The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  For an 11-year-old country girl, Sydney in 1965 was another world. It was the swinging sixties, a time of seismic social and political shifts in Australia. The country was still in the grip of Beatlemania, after the Fab Four’s riotous tour downunder the previous year. It was the year that British model Jean Shrimpton scandalised polite society by appearing at Melbourne’s Flemington racecourse in a sleeveless mini-dress; ‘five inches above the knee, NO hat, NO gloves and NO stockings!’ as the Sun News-Pictorial gasped. The 19-year prime ministership of Robert Gordon Menzies was coming to an end, and a youthful Harold Holt was about to take the helm. Australia sent its first troops to Vietnam, prompting a corps of neatly frocked middle-class mothers to take to the streets with placards demanding ‘Save our Sons’, the beginning of a massive anti-war movement.

  Bessie got a job in the snack bar at the Harbord Diggers Memorial Club, a popular local institution that advertised ‘Modern Go Go Dancing for Teenagers’, and boasted a lineup of Saturday night entertainment, which featured ‘Myleeni the Belly Dancer from the Latin Quarter’, and ‘Koko, TV’s Educated Monkey’. On big nights they would pull headline acts such as Little Patti with Col Joye and the Joye Boys. For Bessie, it was liberation at last from the social straitjacket of Mudgee. The Diggers had a ladies’ darts club and a ladies’ indoor bowling club, although they drew the line at allowing women to play billiards and snooker. Here it didn’t matter where your father worked, or whether you were married or divorced. And, as Robyn put it, ‘If a woman went to the beer garden for a drink on a Sunday it didn’t mean she was the dregs of society’.

  Robyn and her little sister Susan were enrolled in the local state school, Harbord Public. To Robyn’s embarrassment, she was a year behind her classmates, having had to repeat a year at school in Mudgee due to illness. Although she was older, the city girls were streets ahead of her. ‘I was a kid from the country. There was no such thing as fashion where I came from. The girls in the city were already into boyfriends and music, they were much more advanced. I found it repulsive. It was just a different world. I hated city life.’

  Her brother George had left school years before to get a job and help his mother support the family. A talented athlete and artist, he had abandoned his hopes for a career as a cartoonist to work as a salesman in a menswear store, according to Robyn. He was now lugging furniture for a firm of removalists on Sydney’s north shore.

  ‘My brother was very distant, I always looked up to him, he was seven years older so he was the father figure in my life’, Robyn recalls. ‘He was always the authority figure. He was very matter of fact, not emotional, quite cold—like my grandfather. He picked up a lot from my grandfather—the importance of stability; the man goes to work, saves money, gets married, buys a house, educates his children.’ George would pay Robyn pocket money out of his wage, and withdraw it as punishment when she misbehaved, which was often. ‘His approval always meant a lot to me. I wanted him to be pleased with me—but he very rarely got the opportunity to be.’

  The baby of the family, Susan, was a placid, happy child, devoted to her older sister. ‘She was the opposite to me, she’s very good-natured, she hasn’t got a bad temper, she takes a long while to get angry’, says Robyn. The pair of them would clamber down the rocky cliff face every morning to walk the half a dozen or so blocks to school. On one occasion Robyn put Susan in a plastic bucket attached to a rope and lowered her over the balcony, from where it was a sheer 10-metre drop over jagged rocky outcrops to the bottom.

  ‘Are you sure about this, Robby?’ a nervous Susan asked her.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, just get in, I know what I’m doing’, Robyn assured her.

  ‘I always knew what I was doing’, she remarks wryly, remembering the event years later.

  By dint of sheer chutzpah and a knack for invention, Robyn devised ways to steal a march on the sassy city girls, and her forceful personality soon commanded a following. She formed her own club at school; by way of initiation, would-be members had to take off their shoes and socks and walk barefoot across a line of scalding-hot metal garbage bin lids in the asphalt playground. Those who joined were obliged to do Robyn’s needlework homework for her, and stand in line at the school canteen to fetch her lunch.

  But despite her ingenuity, she often felt she didn’t belong— even within her own family. Her brother was tall, stern and well behaved. Her sister was petite and amiable. Only Robyn was short, fat and miserable. She felt like a changeling.

  ‘Mum’, she said one day, ‘I’m grown up now, I’m mature, so I wanted to ask you …’

  Bessie sighed and folded her arms. ‘Yes, what is it now, Robyn?’

  ‘Am I adopted?’

  Bessie put her head on the side and looked at her tubby twelve year old.

  ‘Robyn, if you’d been adopted I would have given you back years ago.’

  Her relationship with her mother was close—by virtue of necessity they shared a room and a bed, just as they had done in Mudgee—but fractious. Robyn’s argumentative nature exasperated her mother. ‘If Jesus Christ were to come back tomorrow, you’d argue with him too’, Bessie would exclaim. However, Robyn calculated that it wasn’t difficult to get her way. ‘I learned very early on that my mother carried an awful lot of guilt—about her divorce, about never having her father’s approval, about the fact that we didn’t have a father. I learned to manipulate her from a very early age. If I wanted something that wasn’t good for me, she would say no. And you couldn’t argue with my mum. So I would just sit there and stare into space and get a sad look on my face.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Bessie would ask.

  ‘Oh, nothing’, would come the dispirited reply.

  ‘Come on, tell me. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I was just thinking about how all the other kids at school have fathers.’

  With that, a guilt-ridden Bessie would usually relent and give Robyn whatever it was that she was after. When this failed, Robyn would mutter, ‘I wish I’d gone to live with my father’. One day Bessie called her bluff. ‘If you’re so keen to live with your father, I’ll arrange it’, she announced darkly. In no time she had packed Robyn’s port and put her on the train to Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains to stay with her father, Jim Hutchinson, who had remarried and was now with his new wife running the bar at the historic Hydro Majestic hotel.

  ‘I thought I’d died and gone to hell’, Robyn remembers. ‘He was still an alcoholic and he would get drunk every day and scream at his wife.’ In bed at night, Robyn would cover her head with pillows to block out the thumping sounds from the kitchen. After two weeks she rang Bessie and begged her to be allowed to come home. After that she didn’t mention her father again, and the episode was never discussed.

  Robyn’s pubescent misery ended when she turned thirteen and the family moved down the hill to a block of flats a short walk from Freshwater Beach, a pristine crescent of sand and sparkling ocean that hails itself as the birthplace of Australian surfing. It was here that the legendary Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku demonstrated his board-riding prowess on a hand-carved timber plank to thousands of rapt spectators in 1915. The board he fashioned out of local hardwood is still proudly displayed at the Freshwater Surf Club. By the mid 1960s, with the advent of Gidget, the Beach Boys and Midget Farrelly’s win in the world championships at Bondi, a new surfing craze was in full swing. ‘That’s when I discovered boys’, says Robyn. ‘I sure lost all that weight.’

  The teenage crowd practically lived at the beach; the boys surfed, while the girls hung out in the sand dunes talking about boys. Robyn had her first marijuana joint at thirteen, in a shelter shed on the grassy dunes of the Freshwater Beach reserve. On weekends they would clamber through the Wormhole, a tunnel blasted by local fishermen through the rocky headland linking Freshwater with its more upmarket neighbour, Manly. Freshwater was traditionally a working-man’s beach, the site in the 1900s of a men-only camping ground, where workers pitched tents on the weekends to enjoy their ti
me off by the sea. Ladies were allowed only on Sundays. Manly was a more genteel resort, with an amusement park at the wharf featuring a ghost train and ferris wheel, and hordes of tourists drawn by its famous slogan: ‘Seven miles from Sydney, 1000 miles from care’.

  Robyn attended secondary school at Manly Girls High, whose veteran headmistress Miss Simpson was dedicated to grooming virtuous young ladies, regardless of their socio-economic pedigree. The uniform was a pressed fawn pinafore with matching tie, gloves and boater hat. Prefects were stationed at the school gates to impose detention on girls who failed to wear the correct shade of fawn socks. Robyn preferred white: ‘Hence, I was always in detention’.

  At the weekly assembly, the girls would stand to attention to sing the school anthem, whose lofty morality reflected Miss Simpson’s vaulting aspirations for her pupils.

  Truth the rock that man must build on

  Truth the sword with which we fight

  Wisdom gained by patient learning

  Turns on truth its radiant light.

  Beauty in our thoughts and actions

  Beauty in the sky above

  And the Glory of the sunlight

  Lets us glimpse God’s perfect love.

  Robyn’s strong will and audacity marked her out as a leader among the girls. A former school friend, Deborah Jensen, remembers her as extroverted and charismatic. ‘She was an unreal girl, so much fun to be around. She was awesome—very funny, very articulate, she made you laugh.’ Deborah says Robyn ‘always had a desire to be in the spotlight’ and that she liked to ‘play roles’. ‘She was just a full-on character, she was a wild child.’

  On one occasion, while Robyn and Deborah were waiting outside the deputy headmistress’s office to be punished for some misdemeanour, Robyn suggested a contest to see who could spit from the farthest distance on the young Queen Elizabeth, who gazed serenely from a framed portrait on the wall. Robyn spat first, as Deborah recalls: ‘She did it deliberately to break me up. I do remember it hitting the wall and this big globule dribbling down the wall. And that was the end of me—I was just hysterical; and panicking—because the deputy headmistress was about to come around the corner.’ Robyn’s version has the headmistress appearing just in time to find a gob of saliva trickling down Her Majesty’s face, as a result of which another spell in detention followed.

  ‘I had a very strong personality and I had the ability to get the girls to co-operate with me’, says Robyn. ‘I don’t want to use the word bully, I wasn’t really a bully.’ Some of her former classmates might disagree; by her own account, she could be tough and intimidating. There was one girl she used to pick on by making her wear her glasses upside down, for no particular reason except ‘because I was wicked, because I could’.

  Among the teaching staff, Robyn gained a name for herself as a gregarious student who questioned everything and insisted on saying exactly what she thought. She was also known as a ringleader and troublemaker. ‘I was always very opinionated’, she recalls. ‘I wasn’t rude or abusive or violent, I was just non cooperative. The deputy principal absolutely detested me, because I was so disruptive.’

  She claims her disruptive conduct was often a reaction to some perceived injustice. ‘If something happened in class and I deemed it unfair or unjust—that was the end of it; and then I would get other people onto the cause. There was no such thing as “it’s not my business” or “I don’t want to get in trouble”.’

  There was a male teacher, Mr Mallard (not his real name), who would sometimes touch the girls inappropriately, according to Robyn. She says she reported him but nothing was done. Mr Mallard’s classes were riotous affairs. Picking Robyn out as a leader, he sought her assistance to get the girls under control.

  ‘If you can get the girls in my class to co-operate, I’ll let you sit wherever you want.’

  ‘I already sit wherever I want’, she responded.

  One day Robyn brought a bottle of dishwashing detergent from home and filled up all the disused inkwells in the girls’ wooden desks with soapy pink liquid, then instructed her classmates to take the innards out of their ballpoint pens, thus arming themselves with empty plastic tubes, like pea-shooters. When Mr Mallard turned his back to the class and began writing on the blackboard, the twenty-five girls took their cue from Robyn and began blowing bubbles through their pen tubes into the air. The classroom was soon full of inky pink bubbles that exploded when they landed.

  Turning back to the classroom, Mr Mallard exclaimed in alarm.

  ‘Where are all these bubbles coming from?’

  ‘Bubbles, sir? What bubbles?’ the girls chorused.

  Mr Mallard was so rattled he was unable to finish the lesson, by Robyn’s account.

  Academically, she was an erratic achiever who could succeed or fail depending on the subject and the teacher. Only later she discovered she suffered from dyslexia, an affliction somewhat offset by a near photographic memory. ‘My attitude was—and I really regret it now—that if I liked a subject and respected the teacher, I would excel. But if I didn’t I wouldn’t go to classes.’ She claims she could have been a ‘straight As’ student, except that ‘I was always in trouble, always being sent out of class. I spent more time in the assembly hall on detention than in the classroom.’ Like the matron at the Far West Children’s Home, the headmistress, Miss Simpson, could see the girl had potential. ‘You have the ability to do so much’, she scolded Robyn. ‘Yet you cut off your nose to spite your face.’

  Her little sister Susan would spend her own school years living down her older sibling’s notoriety. ‘Oh, so you’re Robyn Hutchinson’s sister, are you?’ the teachers would ask her. ‘She always felt like going “No, no! I’m not like her!”’ Robyn recalls.

  Robyn’s school years ended when she dropped out two years short of completing high school, at the age of fifteen. Failing mathematics put paid to her ambition for a career in medicine; she would later enrol in night school to study for her Higher School Certificate in the hope of becoming a nurse. After leaving school she settled for the nearest thing she could find—a job as an assistant in a pharmacy in Manly. Her favourite task was helping in the dispensary, but she was often admonished for her lack of tact as a saleswoman: on one occasion she advised an elderly lady who was browsing among the anti-wrinkle creams not to bother, because it was like ‘shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted’.

  On weekends, Robyn and her friends would don the latest psychedelic fashions and persuade their parents to allow them to attend ‘The Harbord Bop’, a Saturday night dance at the local civic centre. The new craze among the beach crowd was ‘the Stomp’, which involved literally stamping around the dance floor to tunes such as Little Patti’s hit ‘He’s My Blonde-headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy’. Robyn was extremely popular among the local boys. ‘All the boys loved her’, says her friend Deborah Jensen, who recalls Robyn’s young admirers painting her nickname ‘Hutchy’ in 2-metre letters in the driveway of the block of flats where her family lived. At one of the Saturday night dances, Robyn met an up-and-coming young surfing champion named Ian Goodacre, who didn’t dance but walked her home afterwards. Later he invited her to a Christmas party at the factory where he was apprenticed as a silk-screen printer. It was the beginning of a romance that lasted almost three years.

  ‘She was great, she was a really nice person’, Ian Goodacre remembers. But headstrong and argumentative as well: ‘We did have our moments, we used to fight a bit’, he also recalls. Ian’s family lived in a neat Edwardian bungalow with a picket fence on Pittwater Road, just up from the Manly Fisherman’s Club. His father Jim was a bus driver who had worked for the same company for twenty-five years and drank liquor only on Christmas Day, when he indulged in a single beer. His mother Beryl, a favourite among the surfing crowd, worked at the hamburger joint at Queenscliff Beach.

  ‘It was his family I loved’, says Robyn. ‘I loved the stability and the decency and the loyalty towards one another, and the caring—all
the things I didn’t have as a child.’ Their house became Robyn’s second home. The pair of them would spend hours on Ian’s timber verandah printing t-shirts with elaborate silk-screen designs featuring surf scenes and pithy slogans like ‘You are a Child of the Universe’ from the poems of Khalil Gibran. When Ian went away on surfing trips, Robyn would some times stay with his parents and curl up on the couch with them, watching television. ‘They treated her like their own daughter’, remembers another friend. Robyn called them ‘mum’ and ‘dad’.

  Her own home life had grown increasingly turbulent. Bessie had hooked up with a builder’s labourer named Fred, another chronic alcoholic with a mean streak. ‘Fred was a bit of a nasty type’, says Ian Goodacre. ‘So she had no stable “father thing” happening. I think she was looking for that stability that she lacked.’ Ian would sometimes confuse Fred’s name with that of Robyn’s beagle, Jack. ‘No, Fred is the two-legged dog and Jack is the four-legged dog’, Robyn would point out. Bessie spent much of her time playing the poker machines at the Diggers Club, when she wasn’t at home drinking with Fred. ‘I hated drinking, I hated it’, Robyn vehemently recalls.

  Around this time, her grandfather, Archibald Roy McCallum, died in the tuberculosis ward of the Manly Hospital from lung cancer, aged seventy-six. Although she had seen little of him in the four years since they had left Mudgee, the death of her beloved ‘farvie’ was a blow. She was with Ian at a surfing contest in Newcastle when he died, and returned to Mudgee for his funeral at St Paul’s Presbyterian Church. ‘I remember looking at the coffin and thinking how small it was. I always thought he was so big.’ He was buried in the Mudgee cemetery next to the grave that held his wife Lurline and Bessie’s baby son, Wayne. There was a final bitter sting for Bessie in the old man’s death. In his will he left one hundred dollars for Robyn, nothing for Bessie or anyone else in the family, and the rest to the family with whom he had boarded in Mudgee.