don't think it's a classic but I think it's rather delicious and tender and spine-tingling and that's not a bad thing to be in the slightest, not when you have an author who is doing what she is good at and doing it very, very well.

I've often thought of pony books as something of an early romance, a way for young readers to reckon with the world about them and their position within it, a moment where we/they/us learn how to care for somebody else other than ourselves, and the slow, subtle magic of Snowy River Brumby is all of this, entirely. There are moment when it falters but barely, briefly, a stumble in the dark, a hoof slipping off stone, and then you're back in the bush, in a countryside that can feel fiercely alien and yet somehow the most perfect, entrancing place in the world.

I love how these books feel, you know? I love the moments where you realise that something is going wrong the same moment that the horses do, when the weather turns and you realise the danger that's out there, and that somehow, something is about to happen. I love how Mitchell trusts you to go with her (the faith of a good author in their reader is, I think, paramount), and how she trusts that you will stay with her.

Pony books give you everything, really, and more than that, they give you resonance and heart and something, perhaps ironically enough, profoundly human.