Glenn Albrecht - Inspirations - Elyne Mitchell

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Elyne Mitchell – Australian pioneering environmental writer

 Few Australians who enjoyed the Silver Brumby series of books as children, or their translation to the eponymously named film made in 1993, would know that the author, Elyne Mitchell, was one of Australia’a earliest environmental thinkers. During the period in World War II while her husband Tom Mitchell was a prisoner in Changi Prison in Singapore, Elyne Mitchell wrote extensively about the need for soil conservation in Australia in her books Soil and Civilisation, and Speak to the Earth. She revealed many years later in a private communication to Glenn that, because her ideas were so politically unpopular after the end of the war, she ceased writing explicitly about environmental issues.  

Elyne Mitchell’s series of Silver Brumby children’s books have enriched the reading experience of many children around the world, in their celebration of the wild places of the Australian high country.

 However, her prescient comments on the state of the Australian rivers and soil, published years before Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson were making environmental awareness the subject of mainstream thought, demonstrate her profound understanding, enriched by extensive reference to philosophical and literary ideas, of the link between human and ecosystem health. (Note: Elyne pron. Ell-een)

Wikipedia contains a brief biography of Elyne Mitchell.