She decided to try it herself, with mixed results. ‘The first fast I ever did, I would fast and if I got really hungry I would go into my room and eat without telling anybody.’ Incapable herself of going hungry, she was struck by the serenity of those around her who endured the fast until sunset each day when they gathered for an evening meal. ‘Instead of people being angry and depressed and sad, they seemed to exuberate (with) joy. I couldn’t understand it—the camaraderie of eating together, the joy of giving food to the poor. I thought it was terrible. I just got migraine headaches.’ Her conversion to Islam was off to a faltering start.
During university holidays, the Prambors crew would flee the heat of Jakarta for cooler retreats such as the hill town of Bandung or the island of Bali. During one such trip to Bali, Robyn and Lili were dining with a group of friends at Mama’s café in Kuta Beach when a handsome young stranger came over to their table to say hello to one of their group. He wore jeans and a checked cowboystyle shirt, and had long jet-black hair, a jocular manner and spoke good English. He was introduced as Bambang.
Raden Bambang Wisudo was the son of a respectable Javanese family who was well known among the progeny of Indonesia’s upper crust. His father, Amir Andjilin, was a mediumlevel functionary in Suharto’s New Order regime, in charge of customs at Bali’s international airport. His mother was a member of the aristocratic priyayi class who claimed descent from Javanese royalty, a haughty matriarch with manicured fingernails and a penchant for mahjong who carried the title raden ayu, which denoted her place in the nobility. Bambang’s honorific, Raden, signified his own, albeit diluted, upper-class blood. His family called him ‘Wisha’, a variation on his Hindu family name which means ‘to graduate’ or attain success; everyone else called him ‘Boy’.
When Robyn met him, Bambang was twenty years old. He was the favoured eldest son among six children, who had dropped out of private Catholic college and had not yet found anything to do. ‘He was spoilt rotten’, she would later conclude. While content to have his family support him, Bambang treated their elaborate etiquette with casual disdain. His sister told Robyn that he had earned his stripes in the brat-pack at the age of sixteen, by riding a motorbike given to him by his father through the front doors of the family home and into the dining room. He spent his time writing songs and poetry, smoking hash and playing blues guitar in all-night jam sessions with his friends. He also liked to befriend foreign tourists in Kuta Beach and squire them around on his motorbike to restaurants, bars and tourist traps where they would invariably pick up the tab.
Bambang was smart, good-looking, funny and a nonconformist like Robyn. But Lili, who was there the night they met, thought them an unlikely pair. She says he was ‘cute’ but looked no older than seventeen. ‘Bambang strikes me as a nice boy. He strikes me as a “mummy’s boy” really. He always had a clean shirt, well ironed, just nice. To me he’s just a boy so I didn’t pay much attention to him. He’s always in the background. I never thought she would end up marrying him.’
‘It wasn’t a wild, passionate falling in love’, says Robyn. ‘Marriage in Indonesia was still very much based on social compatibility. Our compatibility was that he was intelligent, he was decent, he wasn’t unattractive, he was funny. I found him interesting, we had the same sense of humour, we had a lot in common— unfortunately that we smoked dope and liked music. But the fact that he was taking drugs didn’t bother me, because so was I.’
For all her devil-may-care exterior, Robyn was at heart a conservative girl whose most heartfelt aspiration was to settle down and have a family of her own. The painful breakup with her first love, Ian Goodacre, less than two years earlier had left her cynical about romance. She simply wanted to marry, make a home and have children, and the highly ordered, family-centric society in which she found herself seemed an ideal place to do so. ‘I was disillusioned with the Cinderella stories, the Romeo and Juliet nonsense about love. I could see myself getting married, having children and staying in Indonesia.’ The clincher, however, was that her visa was about to expire.
‘If we got married, you’d get a visa’, suggested Bambang. So they did.
‘We never thought about it, it was on the spur of the moment’, Robyn says. ‘It was not a “visa marriage” as in a deception, but that was one of the things that motivated us. He liked me and wanted to help me out. So it was just a case of “why not?” It wasn’t really something that either of us thought about the long-term consequences of.’
In order to marry, Robyn had to formally convert to Islam, a straightforward procedure that required her merely to swear the profession of faith, the shahadah, in front of two witnesses. On 1 February 1974, she and Bambang rode on his motorbike to the Department of Religion at Ubud, where, in the presence of a pair of government officials, she declared: ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger’. Later, when she told her family she had become a Muslim, she recalls that their response was: ‘Oh here she goes again, I wonder how long this will last’.
Bambang dreaded the florid formalities of a Javanese society wedding. ‘He wasn’t into the whole cultural Javanese thing—so we actually ran away and got married’, Robyn recounts. The signing of their Islamic marriage contract took place with virtually no ceremony at the religious affairs office in Ubud. But their subterfuge was short-lived. When Bambang went home and told his parents he had married a foreigner they hadn’t laid eyes on, his mother was appalled; it simply wasn’t the done thing for the scion of a blue-blooded clan. His family insisted on a full Javanese wedding to solemnise the union.
The nuptials were held in the city of Magelang, Central Java, the family’s maternal ancestral home. First they needed the blessing of their forebears, which entailed a trip to the cemetery where Bambang’s grandparents were buried.
‘We have to seek permission for you to get married’, Bambang’s mother explained.
‘But they’re dead’, Robyn pointed out. Dead or not, the betrothed couple were obliged to prostrate themselves and sprinkle water on the grave to secure the ancestors’ dispensation, which was apparently granted.
Forty days of elaborate preparations followed. The bride-to-be was bathed in perfumed water and rose petals, and anointed with a potion of herbs and saffron concocted to whiten the skin, notwithstanding Bambang’s protestations: ‘But she’s already white!’ Bambang’s mother oversaw the preliminaries in her customary imperious style. Robyn was a young woman who was not easily intimidated, but her mother-in-law was ‘scary’, she later recalled. Fortunately the matriarch was satisfied with her son’s choice of wife, because marrying a foreigner was a mark of prestige. Bambang’s father, as usual, had little say in the matter. Amir Andjilin was a wise, kindly man who preferred to avoid domestic drama, and did so by demurring to his wife’s whims. As a result, their home was her dominion.
The family prized their colonial-era provenance. They liked to speak Dutch at home and their children called them ‘mami’ and ‘papi’, in the Dutch style. When the servants walked past their masters, they were expected to stoop so the tips of their fingers trailed on the ground, to signify their lowly station. When leaving a room they were required to back out bowing. Bambang’s mother used the royal ‘we’ in Javanese, and liked to reminisce about how her father, an officer in the colonial regency, used to stride around the royal palace escorted by a minion bearing an umbrella to spare him from the tropical sun; and how, until her marriage, she had never so much as spooned the rice onto her own plate.
On the day of the wedding, Robyn’s forehead was adorned with painted designs, and gold ornaments were woven through her hair. She was dressed in a ceremonial kain kebaya, an ornately embroidered blouse worn with a long swathe of batik wrapped tightly around the lower body and legs, and held in place by a sash called a setagan, which is bound so firmly that the bride can only totter in tiny steps. Rendered virtually immobile, she was then seated on a throne-like chair on display for several hours, with eyes downcast and wearing the express
ion of blank forbearance encour aged in a Javanese bride. For Bambang, attired in similar ceremonial fashion, it was an ordeal to be endured only to humour his mother. But Robyn was in awe of the solemn rites. ‘I took all the rituals seriously. I thought that they were all part of being a Muslim.’ On their wedding night, the matriarch laid an offering of flowers, food and incense under the bridal bed, in an appeal to the gods to sanctify their union. It was supposed to stay there for seven days but Bambang threw the whole thing out the window when the rotting banana started to stink in the tropical heat. Robyn hastily retrieved it and put it back, lest the gods be offended.
The newlyweds returned to Bambang’s family home in Bali, an imposing colonial-style manse in the Krunang district of Denpasar, which boasted seven bedrooms, three lounge rooms, two dining rooms, two kitchens and an expansive garden pavilion for entertaining. The family sitting room, known as the ‘blue room’, featured ornate curtains in peacock blue, and a gold inlaid coffee table 2 metres long, which was made from an ancient temple door. Bambang’s father had been transferred to a new customs post at Medan on the island of Sumatra, so the newly-weds shared the house with three of Bambang’s sisters, a retinue of servants, and a passing parade of visiting relatives. In the matriarch’s absence, Bambang’s eldest sister ran the household with the same magisterial authority as her mother. The servants slept on mats in the kitchen and there were locks on the fridges so they couldn’t steal the food. While the family reclined on lounges to watch television of an evening, the hirelings would sit on the floor behind them awaiting their next command.
Robyn quickly discovered that the fact of their marriage had transformed her hitherto casual relationship with Boy. ‘When Bambang and I were just hanging out together, we were friends. But when we got married our roles changed. Being a husband and wife in Indonesia, you are not “friends”. You have separate lives and defined roles.’ It was no longer acceptable for her to call Bambang by his given name, because for a wife to do so was considered disrespectful. So while he continued to call her Robyn, she was expected to address him as Mas, which literally means ‘gold’ but in common usage means ‘older brother’, and is employed as a generic term of respect for a man.
After their marriage, Robyn lost touch with her friends from Prambors, even her close friend Lili. It was not the last time she would leave an old life behind to fashion a new one. Lili was not offended; she believed Robyn had simply found what she’d been looking for. ‘We lost contact because our interests were different. I was always interested in foreigners, all my boyfriends were foreigners. She was very into Indonesian guys.’ Lili saw Robyn just once after she married, when Robyn came to visit Lili’s mother’s home in Jakarta. She was struck by the change in her friend, who appeared to have morphed into a new role.
‘I thought she had become more and more not like an Australian girl. She was very Indonesian in her behaviour. She had become demure—like a typical Indonesian wife, married to an Indonesian guy. That was my impression.’ Lili saw this as a natural consequence of Robyn’s Javanese marriage. ‘Once you’re married, you belong to your husband’s life, you don’t have your own life’, she explains. Nor was she completely surprised by the new ‘demureness’ that she saw in her friend. ‘I think it’s easy for Robyn because she’s quite soft inside. I can see that side of her. She’s very soft. If she meets someone who can nurture that softness in her, she would probably succumb to that.’
However, finding her place in the hierarchy of Bambang’s family proved a challenge. She was expected to stay out of the kitchen, which was considered the servants’ preserve; apart from which her habit of clattering the pots and pans was considered ‘low class’—as was any unnecessary noise. ‘From the time I arrived in Indonesia, my mother-in-law used to say I even walked too loud’, she recalls. Navigating the elaborate protocols of a traditional Javanese household was fraught with pitfalls. ‘I had terrible trouble with the servants because I didn’t have the ability to manage them or interact with them. I had this idea from my hippy days that everyone is equal. I later realised that everyone is equal in worth, yes, but not in status. You have to have an employer–employee relationship. If you try to behave as though you are the same as them, they think you’re stupid.’ When she took her plate and sat on the kitchen floor one day to eat with the servants, they were so alarmed they ran out.
Robyn would later look back and laugh at these experiences, although by her own account it sounds like a lonely ordeal. It reminded her of the famous scene from the science fiction spoof movie Spaceballs, in which the Darth Vader look-alike Dark Helmet announces to the young hero, Lone Starr: ‘Before you die, there is something you should know about us … I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate’. ‘What does that make us?’ asks Lone Starr. ‘Absolutely nothing.’ That was how Robyn felt about the value she was assigned in the arcane pecking order of her marital home: absolutely nothing.
But that was about to change. Within weeks of her marriage, Robyn fell pregnant. Having longed to settle down and start a family, she felt elated, but also deeply apprehensive. Suddenly her own home and family seemed a long way away. As mother-to-be of her Indonesian family’s first grandchild, she found her place in the family hierarchy suddenly elevated. But at the same time, her activities were dramatically circumscribed. A whole array of hitherto daily tasks and amusements became pantang—not allowed—in her delicate condition. There was no such transformation for Bambang. ‘My role changed—I was having a baby, I would have to stay home and play house. But he had no reason to change. He wasn’t pregnant. His attitude was, “You’re my wife, you’re pregnant, and of course you can’t be riding on the back of the motorbike, coming to Kuta and taking drugs”. I think that was my first reality check, and it was a shock when I sat down and thought about it, that I was really married and so many people were involved in our life now. It changed me and I thought, how long were we going to be able to stay in Kuta Beach smoking dope, eating magic mushrooms and living off his parents?’
Robyn found herself spending long days at home alone with the domestic help. Left to her own devices, she befriended a servant girl named Muna who was about her own age. Muna was a devout Muslim and follower of a hardline new organisation called Islam Jamaah (which is not to be confused with Abu Bakar Ba’asyir’s group, Jemaah Islamiyah, founded in 1993). She wore a hijab (headscarf) to cover her hair, which was rare in Indonesia at the time. She took Robyn to the mosque and to lectures by the group’s leaders, who preached that Islam in Indonesia must be purged of its Javanese ‘impurities’. They had begun burning books they deemed to be impure and branded those who didn’t join them as infidels. Islam Jamaah would later be banned as a heretical sect. It was from Muna that Robyn learned that the offerings made to gods and spirits in Bali and the statues of divinities like those revered by Bambang’s family were haram, or forbidden, because Muslims are meant to worship God alone, not cement idols. Robyn and Muna would sit and discuss Islam for hours, until Bambang’s family found out and the girl was dismissed from the household. ‘You can’t have the majikan (master) fraternising with the servants’, they explained.
While Robyn was making her new life in Bali, more trouble was brewing in Jakarta. At the start of 1974, simmering anger over corruption and economic inequality had boiled over in the streets of the capital. Student protests demanding price cuts and curbs on corruption turned to riots in which shops were looted and cars burned. In response, Suharto’s troops opened fire, killing about a dozen people. The upheaval shook the New Order regime and ushered in a new era of repression in which hundreds were arrested and tried, newspapers shut down, student activism squashed and moderate military leaders purged from the armed forces.
Meanwhile Robyn was growing restless and homesick, and felt reluctant to entrust her own fate and that of her unborn infant to Indonesia’s rudimentary health-care system. So at the end of 1974 the couple decided to travel to Sydney to await the birth of their ch
ild. Bambang was characteristically nonchalant about what lay ahead. ‘He was from a privileged family’, says Robyn. ‘He lived a privileged life and did whatever he pleased. His father had always supported him. His family thought, he’s in Australia now, her family will take care of him.’
4
A JAVANESE WIFE
Indonesia & Australia, 1974–1977
Robyn was six months pregnant when she and Bambang landed in Australia around the end of 1974. Bessie was waiting eagerly at Sydney airport to meet her exotic new son-in-law, whom she had hitherto seen only in wedding photos, resplendent in ceremonial attire.
‘How will you recognise him?’ one of Bessie friends had asked.
‘I’ll just look for the guy in the dress and tall hat.’
To her disappointment, Bambang was wearing his habitual blue jeans and checked shirt when he and Robyn emerged through the customs gates.
‘How ya going, love? You haven’t got your skirt on? Oh no, of course you wouldn’t.’
A welcoming party of curious friends and relatives lay in wait at Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches, where Bessie made cups of tea and sandwiches while Robyn did the introductions: ‘Susan, this is Bambang, Bambang this is Susan’ and so on around the room. Among the gathering was Bessie’s friend Gladys, whom the children called ‘aunty’. ‘Aunty Glad, this is Bambang, Bambang, this is Aunty Glad’, Robyn continued. Bambang shot her a glance of alarm, but held his tongue until they were alone in the bedroom.
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