The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  ‘Far out! I thought I knew you Westerners pretty good, but you people really are incredible!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘You don’t have any shame.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well in Indonesia, if we thought someone was a tante girang we’d never say it to her face.’ In Indonesian, the term tante girang is used to refer to a woman who goes with younger men; the English translation is ‘aunty glad’.

  It was a foretaste of the culture shock that lay in store. This was Bambang’s first foray out of Indonesia, his first encounter with any existence other than his own rarefied world. ‘He was from a privileged family, he had never worked a day in his life’, says Robyn. ‘They assumed that all white people are rich and that my family would look after him. So coming to Australia and living in Dee Why in a fibro house, where we were very much a working-class family—it was a total shock.’

  Bessie had split up with Fred and was living with her younger daughter, Susan, in a two-bedroom fibrocement house at the industrial western end of Dee Why. They lived frugally on Bessie’s supporting mother’s pension, supplemented by a parttime job making breakfasts at a motel around the corner. Bessie’s health was poor; she suffered from chronic asthma and was in the early stages of emphysema, yet to be diagnosed and no doubt aggravated by smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. Thirteen-year-old Susan was a sweet, good-natured girl, who was now in her second year at Manly Girls High, where she was still living down the notoriety of being Robyn Hutchinson’s younger sister.

  Polite, laid-back and affable, Bambang was an instant hit with the family. ‘Bambang had an incredible ability to fit in wherever he was’, says Robyn. ‘He was extremely funny. I don’t know anybody who met him who didn’t like him. He had my mum wrapped around his little finger.’

  However, a rude jolt was in store for Bambang when Robyn found an advertisement in the ‘situations vacant’ page of the Manly Daily for a process worker at a chemical warehouse in Dee Why West. Bambang suddenly found himself packing chemicals into bulk bags for distribution in return for a wage of $120 a week. Fortunately the boss took a liking to him, he got on well with his workmates, and at least he was earning an income. But getting up at 6 a.m. each day to be at the factory by seven was an unaccustomed tribulation for a Javanese aristocrat whose life had been governed thus far by jam karet—Indonesian ‘rubber time’. ‘He didn’t like how everything here was time driven’, says Robyn. ‘He used to say jam karet and “time is money” just don’t go together.’

  In February 1975, about two months after their arrival in Australia, Robyn went into labour with their first child. Bambang had been startled to learn that it was now commonplace in Australia for fathers to be present for childbirth, a practice that was virtually unheard of in Indonesia and which struck him as quite bizarre. ‘He had no idea what it was like and didn’t want to know’, Robyn recalls. So they agreed he would accompany her to hospital but leave before the birth. However, the event did not proceed according to their plan.

  ‘It was a 17-hour labour’, says Robyn. ‘By the time the baby’s head crowned, I was so exhausted and in such a state I couldn’t have cared less who was there. I remember him bending down and saying, “OK, I’m going out now”. I couldn’t have cared less. I was screaming.’

  But as Bambang headed for the door, he was rounded on by the duty midwife, a hard-boiled Dutch matron whose delivery room was her domain; she would decide who left and who stayed.

  ‘Oh, is this what they do in your country? They desert women in their hour of need? It took two to make this child, didn’t it?’ the midwife harangued him. A speechless Bambang felt compelled to stay for the whole bloody ordeal. ‘He was absolutely and utterly horrified’, says Robyn, ‘even though he was delighted with his newborn daughter. He leaned down and said to me, “Never again, I will never see you go through that again”. He was so traumatised he swore I would never have another child.’

  The baby was a golden-skinned girl with a thatch of black hair, who weighed 3.2 kilograms. They called her Devi (pronounced Day-vee) Suni Wisudo Putri, a Hindu name meaning ‘goddess of the sun and daughter of Wisudo’.*

  ‘Devi was my firstborn’, says Robyn. ‘You love all your children and they’re all different and you love them all in different ways. But your firstborn has something special and she was my firstborn.’

  When they arrived home at Dee Why, to Bessie’s horror they brought the after-birth wrapped in a plastic bag, which Robyn placed carefully in the freezer compartment of the fridge. Bambang would happily have left it behind to be disposed of at the hospital, but Robyn wished to bury it in keeping with a Javanese custom that deems the placenta to be the adik ari ari— the ‘little brother’ (adik means little brother and ari ari means umbilical cord) of the newborn child, thus necessitating a respectful burial. She dug a little plot in a garden bed beside the driveway, in view of the next-door neighbour’s lounge room window, and buried the placenta in the soil. A lamp placed over it was to be lit each evening for forty days to keep away evil spirits. She wrongly assumed this was an Islamic practice. ‘The type of Islam I was practising was very much confused with Javanese beliefs, and had so much Hinduism in it that it’s hard to know where the Hinduism ended and the Islam began.’

  One evening at maghrib, the time around sunset when Muslims pray, Robyn asked Bambang to go out and light the lamp in the garden. Wondering why he was taking so long, she looked out the kitchen window a few minutes later, and saw him dancing around the tiny grave in a seemingly trance-like state, chanting some strange incantation.

  ‘What on earth were you doing?’ she asked, when he came back in chuckling.

  ‘I couldn’t help myself. The neighbours were looking out the window. I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I gave them a show.’

  Despite the social revolution of the 1970s, Australia remained a deeply conservative country, in which a quick scratch on the surface of polite society was enough to expose a rich seam of xenophobia beneath. It was only two years since the last vestiges of the White Australia Policy had been dismantled by the new Whitlam Labor Government. The fall of Saigon and the Communist victory in Vietnam would soon send a wave of refugees washing onto Australian shores, reviving the nation’s latent suspicions towards the ‘yellow hordes’ of Asia to its north. Intermarriage between white Australians and Asians was still rare. After Devi’s birth, a nurse pushing a trolley-load of new-borns through the maternity ward had glanced at Robyn, then at her baby, and kept on walking past her bed, assuming the tawny infant could not be the white mother’s child. At the infant health centre in Manly, a kindly nurse mistook golden-skinned Devi for an adopted Vietnamese orphan.

  Robyn contacted her father, Jim Hutchinson, whom she hadn’t seen in years, eager to show off her firstborn. Jim and his new wife Yvonne drove over to Dee Why to visit with their two sons, nine-year-old Roderick and his little brother Brett. Roderick recalls that Robyn and her father were soon arguing, about what he doesn’t recall, while Bambang sat quietly in the lounge room playing his guitar. ‘They didn’t get on’, says Roderick. ‘My father really disapproved of the marriage. He didn’t want his white Anglo-Saxon girl marrying another race. My father did not approve of mixed marriages.’ Roderick had only met his halfsister a couple of times. He was struck by her forceful personality and her strident voice and behaviour. ‘She was loud, very strong, she was a pretty ballsy type of girl too, she didn’t take any crap from anyone. It was that voice—anyone’s got a voice like that has to be ballsy.’

  When news of Devi’s birth made it to the surfing fraternity, Robyn’s old friends came bearing gifts of baby bonnets and fluffy toys. The crowd had thinned somewhat while she had been away; Ian Goodacre had moved to Queensland, and some of the others had travelled overseas. The drug culture had grown more insidious, as heroin had crept onto the scene. A few of the boys had been conscripted to serve in Vietnam and returned as hardcore addi
cts, and there had been a rash of heroin overdose deaths.

  Robyn’s own days of frequent drug use were over, since she had become pregnant and then begun breastfeeding. It was a past she was happy to leave behind in favour of the settled domesticity she yearned for. ‘I had changed because I had a kid’, she remembers. ‘Most of my friends didn’t work, and sold dope to support their habits. A lot of people were getting busted. I didn’t want that life any more.’

  Another old friend, Steve Warnock, saw a marked change in the carefree party-girl of old. ‘She was certainly different. Her life had changed radically at that time. Where she had come from was no longer the place she was at. She found something in Asia and came back with a whole new perception. I think she went looking for that. She wasn’t a Sydney girl from the northern beaches any more; she had found a new life. She dumped her roots, and I don’t blame her—it was a pretty ordinary life she was leaving behind.’

  But the life that lay ahead was uncertain as well, and the stability she longed for would prove elusive. Their living conditions with Bessie and Susan in the fibro house at Dee Why were cramped and for Bambang, the novelty of bagging chemicals eight hours a day to support his wife and child had quickly worn off.

  ‘Some days I would wake him up and he’d say, “No, I’m not going to work today”. I would say, “What do you mean you’re not going to work? This isn’t Indonesia, you’ll get the sack”.’

  Australia had fallen on troubled times. A global downturn combined with the adventurist policies of the Whitlam Labor Government had sent unemployment soaring and inflation spiralling to 16 per cent. The deprivations of childhood, when her mother had slaved as a donkey stoker and eaten bread and dripping, were still vivid in Robyn’s memory, whereas Boy had never known privation of any kind. He would simply roll over and fall back to sleep, while Robyn fretted over how they would pay the rent. When he wasn’t sacked, he would say, ‘See, you didn’t have to worry’.

  ‘It didn’t matter what you did with Bambang, he just used to live from day to day. It was always “Don’t worry about it, it’ll be alright”. His whole life had been spent just doing what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. In Indonesia there were no consequences because his mother and father always took care of him.’ With his lackadaisical attitude and fondness for marijuana, Bambang fitted well into the surf crowd. ‘Boy was a sweet guy. People wanted to be around him because he was a lovely bloke’, remembers Robyn’s friend Deborah Jensen. ‘But unfortunately he got a bit involved in smoking dope and taking pills. When she brought him to Australia he just wanted to be like the Australian boys.’

  Their precarious domestic equanimity was shattered when Robyn’s mother found a bag of marijuana seeds on top of a cupboard. If there was one thing Bessie couldn’t abide, it was drugs. She gave them an ultimatum: the drug use must stop or she would tell Robyn’s brother, George. It’s unclear exactly what George would have done, as he was married by now with his own domestic affairs to attend to. But the mere thought of her brother’s reaction was enough to send Robyn and Bambang packing. ‘My brother was seven years older than me. I’d always looked up to him like a father figure. He was always very strait-laced and very law abiding, and it was always very important to me what he thought. Not that he would have done anything, but just the fact of him knowing about something he disapproved of would have been very difficult for me.’

  Robyn, Bambang and the baby moved into a two-bedroom flat in Ashburner Street, Manly, around the corner from Manly’s famous South Steyne beach and a block from the Royal Far West Children’s home where Robyn had been billeted as a child. Bambang had developed an allergy to the chemicals and quit his job at the factory, leaving them reliant on unemployment benefits, a good part of which he spent on marijuana, which he now smoked daily. ‘We used to fight about it’, says Robyn. ‘Well, I used to fight and he would ignore me. You couldn’t fight with him. And he didn’t stop. He saw every reason why I shouldn’t smoke, but he wouldn’t stop himself.’ Occasionally, in the face of her persistent nagging, the normally acquiescent Bambang would snap and erupt in a rage. He usually stormed out before it got physical.

  Ashburner Street was a well-known drug dealers’ haunt, where junkies and dope peddlers would skulk beneath the streetlights to do their deals, then slink off into the shadows when a police patrol car cruised by. On 23 July 1976, Robyn and Bambang were at home at about ten in the morning, when two police officers appeared at the open front door, presumably in response to a tipoff. Bambang was in the lounge room chatting to a neighbour, while Robyn was in the bedroom changing Devi’s nappy. On the dressing table next to her was a plastic bag containing six 30-gram packets of Indian hemp. ‘When they came through the door, the marijuana was in a plastic bag on the dresser’, says Robyn. ‘I saw the police coming and tried to throw it out the window, but I wasn’t a very good shot, and it landed in the baby’s cot.’

  When the police found the incriminating package, Bambang was arrested and taken to the Manly police station, where he was charged with smoking and possessing Indian hemp and possessing a homemade pipe for the purpose. Robyn went along later to bail him out with a $200 bond and three days afterwards his case was heard in the Manly magistrates court. It was so rare to have a Muslim defendant in those days that they had to send out for a Quran so that Bambang could be sworn, and Robyn was asked to help out with translation because there was no Indonesian interpreter. Bambang was relaxed as usual, calling out a cheery ‘How are you?’ to the magistrate from the dock.

  But for Robyn, always a proud young woman and now a wife and mother intent on settling down, the episode was sheer humiliation. ‘The fact that we were raided for drugs is bad enough. But it was made out as though I was some sort of negligent drug-crazed mother, which wasn’t true. I was really paranoid they were going to take Devi away.’ Much was made of the drugs having been found in the baby’s cot, and the magistrate recommended the Department of Child Welfare investigate the child’s care. ‘With a father who is a previous drug-user, it must be ascertained the child is being properly looked after’, instructed stipendiary magistrate Mr LJ Nash.

  To make matters worse, a week later the story was reported in the Sydney tabloid newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, under a head line in bold upper-case letters: ‘DRUG FAMILY MAY LOSE BABY’. It featured a photograph of ‘Mrs Robyn Wisudo, 22’ holding her doe-eyed 17-month-old daughter, beside a subheading ‘We love our little girl’. Robyn was smiling but reportedly ‘distraught’ with fear that her baby would be taken away.

  ‘The court thought we had hidden the drugs in [Devi’s] cot and that we couldn’t care less about her. But that is all so far from the truth’, Robyn was quoted as saying. ‘Bambang and I love our daughter dearly. The reason the drugs were in the cot was because I had them in my hand when the police arrived and I panicked and threw them there.’ She said Bambang was also distressed. ‘When I told him our baby could be taken away he just shook his head and said, “They cannot do that. It is wrong”.’

  The story was written by a former friend from the surf scene, Steve Warnock, who was now working as a junior journalist at the Mirror and had volunteered to interview Robyn after spotting the case in a court report in the Manly Daily. Warnock remembers visiting the flat in Ashburner Street to find Robyn furious over what had happened. ‘She was pissed off, she was angry, defiant.’ Her ire was reserved mostly for Bambang, who sat chastened, like ‘an unassuming Asian guy’, while Warnock interviewed his wife.

  While Robyn stood by him publicly, she never forgave Bambang for the shame, and for finally shattering her cherished domestic idyll. ‘It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was so angry because that was my whole point. I had been trying to tell him this was irresponsible behaviour. And him being caught for marijuana paled into insignificance compared to the slight on me as a mother. I was the one who ended up on the front page of the newspaper. I wasn’t even smoking at the time. No one even remembered it was him who had the drugs. I
t was all about what kind of mother was I.’

  Her family was mortified. Bessie said she literally fell off her bar stool when she came across the ‘DRUG FAMILY’ headline while reading her Sunday morning newspaper at the motel. Robyn’s brother George refused to talk to her for years afterwards. Her father, who abhorred illicit drugs and disapproved of her Asian husband, was ‘livid’, according to Robyn’s half-brother Roderick. He remembers asking some time afterwards whether they would be going to visit Robyn again. ‘No. As far as I’m concerned she’s no daughter of mine’, his father replied.

  Bambang was fined $900 and placed on a two-year good behaviour bond. But there was worse to come. In the aftermath of his conviction, a letter arrived from the immigration department announcing that his residency visa had been cancelled and he would face deportation. Bambang’s family moved quickly to head off the mounting scandal after being discreetly informed of their son’s predicament by an Indonesian diplomat in Canberra who was a family friend, according to Robyn. Bambang’s father, Amir Andjilin, paid for their tickets and they were soon on a flight to Jakarta, before Bambang could be bundled out of the country.

  The ignominy of the drug bust and Bambang’s narrowly averted deportation was politely ignored when they arrived back in Jakarta with 18-month-old Devi a few weeks after the event. Had the scandal occurred in Indonesia it would have caused immense loss of face for Bambang’s family, but Sydney was far enough away for the matter to be discreetly put behind them. His parents were happy to accept their son’s assurance that the incident in Australia had been a trivial infringement. ‘I think for his parents it was just accepted that boys would do all these weird things, be totally irresponsible, get into trouble, then grow up and “get over it”’, says Robyn. ‘They certainly cared about his drug use—most definitely, but there was a lot of denial. If he told them the sun shone at night and the moon came out in the morning, they would believe him.’