Robyn Catchlove - Somewhere Down a Crazy River: A spirited life catching fish, love and wisdom

From the high seas through to the coincidental meeting of her Guru and beyond, Robyn Catchlove has lived an unconventional life. As a jack of many trades, she has managed a used car yard, done the travelling salesman gig, sold Lightning Ridge opals, and been the promotions officer of a race club. She holds a Master Grade 4 enabling her to skipper certain trading vessels in all Commonwealth waters.

Such a life has been lived across Australia, California, New Zealand, India, Nepal and Tibet and now in Sydney, where she resides in a garage fully decorated with 1970s stuff. Robyn constantly listens to funk, blues, kurri and classical music, plays drum, and always greets the unexpected with great delight.

She is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, writes poetry, short stories and political rants and these days is learning the blues harmonica and dabbling in the art of lino printing.

First published 2010 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

1 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright Robyn Catchlove 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Catchlove, Robyn.

Somewhere down a crazy river : a spirited life catching fish, love and wisdom / Robyn Catchlove.

9781405039802 (pbk.)

Catchlove, Robyn.

FishersQueenslandBiography.

WomenQueenslandBiography.

799.1092

Typeset in 12.5/14.5 pt Granjon Text by Post Pre-press Group, BrisbanePrinted by McPhersons Printing Group

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Somewhere Down a Crazy River

Robyn Catchlove

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To my extraordinary Mother and Father,
with unceasing love.

C onsidering that life is a profoundly unexplainable impermanence, thanks seems not enough, so I want to pay homage also to all those who have played any part in my life (including Tim), to my past, present and future teachers, especially my Rinpoche, and to all the water, land and sky animals whose lives have been sacrificed along the way; and to the magic ones, Pippa, Alex and Emma.

We are the people we are waiting for.

Ancient Hopi Indian proverb

W ho says children arent capable of murder? Certainly, Id well and truly had enough of the furtive yet regular bullying by my brothers when, as a little kid, suddenly I lunged out of the bath, turned on the youngest one and coldly delivered the following deadly sentence: Im gunna kill you, David. Right now! After all, they had both been relentlessly harassing me for years and, since Mum and Dad werent listening to me, this looked like the only way to fix things.

As the sound of gushing water revives this early childhood memory, I decide that swimming upstream in my mothers vagina has been the easiest part of my colourful life so far. It is 28 August 2007 and I have just arrived at the famous women only Ginseng Baths, at the back of Kings Cross in Sydney. Coincidentally, the full moon, the earth and the sun are performing a spectacular lunar eclipse, so not only is the night very intense, it makes me feel different too. Stripped naked, the surrounding full-length mirrors fully highlight the scars on my body that came from all my years on the sea. Internally, I can feel the invisible scars stirring up, trying to reach the surface. I mean it was a pretty tough way of life and please dont get me wrong, it wasnt all bad but still, I wouldnt wish what I went through on anyone else, especially not as a woman.

Floating face-down in the bubbling spa, I let the warm water rock me this way and that. It feels so womblike and safe, and makes me think how very different my own birth must have been probably I drove out in an eight-cylinder Holden, enthusiastically snatched up a packet of fags and a bottle of cheap whisky and blindly headed for the most exciting adventure I could find. Born with boundless, passionate enthusiasm, how could it have been so misread by others, especially the one I gave the most to? Tears spring up at the memories...

So, back in the mid 1950s as my brattish brother skittled away, I dashed to the kitchen, snatched up the nearest knife and, like an Olympic javelin thrower, bolted down our homes narrow full-length hallway and with almighty force thrust the silver blade into the bottom of Davids tender young spine, and ripped it upwards. God, it felt good. My brother fell onto the shiny linoleum floor and let his piercing scream fill the entire neighbourhood then he looked up at me, gave a trickster wink and continued the naughty hullabaloo until Mum and Dad arrived. As luck would have it, the knife Id plucked for Davids demise would not have cut through melted butter so he wasnt dead or even badly bruised for that matter, but he sure made it sound that way. Of course, on the surface, Mum and Dad saw that this was all my doing, so once again I was showered with verbal splatter and sent into shameful solitude. If only someone out there would listen to me.

By lunchtime the next day, in what was already a habit, I had wagged school and was at home preparing a cigarette. Liberally sprinkling Liptons tea-leaves onto a page of Adelaides daily newspaper, I rolled a very large, loosely wrapped cigarette, lit it up and took a drag. Smoking helped me think. It had been a rough week and a few things started to dawn on me. Even though Mum and Dad were loving, intelligent parents, both worked full-time and ran a very busy household, so no matter how hard I tried, I was not being heard. And now that David had survived my assassination attempt, it meant that he would continue to torment me even more heavily. Then there was me being a girl with a surname like Catchlove Ill leave you to imagine how incessant the cruelty of the boys at school were around that! Even though wagging school relieved some of that pressure, plus allowed me to avoid the absolutely dull, colourless lessons called education, I was still without answers to my main dilemma. What was it with the double brother standover tactics? Why did Roger and David spend their time making life hell for me? Why did everyone make me being a tomboy kind of girl so difficult?