‘Why have you only fed your son tea?’ she asked.
‘Because I don’t have any milk.’
Before she left, Robyn’s Christian friend made a solemn promise.
‘I swear by God that when I get back to Australia, I’ll help you get out of here.’
She was as good as her word. Three months later she sent enough money to Jakarta to buy plane tickets home to Sydney for Robyn and the two children. Robyn later wondered about the motivation for her act of kindness. ‘I’m not saying she didn’t do it out of the goodness of her heart, but I think the fact that I’d become a Muslim and needed “saving” was also in there somewhere.’ When Robyn told Bambang she was leaving, he offered no objection; he even took them to the airport to say goodbye. ‘Take care of yourself and look after the baby’ were his parting words, as Robyn, Devi and baby Mohammed left to return to Australia.
*See note on page 392.
5
THE DEATH OF ROBYN
Sydney, 1978–1980
Two weeks after touching down in Australia, and after visiting her local GP for a checkup, Robyn was admitted to the Mona Vale hospital on Sydney’s northern beaches. She was diagnosed with malnutrition, immune deficiency caused by blood loss, and a raging uterine infection, which had gone untreated since Mohammed’s birth and had spread to spawn secondary infections in her liver and kidneys. She was hooked up to a drip and fed antibiotics intravenously then discharged after ten days.
Robyn and the two children, three-year-old Devi and Mohammed, now aged seven months, moved in with Bessie and her younger daughter Susan, who were living in a granny flat in the backyard of their old fibro house in Dee Why West. They had vacated the house and moved into the bungalow in the garden when Robyn and Bambang had left hurriedly for Indonesia after the drug bust. But two adults, a teenager and two small children was more than the little flat was built to hold, and not long after their arrival the owner told them they had to leave.
Reliant for income on her single mother’s pension, Robyn rented a room in a dilapidated doss house on the waterfront at Manly Wharf near the aquarium. She and the children slept in the same bedroom and shared a common kitchen and bathroom with a motley collection of junkies, drug dealers and winos. ‘It was a terrible place, it was gross’, she recalls. The linoleum flooring was thick with grime. ‘The baby was crawling by this stage but I wouldn’t let him on the floor at all; I either carried him or he was in bed.’ Despite their mean accommodation, Robyn was elated to be home. ‘She was just relieved to be back. She always had this amazing smile—and she was just all smiles’, remembers her old classmate Deborah Jensen. Her friends in the surf crowd passed a hat around to raise money for a bond and helped her find a garden flat at Narrabeen overlooking the lagoon.
About a year after her return to Australia, Robyn received a phone call out of the blue from Bambang’s mother in Jakarta. Bambang had been arrested for possession of drugs and was in a Denpasar prison. His parents were beside themselves. Apart from the public shame for the family, serious drug offences could carry the death penalty, and his father’s money, rank and clout were proving insufficient to get Boy out of this particular fix. They believed an appeal for mercy from his orang bule wife and mother of his children might just be enough to save him. ‘They wanted me to come to set up the impression that he was a good family man who had gone a bit off the tracks, and to give assurances to the judge that he’s going to come back to Australia and start a new life.’
After borrowing the airfare from her mother, Robyn left the children with Bessie and Susan and flew to Jakarta. She was greeted by her father-in-law, Amir Andjilin, who took her first to the jail to see Bambang and then to the home of the judge presiding over his case, to pay their respects and beg for clemency. Bambang was a fine upstanding husband and father who had seen the error of his ways and wished only to be reunited with his family in Australia where he could start a new life, Robyn assured the judge. Apparently convincing in the role of tearful supplicant, Robyn’s performance combined with his father’s connections—and no doubt an appropriate token of the family’s appreciation—was enough to secure Bambang’s release.
Robyn returned to Australia and next petitioned the immigration department to overlook Bambang’s previous drug conviction in Sydney and renew his residency status so he could be reunited with his family. No mention was made of his latest infringement in Indonesia, of which the Australian authorities were presumably unaware. Once again Robyn’s entreaties had the desired effect. A new visa was issued and Bambang flew back to Australia, ‘with all the promises in the world that he was going to wake up to himself’, she recalls.
But Bambang’s penitence—and their reunion—proved short-lived. Unqualified and reluctant to return to factory work, he remained unemployed and they made do on social security benefits. Robyn thought he had stopped taking drugs, but while rummaging through the medicine cabinet she found a stash of the benzodiazepene Rohypnol. She knew enough about narcotics from the surf scene to know that Rohypnol was the prescription drug of choice for heroin addicts. When she confronted him, she says he admitted he had graduated to heroin.
Not long after this, Robyn was hanging the washing on the line in the garden when two-year-old Mohammed woke up crying. Bambang, apparently in a drug-induced stupor, gave the baby a dose of Rohypnol—or else the child took it himself after finding it on the bedside table, as Bambang claimed. Either way, the toddler fell unconscious and had to be rushed by ambulance to the Mona Vale hospital. Robyn was enraged.
‘When I leave this hospital and take my son home, you will not be there’, she told him. ‘If you promise to leave us alone, I will tell them it was an accident. If you don’t, I will tell them you did it on purpose, and you will be charged with attempted manslaughter—or manslaughter if the baby dies.’ When Robyn and baby Mohammed came home from hospital three days later, Bambang had packed his things and gone.
She was now twenty-six, and the life of Robyn Mary Hutchinson was not going according to plan. She had envisaged a career, a stable home life and ‘a big happy family’. Instead she was separated from her drug-dependent husband, bringing up two children alone, and working night-shift as a barmaid at the Steyne Hotel, where one night an obnoxious drunk tipped a beer over her head. It was looking far too much like her mother Bessie’s life for Robyn’s liking. Unlike her mother, she had by now sworn off drugs and alcohol for life after seeing their ravages at close quarters. She briefly tried a career in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, but her brusque intolerance proved ill-suited to counselling; asked to advise on a couple of heroin addicts who had hired their eight-year-old son out for sex to fund their habits, she wrote: ‘Stand them up against a wall and shoot them’.
Robyn felt angry and betrayed at the direction her life had taken. At times she despaired of the future. It was a struggle to maintain her faith. ‘My practice of Islam had almost disappeared. I still believed in God, but I had no real knowledge of Islam, other than “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger”, and that was it.’
One summer evening a workmate from the Steyne came over to take Robyn out for a night on the town. She had lined up a babysitter and they were heading for a disco in the city. Her friend had brought a pizza to share before they went.
‘I can’t eat it’, said Robyn, pushing the cardboard carton away.
‘Why not?’ asked her friend.
‘It’s got pig in it. I don’t eat pig. It’s my religion.’
Her friend rolled her eyes.
‘What kind of religion is that—when the only thing you don’t do is eat pig? I’ve known you long enough, and as far as I’ve seen that’s the only thing you don’t do. What kind of religion is that?’
Four-year-old Devi was sitting under the table playing with a doll.
‘Mummy’, she piped up, for no apparent reason, ‘when I was a little girl, you taught me to say something before we ate. What was it?’
‘Bismilla hir Rahman
nir Rahim’, Robyn recited. In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.
Looking back years later, Robyn would recall this instant as an epiphany.
‘When I said it, I felt like I’d been hit over the head—it was physical pain. A feeling came over me like I was going to die. I felt like this was my last chance—Allah wasn’t going to give me any more chances. Either I was going to be true to this religion of Islam or else I would be lost for ever.’
Shoving aside the pizza box, Robyn fumbled for the White Pages phone book, looked under ‘m’, and found a number for a mosque at Surry Hills, in Sydney’s inner eastern suburbs. Her call was answered by a caretaker who spoke little English and listened, bewildered, as she blurted out that she needed help. He wasn’t sure what he could do.
‘You don’t understand’, she insisted. ‘I’ve been a really bad Muslim and I’m going to die.’
‘You come’, was his reply.
She called a taxi, bundled up Devi and baby Mohammed, and took them to the mosque, where the caretaker was waiting for them.
‘You come with me’, he repeated, lifting the children into the back of his car.
Robyn had no idea where he was taking them, as they motored south-westwards in the fading light through a trail of shabby suburbs strung out along Sydney’s Parramatta Road. Eventually they reached a shopping strip in Haldon Street, Lakemba, which is known for being Australia’s Muslim heartland. In the middle of the shopping centre they pulled up outside a bookshop with a sign in Arabic and a display window full of books, prayer mats, clothing and Islamic paraphernalia. It was owned by a couple of Australian Muslim converts, Silma and Siddiq Buckley.
Silma Buckley (now Ihram) was a well-known figure in the Australian Muslim community. Like Robyn, she and her husband Siddiq had travelled to Indonesia on the hippy trail in the 1970s and converted there to Islam. She had returned to Australia to become the youthful doyenne of a small but growing band of converts—or ‘reverts’, as they preferred to call themselves, believing that Islam is the universal religion and that those who discover it are simply reverting to their natural faith. She and Siddiq had set up the Muslim Services Association in an office in Haldon Street, with a shopfront that housed the Muslim Women’s Shop and Centre.
Silma recalls the day an extremely agitated Robyn showed up on her doorstep and poured out her story. ‘You don’t know me but you would have read about me—I’m the marijuana baby’s mother’, Robyn announced.
‘I remember when she came in, because she spent a fair bit of time talking to me, and she was obviously having a really hard time’, says Silma. ‘She told me how her husband had left the country, and how the police had found the dope in the cot. She was very bitter about the media and what they had done to her, and she was bitter about her husband.’ Silma could see that Robyn was vulnerable, depressed and angry, but at the same time determined to take control of her life. ‘I found her overpowering in some ways. I’m quite an outgoing person, but I found her a bit intimidating. But she was obviously someone in need.’
Robyn was taken by Silma’s attire—a full-length, loose-fitting dress with a scarf tied around her hair. It reminded Robyn of the outfit worn by her former servant girl, Muna, in Indonesia.
‘What’s that you’re wearing?’ Robyn asked her.
‘It’s called a hijab’, Silma replied.
‘Why are you wearing it?’
‘Because it’s a requirement for all Muslim women.’
‘Well, you’d better give me one too.’
Wrapped in the folds of fabric, she felt relief wash over her. ‘I felt like I’d come home. I felt an incredible sense of peace. I was at peace.’
Silma and Siddiq persuaded her to move with the children to Lakemba, where they assured her it would be easier to maintain her faith among a large Muslim community. They likened it to the Islamic tradition of hijrah, ‘where you leave something for the sake of Allah, something that’s bad for you, and you take a journey to something that’s good for you’, in Robyn’s words. The original hijrah was the Prophet Mohammed’s historic journey from Mecca to Medina in the seventh century, to escape his enemies and take shelter in the safe haven where he established his Islamic realm.
Robyn packed a single bag with three sets of clothing for herself and each of the children. ‘I left the rest behind— clothes, furniture, toys, everything I owned. It was quite a statement. I didn’t care any more. I just wanted that feeling of peace.’ She knew that this time there would be no going back. ‘I feel now that everything before that was a prelude to what I would become. This was the beginning of the real me—who I was and what I really believed in, and I felt it very intensely. And I made a promise to Allah that to the best of my ability I would try to learn this deen (religion) of Islam with everything that I had.’
She took to Islam with a convert’s zeal, redoubled by her own characteristic intensity and desperate need to order her life. Silma Buckley had already seen what happens when ‘vulnerable people’ convert to Islam. ‘When they find out there’s a way they can sort themselves out, they seize onto it like someone who is drowning seizes onto life support. Converts are often high maintenance, they have high emotional needs. They’re people on the outskirts of society. You find the same kind of person in a whole range of religious and alternative organisations—like Scientology, or Pentecostalism. Because they’re not your mainstream, conservative kinds of people. You have to be really at the edges of society before you’re able to make the jump to Islam, because it’s so unacceptable to mainstream Australians. It’s more acceptable to become gay than to become a Muslim.’
Through Silma and Siddiq Buckley, Robyn was welcomed into the tight-knit convert community. They were caring and supportive; they called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’; it was like the big happy family she had craved.
In keeping with Muslim tradition, Robyn’s friends suggested that she Islamise her name. One of the women at Lakemba suggested the moniker of a legendary eighth-century Iraqi teacher and ascetic named Rabiah al Adawiyah. According to Robyn: ‘She was a pious woman in the time when the men were very lax and didn’t do their Islamic duty. She led men into battle.’ The history books give a somewhat different account, describing the original Rabiah as a Sufi scholar, mystic and saint, who formulated an ideal of selfless worship, inspired purely by love of God, rather than by hope for paradise or fear of hell. One famous story tells how she ran through the town of Basra with a bucket of water and a torch, to symbolically douse the fires of hell and set paradise ablaze, so that people would devote themselves to worship for Allah’s sake alone. Her legendary fortitude and unyielding faith were recounted in many such tales:
One night Rabiah al Adawiyah was praying in the hermitage when she was overcome by weariness and fell asleep. So deeply was she absorbed that when a reed from the mat she was lying on broke in her eye so that the blood flowed, she was quite unaware of the fact. A thief entered and seized her chaddur (veil). He then made to leave, but the way was barred to him.
After several attempts to steal Rabiah’s veil—a symbol for luring her away from Islam—the thief heard a voice from the corner of the hermitage:
Man, do not put yourself to such pains. It is so many years now that she has committed herself to Us. The Devil himself has not the boldness to slink around her. How should a thief have the boldness to slink around her chaddur? Be gone, scoundrel!
And thus in 1980, at the age of twenty-six, Robyn Mary became Rabiah Maryam Hutchinson. It was a propitious choice of name, because her single-minded sense of mission would prove every bit as staunch as that of her namesake.
But it was more than just a change of name. As she saw it, it was her life starting over—the transformation she had been effecting since first leaving Australia was complete. ‘Robyn died that day, the day I went back and got my belongings and moved to Lakemba. I just literally walked out and left that person behind. It reminds me of the cicadas I used to go and collect as
a child. What I left behind was a shell, and it was empty because that wasn’t the person I was. The life that I had lived as Robyn was false, it wasn’t really me. I wasn’t leaving behind who I really was; it’s exactly the opposite—it was me becoming who I really am.’
PART 2
RABIAH
6
BECOMING RABIAH
Sydney, 1980
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah
Ash-hadu anna Muhammadar rasulullah
Hayya alas-salat
The pre-dawn wail of the muezzin wafted across the terracotta rooftops of suburban Lakemba, calling Muslims to pray at the Arabian-themed mosque in Wangee Road. The mellifluous chant that had merely piqued her curiosity the first time in Jakarta now filled Rabiah with a joyous relief and sense of belonging.
In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most
beneficent,
All praise and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the
worlds …
You alone we worship
You alone we ask for help
Guide us to the straight way
The way of those on whom you have bestowed your
Grace,
Not the way of those who have earned your Anger nor
of those who went astray.
Veiled in white and surrounded by hundreds of fellow Muslims, prostrated and praying in unison, their feet lightly touching to signify their communion, Rabiah knew for certain that she had found the true faith—and her true self.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 10