Robin Levett (14 October 1925 – 14 August 2008) was an Australian travel writer, novelist, philanthropist, pilot, and breeder of racehorses anointed the "First Lady of Australian Racing" in the mid-1990s. Her eclectic interests ranged from fly fishing in Kashmir, about which she wrote a book, to running her own wildlife refuge in Victoria.
Biography
Robin Levett was born Robin Walker, the daughter of Major Geoffrey and his wife Aileen (Whiting) Walker in Sorrento, Victoria. As a girl, she attended the prestigious Hermitage School, from which she was expelled after she tried to burn it down. She later attended Toorak College in Mount Eliza, Victoria, which seemed to suit her better. She excelled, was named head girl and won the top prize in 1943. She subsequently studied at the National Gallery School, where she was awarded a coveted travelling scholarship.
Following her graduation, the gifted and hyperactive Australian was unable to use her travelling scholarship because of World War II raging; instead she enlisted with the Navy. Posted to a quiet billeting in Albert Park, Victoria, young Walker resigned. She next signed on with the Women's Auxiliary Service, Burma (Wasbees, the Australian equivalent of the WAVES), which sent her to Rangoon.
Following the war, Walker moved to England for a brief time before returning to Australia to work for British Signals Intelligence. Back in Australia, she married Geoffrey Levett, a successful businessman who produced his own line of frozen vegetables. His new wife went to work in the business, gaining her pilot's licence so she could fly her husband to meetings across the continent. Not content with half-measures, the new Mrs Levett gained a commercial pilot's licence, and then learned how to parachute – presumably in case her pilot's skills failed. Subsequently, she flew an air race around Victoria.
In the early 1960s the couple found a new avocation. They leased a filly named Never on Sunday. The horse turned out to be a winner, and soon they were breeding racehorses as well as racing them. They took up the Lyndhurst Lodge stud farm in Cranbourne, Victoria, and later also had the Willowmavin stud farm in Kilmore, before finally settling on Willowmavin. The venture was a success. In 1966 the Levetts won the Victoria Derby with their horse Khalifa; in the following year Khalifa won the VRC St Leger.
The couple also won the Perth and Brisbane Cups and countless lesser races. Their best finish in the Melbourne Cup was third. The Levetts co-owned the horse Buoyant Bird with former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
Robin Levett served for years on the committee of the famous Kilmore Turf Club, and as president from 1989 to 1994, the only woman ever elected president of a grade one Australian turf club. Despite her consuming involvement in horseracing and breeding she found time to open a wildlife reserve at Willowmavin, where she included rescued animals into everyday life. "Guests in the committee room at Flemington would be bemused", said the Australian newspaper The Age in its obituary of the racing legend, "when she would pull a young wombat from a large shoulder bag and feed it from a bottle."
Following the death of her husband Geoffrey Levett in 1990, Robin Levett was forced to close Willowmavin stud farm and its wildlife refuge. She took up writing to fill the void. Her first and most successful book, a novel entitled The Girls, was based on her experience growing up the third of three daughters of a military man. The book twice hit the bestseller lists in Australia, and led to her meeting her publisher – and second husband – Nick Hudson, whom she eventually married at age 77 (he was 70).
Levett showed the same sure touch in her writing as she did in horsebreeding. Her novella entitled The Rangoon Incident, based loosely on her experiences in Burma, began with this beguiling and macabre sentence: "I was at a murder once." The book went on to recount an incident in Rangoon in which a military officer sitting next to Levett in the officers' club was shot in the head and died in Levett's lap, a case of mistaken identity by a jealous husband.