Robyn was intrigued by Bali’s intense spirituality and the exotic rituals of its Hindu faith. The final bastion of the great Majapahit Hindu dynasty, which crumbled in Java in the fifteenth century as Islam spread across the archipelago, Bali retained a vibrant Hindu culture, overlaid with its own plethora of indigenous spirits and gods. There were temples by the thousands, and shrines in every rice paddy and family courtyard. Once a year during the Nyepi festival, villagers would parade through the streets hoisting a huge monster doll called the ogoh-ogoh, which was chased by a mob with flaming torches and finally incinerated in a mighty bonfire to purge its evil spirit.
For a country girl from Mudgee, it was all intoxicatingly picturesque. Many who followed the hippy trail would embrace the Hindu culture, returning home wearing nose studs, saris and bindis on their foreheads. But to Robyn the animistic rites and pantheon of gods—including Hinduism’s own trinity of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu—were exotic, but made no sense. ‘I was never attracted to Hinduism, because it’s totally illogical’, she says. ‘If a woman doesn’t produce children in this life she comes back re incarnated as a cockroach or something. And they beat up on dogs because they’re believed to be an incarnation of someone or other. And the gods—some of them are elephants with lots of hands. I wanted to know all the ins and outs, and to know the Balinese people as much as humanly possible as an outsider. But I was never interested in it as an alternative religion.’
As for Islam, what little she had seen of it at this stage had done nothing to quell her distaste. ‘I hated Islam. I had watched 1001 Nights and Ali Baba, and I thought Islam was a religion where a man could have as many wives as he wanted to and they had absolutely no rights. It was never a religion I thought of looking into.’
After three months in Bali, Robyn was ready to move on. Her plan was to travel overland across Java to Jakarta, then fly to India en route to London. The next stop on the backpacker route was the Javanese city of Jogjakarta, renowned for its ancient walled citadel housing the sultan’s palace, the kraton, guarded by giant carved dragons and sacred banyan trees, where in feudal times white-robed petitioners would await an audience with the king. At a cockroach-infested losmen in Jogja, she met a Frenchman called Thomas who was working as an English teacher in Jakarta. He told her it was easy to get a job; there was such a thirst to learn English that they were employing virtually anyone who was a native speaker. It seemed like an easy way to replenish her travel funds, so Robyn travelled with him by train to Jakarta to try her luck.
They arrived in the capital after nightfall, and Thomas took Robyn to stay at the home of a journalist friend in the upmarket residential suburb of Kebayoran Baru. Drained after the eight-hour train trip, she fell into bed, oblivious of the mosque next door.
‘I went to bed in a spare room, not knowing that the loudspeaker of the mosque was directly above my window’, she recounts. ‘So at four o’clock in the morning I was sound asleep and the azan (call to prayer) went off. I was so petrified I literally levitated off the bed. I thought it was World War III.’
‘What’s going on?’ she yelled, stumbling out of bed.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just the Muslims going to pray’, her host called back.
‘Who do they think they are?’ she snapped. ‘They don’t have to wake the whole world up. It’s so inconsiderate.’ The racket only confirmed her distaste for Islam.
The next morning, to her annoyance, she was startled awake again before sunrise by the call to prayer. On the third morning she woke early, just as the muezzin was climbing the minaret to begin the azan.
‘I was lying in bed and I started to listen to it, and it was incredibly beautiful’, she recalls. This time she heard the intricate pattern of the melodious chanting with its rhythmic pauses, repetition of phrases and haunting tone.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah
Ash-hadu anna Muhammadar rasulullah
Hayya alas-salat
God is great
I bear witness that there is no God except Allah
I bear witness that Mohammed is Allah’s messenger
Hasten to the prayer
As she lay listening in the pre-dawn light, her contempt for Islam turned to curiosity. ‘I can remember after that asking more about it’, she says. It would prove to be a profound awakening.
Through Thomas, Robyn got a job with Intensive English Course (IEC), a language institute established in the 1960s, which would eventually grow into a conglomerate with fifty branches across Indonesia. Headquartered in east Jakarta, the school provided lodging for foreign staff in the quarters occupied by the owner and his family. Robyn was allotted a room to share with the director’s daughter and niece. Just as Thomas had promised, her own lack of schooling was no obstacle. ‘They were employing anybody and everybody, as long as you were white and you could speak English.’ She was given a book called ‘English 500’ and told to simply follow the instructions. When a student asked a question about grammatical structure that she couldn’t answer, she would reply knowledgeably, ‘Oh, you’re talking about American English. I only speak British English.’ Her characteristic certitude made up for her lack of qualifications. ‘I had a cultural arrogance, I thought I knew more than they did, that what I knew was right and they should learn from me. And that anything I did was better than them.’
Among the students in her classes were three army officers who told her they had been enrolled for a crash course in English before being sent to Egypt to be trained in controlling political unrest. It was seven years after General Suharto had seized power amidst a storm of political turmoil that culminated in vicious anti-Communist massacres across the country, sparked by accusations of Communist complicity in a failed coup. After years of bloody foment, Suharto’s takeover and the resulting restoration of order and stability had been widely welcomed. But the initial relief at his ascendance was now giving way to rising discord over the endemic corruption and nepotism of his New Order regime. In late 1973, resentment over economic inequality erupted in the form of anti-Chinese riots in the hill town of Bandung, West Java, in which looters trashed hundreds of shops and houses. The unrest would soon spill over onto the streets of the capital.
But at this stage Indonesian politics was of little concern to Robyn. One night a few weeks after arriving in Jakarta, she was out at a city discotheque with a British friend from IEC. The Tanamur disco in the nightclub district of Tanah Abang was a favorite haunt of working expatriates and Indonesia’s bratpack, the spoiled sons and daughters of the military and political elite. Among the crowd that night was a young man named Malik Sjafei, whose father was a former military doctor and Health Minister in the Sukarno Government before Suharto took power. Malik was nineteen years old, the same age as Robyn, and just as outgoing.
‘I just saw a bule (white person) in the disco, she was one of the foreigners’, Malik remembers. He asked her to dance—‘we were flirting a little bit’—and then introduced her to his companions. Malik’s friends were the children of Indonesian businessmen, politicians and serving army brass. Some of them were at university, while others like Malik, who had just finished high school, were too busy studying the nocturnal goings-on at their regular hangout, the Tanamur. ‘We used to call it school because we go there every day—it was like going to school’, Malik recounts. (He would eventually attend university at Bandung and graduate with a degree in communications.) Another member of their group was a girl named Liliek Soemarlono, the vivacious daughter of an army captain who was in her first year at the University of Indonesia studying English literature. Robyn and ‘Lili’, as her friends called her, hit it off immediately.
Three decades later and now living in Australia, Lili remembers Robyn fondly. ‘She had a good heart, she was very nice, a lovely kind of person. She’s very gentle. I was attracted to her gentleness. She was very kind and caring. And she likes good times, and she’s not boring. She’s lovely—but she’s not boring. You
can find a lot of lovely people who are boring—but she’s not boring.’
For their own amusement, Malik and his friends had launched a pirate radio station, which they set up in one of their bedrooms, using 50 watts of power, a turntable and one microphone. ‘It was felt that the gang needed an identity as radio broadcasters’, they later explained. They called it Prambors FM, an acronym derived from the streets in which they lived in Jakarta’s upscale Menteng district, which were all named after temples. The station was illegal at the time, but they were able to secure a licence thanks to their fathers’ influence and the patronage of the Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, who lived in a mansion in Borobodur Street just down from Malik’s house. Prambors was an instant sensation among Jakarta’s entertainment-starved youth. Its formula was a mix of the latest Western rock ’n’ roll and Indo-pop hits, interspersed with edgy and irreverent commentary from its enthusiastic band of student DJs. They ran a weekly music request segment, pioneered talkback radio and launched a panel chat show called ‘Warkopi’, short for warung kopi, meaning coffee shop. Prambors FM would become the most successful youth radio station in Jakarta, with Malik Sjafei eventually appointed as its CEO.
Malik and Lili invited Robyn to come with them the next day to see their setup, which by this time had moved into its own small studio in Menteng. The privileged rich kids of Prambors became Robyn’s new best friends.
‘It was like the surfing scene, except it was very much upper class’, she recalls. ‘They were the cream of the crop. They used to drive around in their fathers’ jeeps, or sometimes their fathers’ army drivers would drive us around. They paid cash for everything. I got to be in the in-crowd because I was white. I was the only white person. They always treated me as though I was as rich as them—they assumed all foreigners were rich.’
Lili and Robyn became constant companions. ‘We were very close together’, says Lili. ‘I still feel very warm towards her—it was a short time, but very meaningful.’ Robyn taught Malik to speak English—‘just flirting English’, in his words. ‘She was fun. She’s like every teenager, no responsibility, just like water—going with the flow.’ They spent most nights at the Tanamur, often till 4 or 5 a.m., dancing to the latest disco hits by The Jackson Five and Kool & the Gang. They attended functions like the eighteenth birthday party of the governor’s son, held in his mansion in Jalan Borobodur, which was shielded from the street by a small rainforest and boasted an indoor Japanese garden complete with bridges and babbling streams. ‘I just used to gape, but they thought that sort of thing was normal’, says Robyn. They smoked cigarettes and shared marijuana joints with the staff of the US embassy with whom they socialised. Lili recalls a night when ‘some of the guys’ in their crowd put LSD in her tea as a joke. She says Robyn took care of her and made sure she got home safely. Lili describes Robyn as fun-loving but practical and responsible.
‘She’s probably “wild” as in being adventurous, but she’s not “wild wild”. She’s the kind of person who’d got her life together. She wasn’t a “hippy hippy” type. She’s clean, she’s got her finances together, she just had her life together.’ Lili says Robyn never talked about her previous life, but she could tell her new friend was searching for something, just as Lili was herself. ‘She probably wasn’t happy with something. Me, I always wanted to live outside Indonesia—looking for something else. That’s what she was like too.’ She got the impression that Robyn was eager to make a new life, and wanted to really ‘belong’ in Indonesia. ‘She was very open to Indonesians. She was willing to adapt to the new place she was in.’
The Prambors crowd were not political activists by any means. Aware that their broadcasts were monitored by the authorities, they steered well clear of politics except for the odd foray into oblique satirical commentary on issues such as corruption. ‘We were not political; sometimes we were critical of government policies and action, but it had to be very, very soft, because in the Suharto era there is no critic’, says Malik. Robyn recalls the introduction of a new regulation that limited the number of people who could assemble at the station at any given time, lest they gather to plot political intrigue; after that, if more than five of them wanted to meet, they had to sneak in.
‘Everything in Indonesia was considered subversive. Never mind freedom of speech—freedom of thought was not allowed. Was it subversive? Yes and no. They were uni students, so they were the thinkers of society, but they weren’t allowed to think. There was no such thing as criticising Suharto. They were afraid to.’ The anti-Communist massacres in which hundreds of thousands of people had been slaughtered were still vivid in the national psyche, and the authorities constantly revived the menace of Communism as a curb on dissent. ‘You didn’t talk openly about anything, because there was a fear that expressing any dissatisfaction was seen as treason, and the only people who would do that were Communists.’
But even for the rich kids of Prambors, the discontent seething beneath the surface of Indonesia’s body politic was becoming too blatant to be ignored. One weekend Robyn and her friends made a trip to the hill town of Bandung, the scene of riots targeting Indonesia’s affluent Chinese merchant class. When they returned to Jakarta late in the evening, protesters were burning cars in the streets and a curfew was in place. Lili, whose brother had joined the rioters, remembers that she and Robyn had to sleep at the bus station for the night because it was too dangerous to make their way home.
Despite the growing political discord, after six months in Indonesia the country had got under Robyn’s skin, and she felt an overwhelming urge to stay. ‘I felt drawn to the Javanese people, in a way that I didn’t feel in Bali. I admired them for their hospitality and their politeness and their ability to forego individual desires for the good of the group. It was something you didn’t see in Western society. They genuinely cared about each other. And their concept of extended family—I liked it and wanted to be part of it.’
The values that seemed important to the Indonesians were reminiscent of many of those instilled in her from childhood by her mother and grandfather, such as the importance of family, modesty, respect and personal discipline. But in contrast to her Sunday-school days in Mudgee, here it seemed that the people lived what they preached. And the more she saw of this, the more she believed—to her surprise—that their religion was at the heart of what she most admired. Her friends from Prambors, although mostly Muslims, were hardly devout; they drank liquor and forgot to pray, and some of them were reformed drug addicts. But Robyn noticed that the ones who did pray and spurned alcohol were treated with a special regard. And the fabric of the broader society appeared to be woven together by its faith.
‘I thought religion had influenced Indonesia’s character; I thought they got it from religion. I saw things in Muslims that I didn’t see in the Hindu Balinese—respect for women, personal hygiene, respect for the mother. I also saw things my mother had taught me to respect which, in our society, some of them had disappeared. I was drawn by the honesty and modesty, by their consideration and kindness to each other, their politeness and calmness. I saw a people who had characteristics that I recognised and I wanted to be a part of a society that held those principles. And through doing that I found out that the reason for it was Islam. I had thought it was the Javanese people I was drawn to—but it was actually Islam.’
She found herself entranced by the simple rituals of the faith she had previously derided. ‘I noticed that people would carry a prayer mat over their shoulder. And when the azan sounded, the women would put on a white skirt and scarf—they were beautifully embroidered, very ornate. And when you watched them stand in line and move in unison, it did something to your heart.’
She bought a prayer mat herself and learned to perform wudu, the ceremonial washing of the face and hands and wiping of the head and feet done by Muslims before prayer, although she didn’t know yet how to perform the ritual salat, or daily prayers. ‘I used to do wudu and then sit on my mat, I just wanted to be part of wha
t was going on.’
As she began to delve into Islam, she was struck first by its simplicity, embodied in the ‘five pillars’ that Muslims must observe: uttering the shahadah, or profession of faith, which states that there is only one God and Mohammed is his messenger; praying five times a day; fasting during Ramadan; paying zakat, or charity for the poor; and making the haj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. She liked the lack of inexplicable mysteries like the Holy Trinity, which depicted God as three beings. Compared with Catholicism, she found it all so clear—it all made sense. ‘When I was a Catholic, I couldn’t get my mind and heart to correspond. But in Islam there was never anything I couldn’t reconcile. In Islam I have never found anything where the heart and mind don’t correspond.’
One day the television was on and an elderly man was speaking. Her Indonesian was still patchy but she was mesmerised by his tone of speech and charisma. The speaker was a famous Muslim intellectual known as Buya Hamka, a champion of the ‘modernist’ school of Islam, which sought to harmonise modern civilisation with a purified form of Islam cleansed of its Javanese cultural accretions. The modernist wave was part of an Islamic revival movement which was sweeping the world, based on a return to the fundamentals of the Quran and Sunnah, the Islamic holy book and the customs of the Prophet Mohammed. Robyn asked a friend what the old man was saying, and her companion explained that he was talking about the fasting month of Ramadan.
‘What’s Ramadan?’ Robyn asked.
‘It’s a time of year when Allah puts all the human beings on Earth on an equal footing, no matter where they are in the world’, she recalls her friend explaining. ‘Whether you’re poor or rich, white or black, whether you live in the United States or the North Pole, at this time of year you go without eating, without drinking, without sexual intercourse during the day. There’s no swearing, no smoking—it’s a shutdown of all your desires.’ The egalitarian quality of the practice instantly appealed to Robyn. ‘I was shocked that (a religion) that I had thought was so unjust would have a facet in it that was so just.’
The Mother of Mohammed Page 6