TRUE CRIME: Rosie Ayliffe is channelling her grief into a campaign to protect vulnerable young backpackers
When her 20-year-old daughter was brutally murdered in a Queensland hostel, Rosie Ayliffe needed answers. What she uncovered compelled her to launch a campaign to expose the dangers backpackers face in Australia, she tells Juliet Rieden.
It was 10 o’clock at night and in their home in England’s Derbyshire Hills. Rosie Ayliffe and her partner, Stewart, were on the verge of turning in when a knock on the door plunged them into the abyss of every parent’s nightmare. Initially Rosie assumed the two policemen now in her lounge room were there for something trivial, but their demeanour quickly suggested otherwise. “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” one of them started. “Your daughter’s been involved in an incident – she’s been fatally wounded.”
The officer was trying to soften the blow, but how could he? Rosie’s only child, 20-year-old Mia Ayliffe-Chung, had been murdered in the most horrific circumstances, stabbed in a backpacker hostel half a world away in remote north-eastern Queensland. It was incomprehensible. Rosie had only spoken to Mia that morning. “It was very distant from me. It was as if I was watching myself going through those motions. I didn’t feel panicked. I felt numb,” Rosie tells The Weekly as she recalls those minutes four-and-a-half years ago when “my reason for being was taken away”.
“Apparently denial is a form of coping strategy. You see, Mia was still in Australia as far as I was concerned. In my heart she was still out there. My brain knew that she was dead but I wasn’t accepting it. I didn’t accept it until Christmas [that year]. It took me five months to accept that she was dead.”
At the same time Rosie was hearing the terrible news, so was Mia’s father, Howard. The couple had tried for three years to get pregnant before Mia came along following a miscarriage, and while he and Rosie separated when Mia was barely three, leaving Rosie as the primary parent, Howard adored his daughter. “He was deeply shocked.
He loved her very much,” says Rosie.
Light up a room
Mia was a chilled-out baby which Rosie jokes may have had something to do with Howard’s JamaicanChinese heritage and as she grew up developed an independent mind coupled with a zest for life and a deep sense of empathy. Rosie worked as a teacher and travel writer and from an early age Mia embraced different cultures and was eager to follow in her mum’s footsteps and travel the world.
Following the 9/11 attacks in the US, Rosie noticed a change in attitudes where they were living in south London and this, plus a desire for Mia to experience a country childhood, prompted her to move north. It was a big step for the single mum and Rosie was slightly concerned that Mia might face racism away from the multicultural capital.
“It was always a worry, moving into the great white hills here in Derbyshire, but this friend of mine, who was actually the head of year, took her into the classroom on the first day and she said all eyes were on Mia. She introduced the new girl and every hand in the class went up, particularly the boys: ‘Miss, can she sit next to me, she can sit next to me’.
“From then on, Mia was invited everywhere; she was very courted locally by older kids and younger kids and everybody. Her funeral was absolutely packed with young people – a thousand-plus not only in the church but all round the church.”
By all accounts Mia entranced everyone she met and Rosie saw a bright future for her little girl. “I told her that she could do anything she wanted to do,” says Rosie. “She had qualities that I didn’t have and didn’t have qualities that I did have. I was bookish and studious and she was this light – she lit up a room. When I said that to her she was absolutely delighted. I actually told her to forget
university. You’re not that person. You are the front of house. You’ve got charisma, you’ve got other skills. You have the ability to lead.
“Mia was fun but very levelheaded. She didn’t discriminate between the in-crowd and everybody else. She had a love of humanity and she built bridges between different sets and communities. She was also ambitious – much more ambitious than I ever was. She wanted to make something of her life. She wanted to push herself. I think she saw Australia as a place where she could make that happen.”
When Mia made up her mind to go travelling in 2015 it was Rosie she turned to for advice. Rosie had travelled extensively in her 20s, including living in Turkey. Mia loved hearing her mum’s tales and Rosie says those stories definitely prompted a desire to explore the world in Mia.
But though excited, Mia was apprehensive. She planned a trip through Asia en route to Australia. “She said to me, ‘will I be all right?’” Rosie recalls. “I said make sure you’ve got people who will look out for you, and dress appropriately. Look around you at how people are dressing and dress as they do.”
Rosie followed her daughter on social media and the two were rarely out of touch. “I saw her taking that advice, from the pictures that were coming back. She was scarfed-up in Morocco; she had long sleeves in India, in fact she wore a sari.”
Like Mum, Mia enjoyed Goa by motorbike and posted a cute Mother’s Day message on Facebook with two photos and this caption: “Me in Goa, India 2015. Momma in Goa, India 1995 (with me in her belly). Happy Momma’s day. Miss you.”
Rosie says that when she saw that post and the photo of her that she didn’t even know Mia had, “I realised that Mia did look up to me and want to emulate me more than I’d realised”.
88 days tragedy
When Mia reached Australia she was jubilant and Rosie was relieved. Mia settled on the Gold Coast and worked first in the canteen at Bond University and then as a waitress in a nightclub. Rosie was a little concerned about the club, called The Bedroom Lounge Bar, but Mia assured her she was simply serving tables and that her apartment, which she shared with a girlfriend and a kitten they adopted, was just down the road. “She made friends everywhere she went and that put my mind at rest,” says Rosie, adding quietly: “You don’t expect some sort of maniac to suddenly stab your daughter.”
Mia was having fun and wanted to stay, but to extend her 417 Working
Holiday Visa for a second year the government required her to complete 88 days of farm work. The scheme, set up in 2005, is intended to support the agricultural industry with a supply of cheap, reliable labour while providing work for backpackers.
Like hundreds of others in the same boat Mia started to look for work and accommodation near that work for the required three months. “I couldn’t see any problem with Mia going into farming on a government program, and I envisaged something like the USA’s gap year program, Camp America: well-regulated and, at its best, mutually beneficial for all participants,” says Rosie, who was totally unaware of the dangers that lay ahead for her daughter.
The National Farmers’ Federation estimates that 417 visa holders comprise 25-35 per cent of the agricultural workforce in Australia. These workers are crucial to the rural economy. But there’s a flaw, a dirty secret at the heart of this scheme. The reason for the estimated figures, Rosie
later discovered, is that “there is no formal registration system … so nobody knows who or where they are, how they are being served by the system or how many there are.”
This lack of regulation has fuelled a system rife with abuse. Hostels promise work that doesn’t exist, luring backpackers to remote locations where they are trapped with mounting debts as they try to pay for their stay. The standard of accommodation and the working conditions have raised many questions about the levels of safety for these vulnerable backpackers who are a long way from home.
Mia had no interest in farm work and was struggling to find a suitable place, but she knew she had no choice. “She seemed to be panicking because she was running out of time,” says Rosie. “It was all very last minute when she said she was going with two friends to Townsville. It didn’t occur to me that this imperative could put them into danger. But as soon as she arrived in the hostel, she said, ‘it’s like a prison here, I hate it’.”
Only one of Mia’s friends ended up going with her and immediately Mia was anxious about the hostel where mixed accommodation and inflexible management meant she was the only female sharing with two men: her friend Chris and a Frenchman she’d never met called Smail Ayad. As Mia shared stories about the hostel and her work conditions with her, Rosie started to worry. “I Googled the hostel and I saw a review that called it ‘the hell hole’.”
There were snakes in the cane fields where she was working but the backpackers were not given any induction or training about the snakes or the machinery. “My mind was whirring and I said to her, look, you need to write everything down, because I thought she might have an accident. What I did just seems so inadequate now.”
In her investigations following Mia’s death Rosie discovered that Mia’s new room-mate, Ayad, had become obsessed with her. He was jealous of anyone else who spoke to Mia and even called her his “wife”, telling another backpacker that he wanted to sleep with her.
Mia didn’t tell her mum, she liked to fix her own problems, but she did confide in one of the local employers, Lorraine, who Mia hoped could help her. But then on the evening of August 23, 2016, 29-year-old Ayad snapped – his lawyer later described it as “a schizophrenic break” – and embarked on a violent rampage with a knife, killing Mia and also British backpacker Tom Jackson. Fellow backpacker Daniel Richards stayed with Mia trying to save her life but the knife had pierced her heart.
Changemaker
It wasn’t until Rosie went to the hostel in 2017 as part of her filming for ABC TV’s deeply affecting Australian Story that the final moments of Mia’s life were revealed to her. She describes them in her new memoir, Far From Home, which she felt compelled to write “to address what happened and impact change”. It’s a powerful and inspiring work that honours Mia’s memory and charts Rosie’s determination to make something good from her daughter’s tragic end.
Mia had fought for her life, running from her attacker. “I wasn’t surprised … because she was so feisty,” writes Rosie, who also learned that Mia was terrified of Ayad and had asked to move rooms. “Mia would not have stayed in a room with a man she felt threatened by who was saying ‘she’s my wife’. That was what upset me most. Why the hell did she stay in that room? Was she mad? No, she wasn’t mad; she just didn’t know how to escape. She was in the middle of nowhere in a one-hostel town,”
Rosie tells me.
Very quickly Rosie started to uncover the intricate web of issues around the 88 days requirement. Scams which involved ineligible farmers signing workers off and then the government refusing to recognise the work and denying visa ratification. Then there was sexual exploitation on fruit farms where “only girls” were required and numerous issues of hostels advertising non-existent
“It didn’t occur to me this imperative could put them in danger.”
employment in order to fill their beds and then holding them in a “debt bondage” scenario as visitors struggled to pay for accommodation without regular work. The more she investigated, the more abuse was revealed. “I suppose people saw my mission as one of transforming grief into bravery, and righting wrongs. I was told it would be a lifetime’s work, and that I was threatening the basis of the Australia economy,” she writes.
Rosie was certainly ringing alarm bells at all levels of government and especially within rural communities. “There are people who hate what I’m doing and I don’t give a shit about that, I don’t care if I’m ruffling feathers,” she says defiantly.
Rosie launched a petition and wrote an open letter to then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and had a productive meeting with the then leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten. It’s an encounter the politician remembers well. “My heart still goes out to Rosie Ayliffe and her family for their loss,” he tells The Weekly. “As a parent of kids now at that backpacking age I can only imagine what a nightmare that would have been. My feeling then and now was that young visitors to Australia should not experience such horrors. The current loose arrangements around 417 visas are bad for all workers – backpackers who get exploited and Australian workers whose conditions get driven down.
“All options should be on the table to fix this mess and prevent future tragedies. At the very least the industrial sectors that benefit from the schemes need to apply more rigour to work with unions and make it safe for all workers.”
Rosie felt compelled to make a difference and her work over the past four years has been impressive.
At first she established the website 88daysandcounting.com, which gave backpackers advice on how to obtain a second year visa safely with a directory of providers that fellow backpackers verified as safe and fair providers of regional work, and also set up an emergency fund which rescued backpackers who found themselves stranded in vulnerable situations. After a couple of rescues, the latter proved too difficult to fund and the website morphed into ‘Tom and Mia’s Legacy’, originally a Facebook group and now a fullyfledged campaign that has lobbied for changes in work regulation and anti-slavery laws and culminated in the upcoming release of Far From Home.
When I speak to her today Rosie says she thinks the 88 days scheme is broken and should be scrapped. “I’ve said I want it better regulated but how can it work when they’re sending young people to these remote areas which they say are too difficult for them to police?”
When she hits a brick wall Rosie thinks of Mia, who she calls her moral compass, and while she can’t wipe images of her daughter’s death from her mind, forgiveness was always her natural response. “I would like
to speak to Ayad’s mum just because I feel she’s lost – her loss and her grief must be on a par with mine. I don’t feel any anger towards her or blame because to all intents and purposes he was a good man. I know people who’ve met him, who met him before this happened, who have a lot of respect and time for him. There’s an aberration. Something went badly wrong. But I don’t feel hatred towards anybody. People might think it’s noble and a lot of people might think I’m foolish, but hatred destroys the person who feels it. It destroys the hater. It doesn’t even touch anybody else. It destroys you.
“I always questioned what I was doing by Mia’s standards and especially in the early days it felt like I would sit quietly and just talk to Mia, in a sense, about the direction and whether this was the path she thought I should take … Sometimes I miss my girl terribly, but if I stop and allow myself the time to consider, often
I find she was with me all along.”