The Woman Behind the Naked Buddha

This was my major assignment for Professional Writing. I can't be arsed proofing it, so I thought I'd leave it as a symbol of my personal journey as a writer. Blech!

Please to enjoy...

The best piece of advice Adrienne Howley can give to people is to write your life story. It doesn’t matter whether it seems uninteresting, or lacking in adventure. Just write it down.
Unfortunately, her own advice is a little bit hard to take. Adrienne is having trouble writing her autobiography. The problem? She has simply done too much in her life. For a fledgling writer, the problem of having too much material to choose from seems a wonderful problem to have. Perhaps Adrienne’s problem is that she has had so many wild and wonderful adventures.

When I first met Adrienne she was a fellow university student, and had already written a book on Buddhism, The Naked Buddha (the follow-up to this book, The Naked Buddha Speaks, was published in 2002). Adrienne has been coping with visual impairment for several years now, and walks with a cane. Despite her disability, she has written books, attended university, and still volunteers part-time for the Respite Volunteers for Palliative Care In Maitalnd.

When we meet again for an interview, Adrienne is now a graduate of the University of Newcastle, having completed a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Philosophy. When I called to confirm the interview the previous day, she told me she was taking me to one of her favourite places for lunch. She guides me to the Heritage Café in the main street of Maitland, overlooking the river. Amazingly, she knows the way from memory.



Adrienne now lives in Lorn but grew up in South Yarra, Victoria. When she was seven years old, she suffered what she tells me was the greatest tragedy of her life. Her mother took her and her brother to Sydney, leaving her father, a talented musician, in Victoria. She would not see him again until she was a teenager.

A difficult childhood followed, and at one point, Adrienne and her brother were sent to an orphanage after her mother was detained by police regarding an incident in which her mother attacked a lover. “One day [the police] came to the school and picked us up, and nobody told us why. I thought my mother and father must be dead.

“We had no idea why we were there, and we were kept in separate orphanages,” she says. “One day my mother came and got me, and dressed me up beautifully, and then we went to Baulkham Hills and got my brother. Still, no word, no explanation…you never knew what was going to happen to you”, she says. “Don’t ever put me in a position where I can’t ask questions”.

Adrienne later became a nurse, enlisting in the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service. She was discharged in 1943 after getting married, and her flair for writing was evident even then. “The first novel I wrote was when I was in the Army, and as I wrote another chapter the others would join me in the mess hut to hear the next exciting chapter.”


Adrienne continued nursing, and it was her nursing career that put her in touch with the Australian poet Dorothea McKellar. “She loved to talk, and one day I asked if I could write her biography if I could get enough material and she said, ‘if you like, Sister dear, if you think anyone would be interested’, and the last two-and-a-half years of her life I was her private nurse.” In 1989, she published My Heart, My Country: The Story of Dorothea McKellar.

Adrienne’s difficult childhood contributed to her need for the world to make sense, and her quest for the meaning of life not only informed her writing but changed her life in the process. Her search had yielded unsatisfactory results until her son left a book on her table, telling her, “here, mother, read something decent for a change.” That book was The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha.

It was one of the Buddha’s final teachings – “don’t believe a word I have said just because I said it, out of respect for me: investigate, investigate, investigate” – that signalled the end of her search and in 1982, Adrienne was ordained a Buddhist nun by the Dalai Lama, an honour that had never before been bestowed on a western woman. At 57 years of age, she was the oldest of her group to receive her orders, but she credits her age with her ongoing commitment to Buddhist teachings, as only two people who took their vows with her that day are still practising Buddhist nuns. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, congratulated her, nudging her in the chest and telling her, “it is good to see an older person taking vows”.

In 1964, Adrienne was faced with a great challenge when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. “On Christmas Eve morning I got a phone call from [the surgeon], and he said my test was positive and I asked what does that mean? And he said an operation. I said when, and he said immediately”.

After the operation, Adrienne was told she may only have two to seven years to live, and this lead her to a big adventure. “That’s when I began to slowly think about, what do I want to do with these last few years, if that’s what I’ve got? And I wanted to use every faculty to the utmost before I go”.

While living in a small flat in Elizabeth Bay, Adrienne looked out and saw, “what to everyone else was a pain in the back, but what I thought was the most beautiful little boat I had ever seen”. She made her son find out who owned the boat, and he found the owner. She made a deal to sell her own yacht, which was bigger and probably better, and pay her own way if she could be his crew. After cooking him dinner under sail, he said yes.

Adrienne seems to light up when she talks about her momentous sailing trip. She left Sydney Harbour on April 3, 1968 in a 36ft gaffed rigged cutter that “looked about a hundred years old.” Everyone had told her the owner of the boat, her captain, was mad, but when she heard this she would say airily, “isn’t everyone who sails in a small boat mad?” She didn’t know then exactly how mad her “brave captain” would turn out to be. His name was Harry, but she rarely refers to him by name.

The trip, which took over four years to complete, included making friends with pirates in Indonesia (“I met a lovely girl pirate. Her father was building her her very own boat”), brushes with the law in Lombok (“we got away because they didn’t know what to make of us”), and running out of food down the east coast of Africa. With a captain who wouldn’t listen to her directions, Adrienne had little to do but cry. “It got to the point where I just couldn’t talk from all the crying. I’d open my mouth, and out the tears would come”. Before reaching land, they had to deal with a rotten sail, 1 litre of petrol, a broken engine and no wind. Things were so desperate that she began throwing bottles overboard with messages in them, convinced that it would be the only way she could ever contact her sons again.

Adrienne’s often difficult trip was made worse by her captain. His paranoia, which she chalks up to an inferiority complex, kept him from teaching her how to navigate, as he was convinced that once she knew how to handle the boat she would push him overboard. After hearing of how he tried to attack her one night with a hammer, I begin to think she should have thrown him overboard.

Instead, she chose a more diplomatic measure. She convinced him she was a witch. As he was often below deck, Adrienne had a much better idea of what the weather would be like, and she told him she could control the weather using some ‘Tuscan spells’. She says, “he would hear me scratching on the deck and stamping my feet and he’d say, ‘what are you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘look, it’s just necessary that I do all this to get a wind’. You

know if there’s calm, there’s going to be a wind eventually. And of course when the wind came along, who did it? I did”.

He was so impressed with Adrienne’s sailing skills he proposed to her. She politely declined. She told him, “no, thank you, my brave captain”. Then she adds, “if I married you I would throw you over the side”. Once they were back in Sydney, she was determined to never see him again.

After hearing about this voyage at sea and all of the other amazing things that have happened in her life, I tell Adrienne that I’m beginning to understand why she’s having trouble writing her autobiography. The trip around the world in itself is enough to fill a book. Or at least, it would make for a great film.
As I bid Adrienne farewell, I watch her steady progress along the Belmore Bridge and I am struck by all the things Adrienne has accomplished, most of these while dealing with a disability. At 81, her future plans include learning how to use the computer and making the leap from writing non-fiction to fiction. And finally writing that autobiography.