Stories from Sunny Avenue: Robyn Clauscen

At 75, Robyn Clauscen – the fifth Sunny Avenue resident in our six-part series – has learnt to treasure the good memories.

Robyn Clauscen of Sunny Avenue. Picture: Justine Walpole

One useful way to measure the best people in life is to start by measuring the worst. Robyn Clauscen, 75, of Sunny Avenue, Wavell Heights, Brisbane, once worked for eight years in the nearby Toombul Shopping Centre cinema. She ushered people to their seats, she sold them their tickets and she scooped their popcorn into boxes. Late one night at the end of a wearying shift, Robyn and a colleague strolled into an all-but-empty ­carpark to find that someone had defecated on the windscreen of her workmate’s car. Her colleague’s panicked response was to turn on her wipers, spreading the filthy ­discharge across the windscreen. Robyn simply shook her head and asked herself the ­obvious question: “Who would do such a thing?”

Robyn was 48 years old when she completed her senior certificate at night school and enrolled in a university psychology course. In the days when uni texts were not all found online but inside large walled book repositories commonly known as libraries, Robyn came across a cagey and ­ambitious young man who gleefully confessed to photocopying and then hiding all the shared not-for-loan exam study texts in impossible-to-find locations throughout the library shelves. “Who would do such a thing?” Robyn asked herself.

Years later, Robyn was working as the on-site psychologist at a volatile and crowded women’s shelter in New Farm, inner-city Brisbane, for women suffering from shocking domestic ­violence, dangerous mental health episodes, entrenched alcoholism and widespread drug addiction. It was in this shelter that Robyn made the heartbreaking discovery that there were men in this world of such unfathomable lowness that they made cold calls to her shelter to sell drugs to drug-addicted ­mothers. Door-to-door salesmen hawking little plastic bags to a captive market. “Who would do such a thing?” Robyn asked herself.

But at the opposite end of all that low-life stuff she can remember a woman who also worked in door-to-door sales. This was in the 1950s. The woman’s husband died too young and she was left to raise four children on her own. She drove a small Ford Anglia around the streets of Brisbane selling household appliances in order to feed her kids. Some days she sold oranges at ­markets from the boot of her car. Some days men in traffic would wind down their ­windows and abuse her. “Get back home to your children,” they yelled. When men weren’t abusing her they were ­making not-so-subtle ­suggestions to move her appliances presentation from the kitchen to the bedroom. But this woman endured all this to feed and clothe her kids.

One day she knocked on the door of a good man’s house. This man was a widower, raising three kids on his own. And that woman married this man. Some people said she never loved that man as much as she loved her first ­husband but she married him anyway because she loved him enough and she was never going to let that man’s three children grow up without a mother because she had seen what it was like for her own children to grow up without a father. Who would do such a thing?

“That was Mum,” Robyn says, her fingers ­tapping the sides of a half-full glass of water resting on the table in the rear courtyard of her house on the even-numbers side of Sunny Avenue.

Robyn Clauscen. Picture: Justine Walpole

That was Mollie Meade. The best of the best. Mother to seven, friend to hundreds. Kindness personified. Thoughtful to a fault, to her final hours. Mollie died at 91 in 2008, the year Robyn and her husband, Keith, moved to Sunny Avenue. Even on her deathbed Mollie was thinking of everyone but herself. She was thinking of her ­children. She was thinking of Robyn. And Robyn remembers the last thing her mother said before she died. Maybe the most beautiful words she has ever heard. And she wants to repeat this sentence now but the words make her weep, not because they are sad, but because they are so filled with life in the face of death. “Yours…” Robyn says. And she pauses to swallow. She breathes and gathers her thoughts. “Yours is the last….” But then she cries and she slaps her thigh, frustrated. “Agggh!” she says. “I can never say this without crying.” And she closes her eyes and tries again.

Sunny Avenue: A series by Trent Dalton

Robyn Clauscen says growing old is like tying abowling ball around your ankle and dragging it behind you wherever you walk. She’s always been active but something about being 75 is slowing her down. She’s suddenly got a debilitating ache in her left knee when she moves. The minor niggles in her back have turned to full-blown causes for ­concern and they’re intruding on her weekly schedule. “And that really pisses me off,” she says. The weekly schedule as it stands: Zumba class on Monday from 7.45am to 8.45am in the Burnie Brae Community Centre in Chermside, five ­minutes’ drive from Sunny Avenue. Art class after Zumba, then lunch, then line dancing class from 1.30pm to 3.30pm. Tuesdays are reserved for her weekly coffee catch-up with her older brother, Keral, and her older sister, Trish. Wednesday sees more Zumba in the morning and then dental and doctor appointments in the afternoon. Thursday is exercise and strengthening class followed by another art class, where she has been putting the finishing touches on a remarkably lifelike portrait of the artist Margaret Olley, one of Robyn’s heroes. Thursday afternoons she picks up Keith from his regular meeting at the local men’s shed. Friday is laundry day. Friday is cleaning day. Friday sucks. But then the weekend comes and she gets to go to the Dayboro Markets, 40 minutes’ drive north, where her teenage grandsons Quinn and Rohan sell scones, shortbread and rocky road treats of such deliciousness that they have banked enough money from sales to buy their first cars. She’s so proud of their work ethic, waking at 4am on ­market-day mornings to bake their scones and selling them in the hot morning sun when most of their mates are sleeping off hangovers.

Robyn couldn’t wait to be a grandmother. When her eldest daughter, Heidi, a special education teacher, gave birth at 36 to Quinn, Robyn gave up work as a psychologist and devoted her days to caring for Quinn until he was at kindergarten so Heidi could continue to work. Robyn’s youngest daughter, Katrina, lives in Sydney and works for Qantas and has told her mum she doesn’t want to have kids. Robyn has finally learnt not to always remind big-hearted Katrina of what a great mother she would be, because that’s not always a thing that Katrina wants to hear.

Robyn Clauscen and husband Keith. Picture: Justine Walpole

Today is coffee catch-up day with Keral and Trish. Keral is a retired carpenter with a passion for photography and history. On Robyn’s garden table, surrounded by native plants, a well-kept lawn and a sign for the outside dunny marked “Loo”, Trish and Robyn sip cold water in the ­stifling heat as Keral updates his sisters on his ­latest investigations into their shared ancestry.

“Thomas Upton!” he whispers. A convict ­relative on his mother Mollie’s side. “He was on the Second Fleet that came out in 1790.” Keral slaps the table with pride. “He was a carpenter,” he sings. A chippy, just like Keral. Thomas Upton unwittingly bought clothes from a 14-year-old boy named John Cooper, who had stolen 49 ­calico shirts from his employer. Upton bought the clothes so he could pass them on to his wife, who was with child and who cut up the clothes and sewed them into a tablecloth and a frock for her soon-to-be-born baby. In the Old Bailey, young Cooper was sentenced to a whipping from his boss, but poor old Thomas Upton was sentenced to 14 years in an unknown land that would one day be known as Oz. Trish knows why he was sentenced so harshly. “They needed the tradies,” she says.

The story goes, according to Keral, that Thomas Upton and many other diseased and starving ­convicts were forced to swim to shore from their anchored ships. Some were too sick, too weak, and drowned before reaching this great southern land. “That swim!” Keral says, shaking his head. “If Thomas doesn’t survive that swim, we’re not sitting here today.” No scones on market-day mornings. No Zumba classes on Monday. No time in the sun on Sunny Avenue. So swim, Thomas Upton, swim.

Robyn was seven years old when she saw Keral walk on water. They were playing in the Nudgee Waterhole Reserve, a morning’s bike ride from their old house in Northgate, a suburb neighbouring Wavell Heights. “Look at me!” Keral ­hollered, and Robyn gasped at the vision of her brother padding across the silky brown water, miraculously stepping on a line of floating lily pads. And Robyn wanted to feel her brother’s magic, not realising that Keral was, in fact, treading along an unseen tree branch just beneath the surface. Robyn leapt from the water’s edge and onto the nearest lily pad and promptly sank to the bottom of the murky waterhole, where the welcoming bottom-dwelling reeds wrapped around her twig-thin legs and wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard she kicked. Swim, Robyn, swim. Then the reaching hand of her big brother broke through the sunlit water. And ain’t that just the story of Keral, always willing to lend a hand.

Sunny Avenue: A series by Trent Dalton

Robyn’s father’s name was Herbert but he calledhimself Jay. Her mother’s name was Ita but she called herself Mollie. Jay worked on his ­family’s 12,000ha sheep station 80km outside Longreach, central west Queensland. He was good with his hands: he built windmills; he built simple guitars to strum as the sun went down. Jay met Mollie while on a trip to Brisbane to see his sister, Ina, who was Mollie’s best friend through their nursing training at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. “You two are in love,” Ina told Mollie. “You best get married before he goes back home or Mum will stop him.”

“She’d interfered in his relationships before,” Trish says. “Mum’s family were Catholics and Dad’s family were Protestants. They decided to get ­married straight away, essentially elope. They were married in Brisbane’s St Stephen’s Cathedral but only in the side chapel. They couldn’t marry in the main cathedral because Dad wasn’t Catholic.”

Mollie moved back to the station with Jay but she was a city girl who struggled to adjust to the dusty and isolated central west. Jay’s sisters were tough on her. Jay’s father was a quiet man who expected silence at the dinner table. Mollie’s outback cooking wasn’t up to scratch. The only way to cook Longreach cow tongue is to boil it in a pot with a handful of marbles. When the ­marbles are soft enough to eat, so is the cow tongue. ­Mollie’s cow tongue was tough enough to wrap around a spare wheel and drive to town.

Jay and Mollie soon moved back to ­Brisbane, where their kids – Keral, Trish, Robyn and the youngest, Don – would grow up in a small-but-big-enough house in Northgate. World War II was raging, and Jay wanted to do his bit for his country. He applied three times and was rejected each time because the medical examiners said he had a bad heart, a heart murmur that could not be fixed in the 1940s. The neighbours always wondered why such a strapping and capable man like Jay – 6ft tall with farm-hardened bones – wasn’t on the battlefields of Europe and it was with a soft and broken voice, years later, that Jay told his oldest son Keral that he once opened up his letterbox in the seemingly sweet suburbs of Brisbane to find a white feather.

Robyn has a vivid memory of farewelling her father at an airport. She’s nine years old and she hugs him and watches his plane fly off into the sky. She knows now that her father was flying to ­Longreach to visit family but whenever she thinks of that moment the young girl in the memory is convinced that her father is flying into the sky because he is on his way up to heaven.

Only days after that airport farewell, Robyn came home to find her siblings hugging their mum on her bed. Everybody was weeping and Robyn didn’t understand why. Her father had finished eating a roast meal in the homestead and died of heart failure right there at the dining table. “They found he had a leaky valve in his heart and 12 months after he died they performed the first pig valve heart operation in a human being,” Keral says. “If he had lasted 12 more months he might have made it to one of these operations.” That’s a 10-minute ­operation these days, Trish says.

It still hurts Keral to think about. It was 1954. Keral was 15. “You see these mongrels today who beat their wives and leave their kids and they live to 97,” he says, shaking his head. “He was the best father in the world and he died at 42.”

Mollie wanted to die after that, too. She wanted to follow Jay up to heaven, no question, because she loved him like nothing else down here on Earth. But she hopped into the family’s Ford Anglia and instead of driving it into oncoming traffic she drove it from house to house, suburb to suburb, selling household appliances.

Robyn did not weep for her father the way her siblings and her mum did. She doesn’t know why. There was no formal goodbye to their dad for Robyn and her siblings. The funeral was in ­Longreach and Mollie didn’t want her kids to see their father being buried. Robyn simply put her father’s death in a place in her mind she rarely went. Then one day when she was 16 years old she was alone in the house and a song called Oh! My Papa came on the radio. A hit for Eddie Fisher in 1954, the year her dad died. Oh, my Papa, he always understood. Gone are the days when he could take me on his knee. And with a smile he’d change my tears to laughter. “It came on and I just broke down crying,” Robyn says. “I just couldn’t control myself. For many years I didn’t grieve. Then all my ­grieving came at once.”

Sunny Avenue: A series by Trent Dalton

Robyn lives on an age pension. Roughly $400 aweek to spread across a seemingly endless pile of bills and rising living expenses. “We’re dipping into savings almost every fortnight now,” she says.

She tried to scale back on gift-buying this past Christmas, as much because of her ever-dwindling finances as the way her stomach has been turning in recent years at the rabid indulgence and unashamed sense of entitlement the silly season seems to further expose each year. In a crowded shopping mall just before Christmas, Robyn got talking to another grandmother. “Have you finished your Christmas shopping?” Robyn asked, cheerfully. And the grandmother sighed, daunted and spent. “Well, my granddaughter just gave me her list.”

“She gave you a list?” Robyn gasped.

The best gift Robyn ever received as a girl was a doll called Debbie that her mum paid off in instalments. Debbie didn’t talk. Debbie didn’t have built-in sensors that could make her eyes light up when someone walked past her. But Robyn made do with Debbie. Robyn always made do. Things were grim after her dad died. But then Mollie met a good man named Nick Meade, a widowed father of three children – Margaret, Chris and Kevin – and Robyn’s family of five became a family of nine. Her very own Brisbane Brady Bunch. Robyn couldn’t call Nick “Dad”, because that name would always be taken, but she called him “Papa Nick” and she loved him with all her heart and soul. He was a sheet metal worker for the federal government’s Postmaster-General’s Department.

Soon Robyn was old enough for high school and she had to make do there, too, like all the Banyo State High School girls had to do. No special academic subjects for the girls of her high school. “We didn’t get offered the higher academic ­subjects,” she says. “Sorry, Robyn, you’re a girl, you can learn maths, English, shorthand, cooking and knitting.” She left in Year 10, found a job as a ­hairdresser and took off across Australia with a boy named Keith Clauscen, who was a National Serviceman – a “Nasho” – alongside his close friend, Keral. Keith and Keral were never called over to Vietnam but Robyn’s younger brother Don volunteered to go because he was like his father and he lived for adventure. He was only 19, like the song goes. He served in the armoured personnel unit. Tanks. Don sent audiotapes back to his family from Vietnam detailing his operations, always leaving out the parts about blood and fear and loss.

“He’d write letters to me and tell me all the horrible things he was seeing but then he’d write to Mum and tell her it was like a holiday camp,” Trish says. “‘All wonderful here, Mum’. I have no doubt he came home with PTSD.”

But Don married a good woman, raised three good kids and moved to the Sunshine Coast. He was walking along a beach almost seven years ago, aged 65, when he had a stroke that left him how he is today. “Can’t read or write,” Keral says. ­“Massive clot on the left side of his brain.”

Keith and Robyn. Picture: Justine Walpole

Robyn and Keith raised their two girls Heidi and Katrina in a house in Nundah, a neighbouring suburb to Wavell Heights. It wasn’t until her daughters were in high school that Robyn entertained thoughts of becoming a psychologist. “I was always interested in it and so was mum,” Robyn says. “I went back to night school and so did Mum. We did modern history and English together. Mum loved learning and she went on to be a social worker in Fortitude Valley with St Vincent de Paul. She had that big heart and that was the perfect job for her.”

When she completed her psychology degree Robyn went from working in the cinema to ­working for an Anglicare women’s shelter in New Farm. “I was so innocent before that job,” she says. “I saw some really bad stuff. This was 1980s Brisbane. We worked with women from 18 to 80 years old. There were women who would sleep down in New Farm Park. They’d get bashed and raped. Old women. We tried to get them accommodation and get them off the street. I was there for eight years and it was a very stressful eight years.”

Sometimes Robyn would ask her clients about their lives and she would be struck by how closely their early stories matched her own. Backyards bathed in sunshine. Swims through creeks. Bike rides. Sunday roasts. So often these women began their lives as intelligent, hopeful girls with big dreams and big hearts and so often their lives were dramatically changed by the worst kind of people. There was always some key incident, some turning point, the women could trace their lives back to that changed everything. Abandonment. Abuse. Neglect. One bad choice. One run of bad luck.

“It came to a time one day where I just broke down and cried with them,” Robyn says. “It was all too much. I don’t believe in the theory that psych­ologists should be impervious to these things. You can’t sit there with a woman who’s crying and telling you these things and not react. I used to cry right there with them. And then I’d feel so happy when you had some win for them, when you got them a place to live or got them some money to pay a debt.”

If there was a beginning to the end of her time working in that shelter, it was when the girl walked to the river. “This girl came in one day and I knew she was a frequent visitor,” Robyn says. “She had an eating disorder and she wanted to go to this place to get some help and so I phoned this place to ask if they had a spot for her and then I had to tell this girl that they didn’t have a place for her. And then she just walked off and walked into the Brisbane River and she didn’t come out.”

Robyn is silent for a long moment. “I spent a long time asking myself, ‘What didn’t I do for her?’ And I know you can’t do that to yourself.” She shakes her head. “She seemed OK when she left me.”

So ain’t that just like life. A woman works for eight years in a shelter changing countless lives and engaging in thousands of positive human interactions but the one interaction that keeps coming back to her is the one that ended in a ­tragedy she played no part in.

But the older she gets, the better Robyn ­Clauscen gets at measuring the good stuff before the bad stuff; the best people before the worst. She remembers her dad and her brothers and sisters and her husband and her daughters and her grandsons. She remembers Mollie Meade. Her mum moved into a retirement village in her ­twilight years and lived with so much verve and vitality that her neighbours complained about her noise and the fact she was still driving in her late 80s. “I don’t want to be around all these old ­people!” Mollie quipped to her children.

What if you could reduce your daily thoughts, expectations and worries to the things you know are going to matter to you on your deathbed? Robyn slept on a mattress in Mollie’s room during the last four days of her life. All that Mollie was concerned with by the end was love. Nothing but love. She was drifting in and out of consciousness at the end. She would stare at the end of her bed and speak of her first love, Jay, standing and watching over her. “Just go, Mum,” Keral said to Mollie at her bedside. “Just go now and be with Dad.”

On the night of Mollie’s death Robyn had to go home briefly to change her clothes. It wasn’t long before the nurses called to say Mollie was gone. It makes Robyn sad to think she wasn’t there in that moment when her mum died. She wasn’t there to hold her hand, to hug her, to love her. But Mollie would be the first to tell Robyn that life rarely unfolds with perfect timing. One must make the most of the good moments when they happen. And Robyn’s getting better at remembering the good moments more often than the bad ones. And so she tries again to say those last words she heard come out of her mother’s mouth and she doesn’t let her tears stop her from saying them this time. “Yours is the last face I’m going to see,” Mollie said, staring up at her daughter, Robyn. “And what a beautiful face it is.”

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Next week: Gary Diggles’ story

Read more stories from Sunny Avenue

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