But for Robyn these were heady days, and there was little time for mourning. Ian had won the junior trophy in the New South Wales schoolboys’ surfing titles, and was a minor celebrity on the surf scene. They travelled around the country to surfing contests on the Queensland Gold Coast and at Victoria’s famed Bells Beach. The Beatles’ psychedelic anthem ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’ was in the charts and many in the surf crowd were doing drugs, mostly marijuana, hashish and LSD, though a few later graduated to heroin. Robyn and Ian holidayed in Byron Bay where they picked magic mushrooms in a paddock and cooked up a hallucinogenic omelette. There were constant parties, tickets to rock musicals such as Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, and concerts with bands such as Daddy Cool and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. The former Mudgee girl basked in her share of the limelight. ‘I never understood how I ended up in the “in crowd”. I was the beach bunny of this surfing idol. You’d walk down the street and people would say, “there goes so-and-so’s girlfriend”.’ Looking back later as a devout Muslim, these memories would seem surreal. ‘When I talk about these things it’s almost like I’m talking about a different person.’
A friend from those days, surfer turned journalist Steve Warnock, remembers Robyn as a fixture on the scene, a happy extrovert who was always up for a party. ‘She smoked dope, she drank alcohol, she knew how to party and kick on. She was always a friendly, outgoing person. She was very easy to get along with— she was a good person.’ Warnock says Robyn was well known and liked in her own right, not just as Ian’s girlfriend. ‘She had a strong personality, she wasn’t a weak person, that’s for sure. She picked her own man when she wanted to. She wasn’t afraid to pick a guy. And she’d stick up for herself, she wasn’t afraid to have a fight. She was a bit of a street fighter, Robyn.’ Not physically, Warnock hastens to add; she was too small for brawling. ‘She wasn’t a spitfire, but she was proud. She had confidence, and she was strong.’ Warnock says she seemed ‘very honest and open’, but never let on how harsh a background she had come from.
Warnock also recalls that ‘Goody’ and ‘Rob’ stood out as one of few steady couples in a fraternity where romantic entanglements tended to unravel quickly. For all her temerity, Robyn’s most deeply held wish was to marry and settle down, although it would not have been the done thing to admit it at the time. ‘When I think back, I was never ever happy or satisfied with the “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” life. The majority of girls I knew really just wanted to get married, although they didn’t say it openly; it wasn’t politically correct.’ At seventeen, Robyn naively believed she had found her future with her teenage sweetheart. ‘I thought we’d get married and have children, and all be one big happy family.’
Her own domestic circumstances were anything but the ‘big happy family’ she craved. Robyn rarely saw her own father, Jim Hutchinson, after he caught her smoking marijuana at the age of sixteen during a visit, according to her half-brother, Roderick. ‘Their relationship was distant, frosty to the point of—he disowned her when she got into the drug scene’, Roderick recalls.
Meanwhile life at home with Bessie and Fred was becoming unbearable. Robyn and Bessie argued constantly, and she couldn’t bear her nasty drunkard of a stepfather. Their alcohol-fuelled domestic chaos inflamed her own volatile temper. She recalls that as a teenager she was ‘always throwing things’. One night she came home around 2 a.m. to find her mother and Fred in a heavy drinking session with ‘some other loser’ and arguing loudly. She retreated to the bedroom she shared with Susan, to find her little sister awake and crying in bed. She went back out to confront the trio in the lounge room.
‘It’s time you went to bed’, she announced.
‘Have some respect for your mother’, the visitor snarled, taking Robyn by the arm.
Robyn recounts that she shook her arm free and punched the man in the jaw, then threw a chair after him as he staggered from the room. As Fred stumbled out the door, she picked up a can opener and hurled it, piercing his neck with the metal spike. Fortunately no one called the police, or Robyn might have found herself the one being arrested.
In her mid teens, Robyn moved out of home and into a dilapidated share house in Manly with a crowd of surfie friends who lived in a haze of dope smoke and on a diet consisting largely of lentils and tequila. They all believed the house was haunted, because it was rumoured someone had committed suicide upstairs. After each night of partying they would line the empty liquor bottles up along the picture rail, only to come out in the morning to find them all neatly laid out on the floor. Bessie was mortified that Robyn had left, and would ring and leave tearful messages, begging her to come home. As Bessie herself had been with her own mother, Robyn was torn between loyalty to her parent and the urge to break free. In answer to Bessie’s entreaties, she would usually relent and return home, only to move out again a few weeks later.
Throughout her tumultuous teen years, the Catholic Church provided one comforting constant in Robyn’s life. Every Sunday, after a morning at the beach, she would towel off and stroll to St Mary’s at Manly to attend afternoon Mass. Among the teen age surf crowd this was decidedly not ‘cool’, but Robyn was not the kind of girl people made fun of, at least not within earshot.
But as she grew older the dogma of Catholicism no longer rang true. ‘I had a very analytical mind and there were things that just didn’t make sense, like the Holy Trinity.’ How could God be three beings at once—the father, son and holy spirit? It simply didn’t make sense, ‘because I’m a very practical person, and things have to be real, and three into one doesn’t go’. She used to wonder, if Jesus was God, who was he calling out to when he was on the cross—‘Oh Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ‘Who was he speaking to? If he was talking to himself, why did he need to scream out? Wouldn’t he already know what he was thinking?’ It troubled her that the statues which were supposed to represent divinities were always different—sometimes Jesus would have blue eyes, sometimes brown; apart from which, it seemed pointless genuflecting before a painted concrete idol. She was deeply disillusioned by the sweeping changes that followed the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. ‘Suddenly you could eat meat on Fridays, and it was not necessary to cover your head in church. Before we’d been told we would go to purgatory, that it was a major sin to enter a church with your head uncovered. It started to bother me. I thought, so what about all those people who did it when it wasn’t allowed, and they’re now in purgatory? Those things were devastating to me.’
Later, when she became a Muslim, the belief that God’s laws are immutable would become an article of faith. ‘I think non-Muslims don’t understand this. It’s absolutely impossible for Muslims to entertain or contemplate the idea of changing Allah’s laws—because they are Allah’s laws.’
In the Catholic Church, she found that answers to her questions were never forthcoming. ‘When you asked those questions, you were told “It’s a matter of faith. If you don’t believe, you’re not a Christian”. And when I was told “It’s just faith, you don’t have to understand it, you just have to believe it”, I couldn’t accept that. That’s when the church and me parted ways.’
Robyn was still sure there was a God, but she now knew the Catholic Church was not where she was going to find Him. ‘At seventeen I said, “I believe in God, but I can’t accept a system that’s going to regulate my life when I’m not expected to understand it”. And it was not only the fact that you didn’t understand, but there was no necessity for you to understand. The view was, “You don’t need to know, and that’s the test of faith”. So I said, “Well, God, I know you exist, but unless you show me what you want from me, I can’t be blamed for not worshipping you”.’
At eighteen, Robyn was heartbroken when her romance with Ian Goodacre came to a tempestuous end. ‘We used to fight a bit, that’s what split us up’, says Ian. ‘She was going through a difficult time. It was a bit of a rough passage. She was a nice person, she was looking for something to cling onto. It
comes back to that family thing. I could see she had a good core, a good base, and she was reaching out for something. But for me, just being young and into surfing all the time, I didn’t want that responsibility.’
‘I was devastated’, Robyn recalls. She had lost not only her first love, but her place in a stable loving family who had treated her like one of their own. A friend remembers she seemed most shattered at losing the adoptive parents whom she had called mum and dad. After the breakup she was admitted to a private clinic on Sydney’s north shore where she was treated for depression for several weeks. Ian describes it as ‘a bit of a mental breakdown’. Robyn says, ‘I don’t know if it was really a breakdown, I think I was trying to get him back. I like to get my own way, and when I didn’t, that depressed me.’ Their split would have an enduring impact. ‘After my relationship with Ian when I’d thought we’d get married and have children and all be one big happy family, and it didn’t happen like that, my whole concept of love and marriage and children changed. I lost my illusions about a Cinderella Hollywood fairytale kind of love.’
Never one for moping, Robyn set herself a new mission—to travel the world. It was the early 1970s and young Australians were hefting backpacks and setting off around the globe, to South-East Asia, India and Europe. A local surfboard maker had been to Bali and reported back that it was ‘a magical tropical island where they sold magic mushrooms and hash cookies in the restaurants’, Robyn recalls. She and two girlfriends decided to travel first to Bali and then hit the hippy trail, making their way across Asia and north through India, then on to Europe and London.
With her usual fixity of purpose, Robyn threw herself into the task, taking on three jobs to save for the trip. She worked mornings at the pharmacy in Manly, afternoons at an electronics factory in Dee Why, and nights as a barmaid at Manly’s Steyne hotel, a riotous drinking barn with beer-soaked carpets whose doors would overflow with brawling vomiting drunks every Friday and Saturday night.
After abandoning Catholicism, she continued to explore the meaning of life and the nature of God, a popular pastime in the 1970s. She became a vegetarian, took up causes such as animal rights, and later joined in protests against the Vietnam War. ‘I always had a mission, like Save the Pigeons on the Corso, or Save the Koalas, or Save the Gum Trees’, she says. She was briefly intrigued by the 1968 cult hit Chariots of the Gods, which hypothesised that ancient religions and technologies were delivered by space travellers who were welcomed on Earth as gods. She was always game for an adventure. Once she and two girlfriends hitchhiked to Adelaide to try a pie-floater (a meat pie served upside down in a bowl of mushy green peas with tomato sauce), which they had heard about but thought sounded too disgusting to be real. Her friends ended up leaving her beside the highway on the Nullarbor Plain because she refused to get on a truck carrying live sheep, objecting to their inhumane treatment.
‘She was quite a character’, says another friend from this era, Lynn Collins. ‘She was kind of a bit hippy-ish, a little bit “out there”.’ When Lynn gave birth to her first child, Robyn came to visit her at Manly Hospital, apologising that she had knitted a bonnet for the baby but had to leave it at home because she’d spilt lentils on it. ‘I remember her being quite funny. She had a great sense of humour. She was very outspoken, and strong—she was a strong girl, she knew what she wanted.’
Looking back on this period, Robyn would later see her ‘hippy days’ as a transitory phase. Beneath the bohemian exterior lay a deeply old-fashioned girl who shared the abstemious morality of her mother and grandfather. ‘I grew up in the days of Germaine Greer—burn your bra, women taking over the world. But I laugh when people say I was a hippy. No way I could have been a hippy—I was too clean, and I didn’t even really like smoking dope. I don’t like to lose control—chemically, socially, politically, or any other way. I did it because everybody else was doing it.’
At this stage, the thought of becoming a Muslim could not have been further from her mind. ‘Before I went to Indonesia I didn’t know anything about Islam, except that men can have as many wives as they want and women have no rights. So I disliked it intensely.’
Robyn’s travel plans were expedited when her mother Bessie enjoyed a long-awaited change of luck, winning $16 000 in a lottery, a small fortune in those days. Her partner Fred had treated himself to a new car, and the rest was fast being squandered on alcohol and the pokies, so Robyn decided a donation to her travel fund would be a good cause.
‘I need some money—and if you don’t give it to me, I’ll just have to sell drugs to get it’, she announced to her mother. She says she had no real intention of dealing in drugs, but ‘knew which buttons to press’. Bessie gave her $1500, enough to facilitate an immediate departure. Robyn’s friends were still saving and asked her to wait for them, but her patience had run out and she told them she would meet them in London.
She was unusually apprehensive as she prepared to embark on her travels. ‘I was absolutely paranoid. I had never been out of the country. The only time I had ever flown was on a Fokker Friendship from Sydney to Mudgee when I went back to spend the school holidays with Laurette.’ Her own attack of nerves paled compared with Bessie’s dread of what might happen to her daughter in remote Bali. ‘Mum thought they were still cannibals and they would probably eat me. My mother was paralysed with fear. She never flew in her life. She used to say, “If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings”.’
However, Robyn had little time for her mother’s advice as they bade one another farewell. She had long since sworn not to follow Bessie’s path in life. ‘I used to say to my mother, “I’ll never make the mistakes you made”. I had visions of getting a university degree, being happily married, having a profession.’ Never in her strangest dreams could she have imagined how different from that idyllic vision her future would be.
3
GOD IS GREAT
Indonesia, 1972–1974
The ‘island of the Gods’ appeared through the window of the Qantas jumbo like a postcard picture of emerald rice terraces, volcanic peaks swathed in jungle, and white sand beaches shimmering in an azure sea.
In the early 1970s, Denpasar airport consisted of a strip of baking tarmac and a shed. The first thing that struck Robyn as she stepped off the aircraft was a wall of tropical heat so thick she felt faint. The next was the cacophony from a swarm of hotel touts and bemo drivers that descended like locusts on the sweaty backpackers crowded around the luggage carousel. ‘You want taxi? Cheap hotel? My friend give you special price!’
Bali was still largely untouched by mass tourism. The palm trees were taller than the buildings, and much of the island had no electricity. Women worked bare-breasted in the rice paddies and cock-fighting was the most popular form of amusement. Travellers stayed in family guesthouses known as losmens, built around courtyards lush with banyan trees and the scent of frangipani, and featuring carved stone statues of Hindu deities to whom the residents made daily offerings of sticky rice, flowers, incense and Balinese coins, to honour the good spirits and appease the bad.
‘It was surreal’, Robyn remembers. ‘You could sleep with your door open. You never paid for food—they would write it on a board for weeks, and you would pay later. Ceremonial dances were done in the open fields, not for the tourists, but as part of religious ceremonies. Balinese women didn’t cut their hair in those days. And there was no such thing as prostitutes.’
For three months Robyn became one of the resident crowd of backpackers, hippies and itinerant surfers for whom Bali was a home away from home. They spent long days at the beach or lounging in bamboo chairs on the verandahs of their losmens, playing chess, swapping remedies for Bali belly, drinking Bintang beer and passing around marijuana joints. In the evenings they hung out at Mama’s café, which was popular for its mountainous smorgasbords, and The Garden restaurant, famed for its 400-rupiah ‘special’ omelettes and pizzas, whose not-so-secret ingredient was Bali’s famously psychotropic mushrooms. As the
law decreed the death sentence for narcotic drug use, the specials didn’t appear on the menu; you had to know what to order. Robyn recalls that one night a pair of elderly British tourists came in, apparently clueless about the local specialties, and told the waitress, ‘we’ll have what everybody else is having’. They ended up in such a stupor they had to be taken to hospital.
In Bali, Robyn discovered a talent that had eluded her during her interminable French classes at high school—a knack for languages. She picked up Balinese easily, and became sufficiently fluent to be called upon by her fellow travellers in minor emergencies as a translator. On one occasion she was summoned to a losmen where some Australian surfers were staying, to explain to them that the square concrete tank in the courtyard was the family’s water supply, used for cooking, washing and cleaning their teeth, and was not intended to be used as a bath. Some callow youth had simply climbed in and begun lathering up with soap, and when Robyn arrived the distraught owner was crying ‘He put his bum in it!’
It sounded like another planet to Bessie when Robyn rang home from the Kuta telephone exchange.
‘How are you, darling? How’s the food?’
‘I’m great, Mum, and I’m eating like a horse.’
‘Oh my God, she’s eating horse!’ she heard Bessie exclaim.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 5