Connecting Seniors
Robyn Catchlove · 61 min
Robyn Catchlove's life — from top-secret weapons research to a decade of professional fishing in crocodile country, from a chance letter to the Dalai Lama to becoming Katoomba's official witty public nuisance — is a masterclass in what it looks like to live with radical curiosity, hard-won compassion, and unstoppable resilience.
Robyn Catchlove grew up poor in Adelaide with parents who fed her voracious mind through weekly library visits and games of puns at the dinner table. Her father taught himself Latin and read the dictionary for pleasure. Her mother, when Robyn was in her fifties and apologizing for the unconventional life she had chosen, told her something that would reshape how she held her own story: your life is written already. Not as fate, but as a shape that, looking back, made sense.
After a decade transcribing top-secret briefings about the first spy satellite, Robyn left her stable marriage and sailed into the ocean with a man who built fishing boats in a shed. For ten years she wrestled crocodiles, cyclones, and the raw demands of the wilderness between New Guinea and Queensland. She learned to read tides and rivers, to kill and fillet cattle with her hands, and to sit with knowledge passed down by word of mouth from Aboriginal elders like Peggy at Aurukun, who showed her how to read the land with respect and gratitude.
After a drunk-driving arrest in Cairns, Robyn wrote a spontaneous letter to the Dalai Lama and, remarkably, received a reply. She chased him across New Zealand with the same fearless curiosity that had driven her whole life, and eventually met him at Wellington Parliament House. What reached her heart was not formal Buddhism but the simple, irresistible knowledge that compassion sits at the centre of all beings. She discovered that when she stopped grizzling about what she should or shouldn't have done and started thanking everything, even the things she disliked, forgiveness fell away naturally.
Now based in Katoomba, Robyn holds space for strangers in their grief, shares stories on community radio, and dances through her neighbourhood as its official witty public nuisance. She is a masterclass in what it looks like to live with radical curiosity, hard-won compassion, and the willingness to hold regret lightly rather than as a burden.
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