Sydney Morning Herald, August 3, 2001
OBITUARIES

     David Mustard
     Mathematician, mountaineer, aesthete
     1930-2001

     When David Mustard was born in London, Britain was
     deep into the Great Depression. In India, Gandhi and the
     Indian National Congress were pressing for
     independence. Born of his English mother Lucy, Mustard
     was forever drawn to the India of his father, N.R.

     Deobhankar.
     Lucy Mustard, tall, striking and adventurous - but, some
     say, also feckless and improvident - had travelled to India
     and fallen in love with Deo, as he was called, in the heat
     and dust of Madras. There were obstacles enough to such
     a union in 1920s British India. To add to them, Deo, a
     doctor and son of a Brahmin school principal in
     Amravati, was active in the independence movement and
     often on the move - and several times jailed by the
     British.

     By the time Mustard was seven, when his mother went
     back to India, taking him to join his father, he had been to
     five schools in three countries - Britain, Australia and
     New Zealand.

     After an all too brief time together in New Delhi - when
     David Mustard was Gopal Deobhankar - the family was
     broken again by the exigencies of Deo's political
     activities. Mustard's longest continuous spell of
     schooling, and the happiest, was at Woodstock, an
     American school at Mussoorie in the foothills of the
     Himalayas.

     In 1947, when he was 16 and India was about to gain
     independence, he set off for New Zealand, as the best
     place to further his education. The ship was delayed in
     Sydney and he decided to stay.

     He grew up in the Sydney of the late 1940s, quickly and
     alone, though his mother eventually followed him to
     Australia. He worked as an office boy by day, attended
     night school to qualify as a radio operator but in 1949
     won a Commonwealth scholarship which enabled him to
     enter the University of Sydney. He graduated in science
     with honours in 1953 and worked as a physicist before
     turning to mathematics.

     David Mustard was very much part of postwar artistic life
     in Sydney, and for a while the expatriate Australian scene
     in Britain in the 1960s. He had a child, Tara. Then, with
     his first wife Judith, he had two children, Trinka and
     Jonathan. From 1973 he was husband to Barbara Spode
     and stepfather to her daughter India.

     For one with such a disrupted childhood, Mustard was
     remarkably calm and composed in his mind. He once said
     he was a socialist in his head but an anarchist in his heart.
     He was an atheist who found both peace and excitement
     in the life of the mind.

     When he said he was a citizen of all countries, and of
     none (though happy to have ended up in Australia), there
     was no pretence. He was a great cook (vegetarian), lover
     of music and art (especially Indian, both), a gifted linguist
     and amateur potter. He was a natural aesthete without
     affectation.

     He is remembered by the generations of students he
     taught at the University of NSW over 35 years until his
     retirement in 1995. He was much loved and highly
     regarded as a teacher and, by the end of his life, had
     contributed significantly as a scholar, on his own and
     helping others.

     "Typically," Professor Ian Sloan said at Mustard's
     funeral, "in recent years David took great pleasure in
     helping the Turkish mathematician Ozaktas and his
     colleagues in the writing of their book on fractional
     Fourier transforms. He drew great satisfaction from
     receiving an early copy of the book just before he died."

     But his enduring passion was India, to which he returned
     frequently, often to trek and climb, especially in the
     Himalayas of happy schooldays memory. In 1980 he and
     Barbara made a four-month, 1,500 kilometre trek, alone
     and unassisted, from Kashmir, through Ladakh to
     Garhwal.

     On retirement, Mustard had time to seek out his Indian
     family. Sadly, it was too late to meet the father he had not
     seen since childhood, but his cousins in Bombay and
     Nagpur embraced him warmly, and a circle was closed.

     Mustard died of cancer. He is survived by Barbara and
     her daughter India, and his children by his first marriage,
     Trinka and Jonathan and grandchildren Miles and Milan
     Ring and Lucy, India and Anna Mustard.

     John Slee