The divide between rich and poor was sharply felt by young Robyn. ‘The fact that if you didn’t have money you weren’t as good as someone else was, for as along as I can remember, something I couldn’t accept. I used to say to my grandfather, “it’s not right, it’s not fair”. Being rich doesn’t make you a better person.’ From an early age she bristled at wealth and privilege, smarted over perceived injustice, and flaunted a fierce pride, grounded in her family’s strict code of morality and discipline.
For Bessie, the strictures that resulted from living as a divorced single mother in a country town under the same roof as her domineering father made for an oppressive life. ‘My grandfather was very, very hard on my mum’, says Robyn. ‘Whenever she was in Mudgee, she had her father and brother living with her. He was very strict on her; she wasn’t allowed any male companionship or Catholic friends. It didn’t matter what she did, she couldn’t please my grandfather.’ For Bessie, the city lights still beckoned, and she would often pack up the children and head off for weekends or holidays in Sydney, to stay with a friend whom the children knew as Auntie Dulce. ‘My mother was torn between wanting her own life and looking after her brother and grandfather, so she would come to Sydney, but then the guilt would get to her and she would always go back to them.’
As long as they lived under Archibald’s roof, they had to live by his rules. ‘If he spoke to you, you spoke. If he laughed, you laughed. If my grandfather put his hat on the hall table and my brother’s gloves were underneath it, my brother wouldn’t lift that hat. It was farv’s hat. We weren’t allowed to speak at the dinner table—but I did. I think he liked the rebellion in me. I think I used to shock him and that he secretly approved of my defiance.’
Archibald taught Robyn to play the card game euchre when she was four years old. Occasionally she would beat him, and once she asked if he had let her win. ‘He looked at me with this look that said: “how could you even suggest such a thing?” He said something like, “if you truly love someone you can never deceive them”. He said, “you’ll never achieve anything in life except on your own merit”. And, like my mother, lying—he abhorred it.’
Archibald’s rigid morality had a profound influence on Robyn. ‘He was very straight, he was always very sure of what he liked and didn’t like, what was acceptable and what wasn’t. He was very much a man of principle. I guess he was a black-and-white man.’ From the time Robyn could talk, it was maddeningly clear to Bessie that the child had inherited her grandfather’s unflinching certitude. ‘My mother used to say to me, “Robyn, there is grey! It’s not all just black and white. There’s grey”.’ On this point, however, Robyn could never be persuaded: ‘I don’t see grey. It’s all black and white to me.’
At the age of eight, Robyn was sent to Sydney to undergo treatment on the astigmatism that her eye-patch had failed to correct. She was a guest of the Royal Far West Children’s Health Scheme, a charitable organisation that subsidised medical treatment in the city for the offspring of remote communities in western New South Wales, coupled with ‘the holiday of a lifetime by the sea’ at its Manly Beach sanatorium. She recalls being there for what seemed like months on end, awaiting surgery on her eye. Notwithstanding the much lauded community service provided by the Royal Far West Scheme, the separation from her family was an ordeal for young Robyn.
‘You weren’t allowed to have your own clothes’, was her abiding memory forty years after the event. ‘In the morning when you got up, they’d have boxes of clothes—they’d have socks, singlets, and for the girls, pleated tartan skirts and blouses. You had to line up to get your clothes. Because we had to line up, the little ones got shoved to the back, so by the time you got to the boxes you’d have to wear whatever was left, sometimes it would be odd socks.’
By her own account, the staff found her a trying troublemaker. ‘I got into a lot of strife there. I was always getting into trouble. I remember turning on the industrial polisher and it went berserk and they couldn’t get to the plug to turn it off. Another time I found an old wind-up gramophone in a storeroom above the girls dormitory. I took it back and gave it to one of the older girls who was my friend, and convinced her that if we could plug it in we could turn it into an electric one. So I attached an electrical wire to the metal handle and got her to shove the wires in the socket. She got electrocuted—not badly, but her hair stood on end.’
‘How do you think of these things? Why don’t you just play with blocks like the other children?’ she recalls the exasperated matron exclaiming.
The eye treatment she received was ultimately unsuccessful, and Robyn was left legally blind in one eye. She recalls Bessie telling her that after she came home she wouldn’t speak, except in monosyllables. She later fell ill with a kidney disease called nephritis, which kept her confined in the Mudgee district hospital for weeks at a time. The main task for the nursing staff was keeping such a hyperactive child occupied; one day, in a fit of boredom, she cut off her eyelashes with a pair of craft scissors. A legacy of her lengthy hospitalisation was an enduring fascination with medicine. She liked to follow the nurses on their rounds, and afterwards joined the Mudgee branch of the Red Cross. In her red cape and white uniform with its Red Cross insignia, marching around the war memorial clock tower on Anzac Day, she fancied herself as a little Florence Nightingale.
‘I was always on a mission. There was always some mission or cause—I don’t mean stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but I used to champion causes that I believed were unjust.’ The Red Cross ladies auxiliary would organise local families to knit clothing for poor children overseas. Robyn never had much patience with domestic science, and she knitted so tightly that the jumper she was fashioning wouldn’t come off the needles, so Bessie finished it for her. When a teacher displayed it in class to show the other children a perfect sample, Robyn was sure she would be struck down dead by a bolt of lightning for the deception.
From as early as she can remember, she was certain there was a God. At weekly scripture classes at Mudgee Primary, she listened rapt to stories of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, in their Kingdom of Heaven. ‘They would talk about how wonderful it was that when you belong to this community you’re going to heaven. And when I heard about heaven, I knew I wanted to go there.’
Eager to find out more, she pestered her mother to enrol her in Sunday school at Mudgee’s Presbyterian Church. Bessie herself had little time for organised religion since the death of her baby son, Wayne, when she was told that her tiny boy would be consigned to purgatory if he wasn’t baptised to purge the stain of original sin. ‘She still believed in God but she stopped going to church’, says Robyn. ‘She was very anti church establishment. She said that no God that is just and loving could punish a child for the supposed sins of the mother and father; she said it was impossible for her to believe that. But my mother never imposed her beliefs on us, she had this principle that you had to find out for yourself, especially about personal beliefs.’
So Bessie pulled Robyn’s well-darned ‘Sunday best’ out of the wardrobe and sent her off to the weekly Sunday class at St Paul’s. It proved a galling revelation for the girl. ‘The Sunday school was filled with the children of happy homes. People like my mum, who was on the fringes of society—she was a divorced woman who worked in a hotel—women like her weren’t acceptable. From very early on I could see the hypocrisy and double standards. What you would hear about in Sunday school—that Jesus loves everybody—didn’t happen in the real world, in the playground or society at large.’
Robyn’s stint at Sunday school ended when she was caught by the teacher gobbling mouthfuls from a jar of Perkins Paste, the glue given to the children to stick together cut-out pictures of Jesus and John the Baptist that they’d been given to colour in. She liked the smell of the stuff and wondered how it tasted. The teacher sent a note home to her mother, saying Robyn could not come back the following week. The seeming illogic of the punishment confounded her. ‘They wer
e telling us Jesus would save us, even the sinners—so if I was a sinner, shouldn’t I be going to Sunday school more, not less?’
Like much of the Western world since the Reformation, Mudgee society was polarised by a deep sectarian divide. Robyn and her friends used to parade past the imposing Victorian sandstone edifice of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, chanting ‘Catholics, Catholics, march to hell! While the Protestants ring the bell!’ But at the age of eleven Robyn underwent her first conversion, after befriending a Catholic girl who lived next door. Her family had moved house again, into a pale-blue weatherboard bungalow in Court Street with a rusting bull-nosed verandah poised on pillars of sun-baked clay bricks. The ceiling was of decorative pressed metal and the interior timber walls were stained a dark smoky brown from decades of wood fires. In the backyard, Uncle Noel kept chooks, cattle dogs, rabbits and a geriatric cockatoo called Cocky, who liked to mimic its master yelling at the dogs, and was once heard screeching at a pair of startled Seventh Day Adventists, ‘get up the back, you mongrels!’
Next door lived the Daniels family, who had two girls about Robyn’s age. Robyn and Laurette Daniels became fast friends, and the Daniels girls would scramble through a hole in the paling fence to go snake-hunting in the long grass up the back near Uncle Noel’s chook shed. Sometimes the kids would borrow George’s air rifle to take pot shots at starlings nesting in the eaves. Because Robyn was the littlest of the troublemakers, the older ones always got blamed, even though she was usually the instigator.
Every Sunday morning the Daniels family would head off to St Mary’s for Sunday mass, and one week they invited Robyn to go with them. The children sat meekly on the hard wooden pews under a giant crucifix suspended from the soaring high gothic vaulted ceiling, as the priest, resplendent in snow-white vestments, intoned in Latin the Confiteor, the general confession of sin.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo …
I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles, Peter and Paul, to all the Saints and to you brethren, that I have sinned exceedingly,
In thought, word and deed,
Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault …
As he uttered the words in Latin—mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—the priest would strike his breast three times in a show of sorrow for the sins of the congregation. The ritual absolution was completed with the words: ‘May Almighty God have mercy upon you, forgive you your sins and bring you to life everlasting. Amen.’
Eleven-year-old Robyn sat spellbound, as shafts of sunlight pierced the blazing stained-glass windows to illuminate the bleeding heart of Jesus and the graphic images of Christ’s agony depicted in the Stations of the Cross lining the walls. The way to heaven seemed brilliantly clear, and she decided Catholicism would be her redemption.
‘In the Catholic church there was clarity, perhaps because the mode of worship was more organised’, says Robyn. ‘I felt it was closer to what God wanted for me. It was clearer—not who God was but what God required of me. I thought, OK, this is what I have to do to obtain salvation. I knew what was expected of me. It was all part and parcel of what I was seeking out.’
When Robyn announced that she was becoming a Catholic, Bessie and Archibald were aghast; it was ‘like becoming a Japanese during World War II’. But as usual when it came to his granddaughter, Archibald relented, and bought her a mantilla of white Spanish lace that cost seven pounds, which she wore to mass each Sunday thereafter with Laurette and her family.
Like everything, Robyn took her new faith in earnest. One day they were visited by a middle-aged aunt, who had divorced, lost custody of her children and suffered a nervous breakdown. Robyn decided she needed deliverance from sin. ‘So Laurette and I dressed up as nuns. We got a tablecloth and tied it around my head. I was the Mother Superior, Laurette was the novice. We made her repent. We threw water on her and made her kneel at the end of the bed in Uncle Noel’s room for hours.’ As for why a grown woman would do the bidding of a couple of pint-sized zealots, ‘I could always get people to do what I wanted. I was very intimidating. And I had this thing about pretending—every-thing had to be real.’
Robyn would continue as a practising Catholic for six years. But beneath her characteristic certitude lay a nagging doubt. ‘It was always with a fear that I didn’t really belong there and I was afraid for people to know who I really was, because the picture of a good Christian—I didn’t fit into. I always felt like I was a fake. That picture was mother, father, children, going to church on Sundays, sitting around the table saying grace—all the things my family didn’t do.’
Across the road in Court Street lived another family, named the Hanchards, who seemed to Robyn to be everything that her family was not. The father was a supervisor in the furniture department at Loneragan’s and instructed the Mudgee Girls Marching Squad, of which his daughter, Annmarie, was a proud member. ‘She had reddish hair and freckles and she always had these pretty dresses’, Robyn remembers. ‘She was the epitome of what a little girl is supposed to be. I was so jealous of her. And they had a car. And she had a father. I think it was just green-eyed jealousy because she had everything.’
The marching girls used to line up in three rows of three, a leader with a whistle at the front, and march in formation around Victoria Park, dressed smartly in red tartan vests and berets, white skirts and shiny white boots. They practised on Mondays and Thursdays after school, and marched in local parades and at the annual agricultural show. It made Robyn’s blood boil with envy.
One day when the neighbourhood children were playing in the long grass out the back at Court Street, Robyn smuggled her brother’s air rifle out of the house, wrapped in Bessie’s best embroidered linen tablecloth. Her quarry was Annmarie, who was up the back near the shed. Both girls would remember the showdown more than forty years later.
‘I do remember her bailing me up in the bloody chook shed’, says Annmarie. ‘There was bloody thistles, or stinging nettles. I think we’d had a fight over a bike or something. They used to go snake-hunting, that’s probably why she had the air rifle. I remember she did have a gun.’
As for her memory of what happened next: ‘She said she was going to shoot me’.
Robyn’s recollection is crystal clear. ‘Right, start marching’, she ordered, or words to that effect. The air rifle was pointing at Annmarie; and Robyn’s faithful accomplice, Laurette, was by her side.
‘We made her march around and around in circles until she fainted. It was 47 degrees. She was petrified.’ Robyn insists the air rifle wasn’t loaded; the object was simply to terrify her unfortunate neighbour. ‘I told her afterwards, “if you tell your mother what we’ve done I’ll come in the middle of the night and shoot your toes off and you’ll never do marching again”.’
At the age of eleven, Robyn Mary Hutchinson was cock of her little roost; a tenacious tomboy borne of harsh material privation, with a rebel’s disdain for conformity, a proud contempt for wealth and privilege, an unyielding clarity about right and wrong, and a deep-seated yearning to find her place in the world.
But now childhood was coming to an end, and with it all the certainties of her young life so far. Her long-suffering mother Bessie had finally had enough of old Archibald’s overbearing ways. ‘My mum always hoped her father would soften towards her, but he never did. At heart she was a country girl and hated the city, but the control my grandfather had over her life was stifling and overwhelming.’ Determined to shake off the yoke of her father’s domination, Bessie decided to pack up and leave Mudgee, this time forever.
2
WILD CHILD
Sydney, 1965–1972
Before the first rays of dawn illuminated the Cudgegong River valley, Bessie piled the children and their luggage into Auntie Dulce’s green FX Holden, and they set off on the twelve-hour drive across the Blue Mountains to Sydney
. It was nightfall by the time they arrived at Dulce’s house in Lagoon Street, Narrabeen, not far from where Robyn had roamed the bush collecting cicada shells as a toddler. It was only when Bessie announced she had found them their own place that Robyn realised to her dismay that this time they would not be going back to Mudgee.
Their new home was a downstairs flat beneath a house propped like an eyrie on the sandstone cliff top at Harbord on Sydney’s northern beaches, overlooking a craggy coastline of pounding surf and yellow sand beaches. Eleven-year-old Robyn counted 127 steps as she clambered up the winding stone pathway from the road to the front door, her heart sinking with each footfall.
‘They got me up there and I wouldn’t come down’, she later remembered. ‘Moving from the country back to the city was horrific, it disturbed me greatly. I hated it. I was out of my element, I was like a fish out of water with city kids. It was a terrible time.’ The only consolation was that her family finally owned a television, so Robyn could spend hours on end watching her favourite programs, the ones starring animals, such as Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. ‘I became very sad and depressed because we’d left the country. I became a recluse. I stayed home, watched television, ate myself silly and was very, very unhappy.’
The Mother of Mohammed Page 3