Queen of the Snowy Mountains: The Unauthorized Biography of Mrs. Polly Dashmore

By Mark Sutter and Judith Hope

Polly's real life is stranger than fiction and much more interesting. As a young girl in Australia, she aspired to be the Queen of the Snowy Mountains. Little did she know the journey that would require. The world travel, the romance, the dinner parties. Nobody in the Snowy Mountains ever asked for a queen, but now they're glad to have her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329581784

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Queen of the Snowy Mountains: The Unauthorized Biography of Mrs. Polly Dashmore

Queen of the Snowy Mountains: The Unauthorized Biography of Mrs. Polly Dashmore

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is mostly coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Judith Hope and Mark Sutter.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. Like that’s going to happen.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-329-58178-4

Cover art by a Montmartre street artist, circa 1971.

For the people we love. You know who you are.

Carpet Tacks

Polly was just shy of her third birthday when she came to realize she was invincible, having ingested a handful of carpet tacks earlier that morning and then egested them without incident before the fireworks display that evening.  It was New Year’s Eve, and Sydney was the first major city in the world to usher in the Fifties.

For the record, this singular success at carpet tack digestion came after several failed attempts by both Polly and her twin sister. The blame for all this, from her mother’s perspective, rested with the goons who’d installed their new carpets. Piles of unsecured carpet tacks were lying about in dark corners immune from maternal governance, and, like any curious toddlers, Polly and her sister assumed that anything within their reach belonged in their mouths.

Carpet tacks do not figure prominently in the formative years of most women who reach adulthood. This is also true of Polly for the most part. But in addition to their having affirmed her invincibility, she also remembers being held upside down in the kitchen sink on multiple occasions, with water pouring over her face, while her mother allegedly tried to save her from death by carpet tack. Polly never asked Mum why waterboarding was called for in her case but not for her twin sister. Somehow it all worked out, though, and Polly survived into adolescence.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme

Polly’s dad was an important man. His civil engineering firm had won a bid to build the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, which, judging by how her sundry aunts and uncles reacted to the news, was a pretty big deal. Polly relished the adult attention she received when reciting the name of Dad’s new project – all those luscious syllables – especially when pronounced with a slight lisp, to mock her twin.

It would be many years later, in a ninth grade civics class, when Polly learned that her dad’s company was responsible for the distribution of water and electrical power across most of southeast Australia. At age four though, Polly was focused on teasing apart the concept of snowy mountains, which seemed magical to a child who, growing up near the beach south of Sydney, had seen neither snow nor mountains in real life, from the word ‘scheme,’ which her mum often used in reference to Polly’s penchant for mischief in real life. You’re cooking up another one of your schemes, aren’t you, Polly? she’d say, which was usually true.

Polly concluded that schemes were perfectly acceptable in the Snowy Mountains. She begged her dad to move them there, relentlessly, when he came home on the occasional weekend. Mostly though, Dad was away, leaving Polly free to spar with Mum over punitive measures directed at Polly’s many transgressions, real or imagined.

It should be noted that Polly was already adept at using grownup language and discussing grownup themes, due largely to frequent exposure to her aunts. In other words, she could cuss like a sailor. And despite her diminutive size and reedy voice, she was treated like an adult in extended family gatherings.  Granted, this status was afforded only by her aunts, who congregated in the kitchen and relied on Polly to empty their ashtrays. It was around this time that Polly started to steal cigarettes from unguarded purses.

On those increasingly rare weekends when Dad descended from the Snowy