The Mother Of Mohammed

An Australian Woman's Extraordinary Journey Into Jihad

Sally Neighbour

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780522857252
• eBook ISBN: 9780522859553

In The Mother of Mohammed, Four Corners journalist Sally Neighbour tells the extraordinary story of how a dope-smoking beach bunny from Mudgee, Robyn Hutchinson, became Rabiah-a member of the jihadist elite. Known among her peers as 'the mother of Mohammed', and as 'the Elizabeth Taylor of the jihad' in CIA circles, Rabiah lived for twenty years on the frontlines of the global holy war. With a reputation for tough investigative journalism, Sally Neighbour persuaded Rabiah to tell her story. She investigates how Rabiah became a trusted insider to the Jemaah Islamiyah, Taliban and al Qaeda leaderships, and married a leading figure in Osama bin Laden's inner sanctum. In The Mother of Mohammed Sally Neighbour discovers a world of converts and true believers. This unique and confronting account from inside the jihad helps us to understand the magnetism of the Islamist cause.

PART 1

ROBYN

1

ROBIN MERRY HOOD

Mudgee, New South Wales, 1953–1965

Sunday 2 August 1953 was a day of noteworthy events, chronicled faithfully as always in the Mudgee Guardian.

Another atomic weapons test to be held at the Woomera rocket range. Three men charged with sedition after a raid on ‘red haunts’ in Sydney including the printery of the Communist Review. Man tells the divorce court that his bride of eleven days knocked him out with a pot of rabbit stew.

And there on page two, tucked between the district cricket results and an advertisement for Kellett’s Ironmongery, was a small but eagerly awaited item of news: ‘A bonny baby daughter has come to brighten the home of Mr and Mrs Jim Hutchinson of Mudgee’.

Jim and Bessie had been trying for years, since the birth of their son George, now aged seven. Bessie had had four miscarriages and another son, Wayne, born with a hole in his heart, who died at four months. Herself an only daughter, Bessie had longed for a baby girl.

‘What do you want to call your sister?’ Bessie asked George, who was turning somersaults on the front lawn as his parents arrived home from Mudgee district hospital with their precious bundle.

‘Robin Merry Hood’, replied George, whose hero was the dashing brigand of Sherwood Forest. Bessie laughed. ‘Why Mary?’ she asked, not realising that George meant Merry, as in merry men.

‘So everyone will know she’s a girl.’

In keeping, more or less, with young George’s suggestion, the baby was named Robyn Mary Hutchinson. The story of how her name was chosen is a favourite and oft-told anecdote. ‘I always loved Robin Hood’, she says. ‘The principle of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor—not the stealing part, but just the idea of the rich having to give to the poor—really appealed to me.’

Like the legendary Nottinghamshire of mediaeval times, Mudgee in the 1950s was a community of haves and have-nots. Pegged out in the 1830s by the colonial planner Robert Hoddle, and enriched by the New South Wales gold rush, it was a town of wide streets, stately Victorian buildings and leafy parks. When the gold was exhausted, the district’s mineral-rich soils and the completion of a rail line to Sydney ensured that it continued to flourish as a producer of fine wool, fat lambs, vegetables, dairy products and wine. By the turn of the century, Mudgee was a bastion of the squattocracy, lorded over by a clutch of wealthy families such as the Loneragans and Kelletts who ran stores, mines and hotels. The divide was keenly felt by working-class folk like the Hutchinsons. ‘There was a right side of the tracks and a wrong side, and we lived on the wrong side’, Robyn would later recall.

Her first recollections were of playing in the yard of the family’s home at 51 Horatio Street, a lemon-coloured, cement-rendered bungalow with a Hills Hoist and a treehouse built in a huge old eucalypt out the back. Thursdays were washdays, when Bessie would light a fire under the big copper tub set in bricks in the laundry, and stir the household linen in boiling water and Sunlight soap until it was spotless.

‘If I close my eyes I can still the see the house and the white sheets flapping on the clothes line, and Maggie swinging back and forth on the sheets’, Robyn remembers. ‘Maggie’ was her magpie, the first of many wild animals she tamed as pets. ‘I have this thing with animals. I think I’ve always liked animals more than humans, and I got this magpie when I was two years old. It had a damaged wing and we nursed it back, and then it wouldn’t leave. I used to dress him up and put little hats on him, and play cowboys and Indians with him.’

When Bessie came out to unpeg her clean linen from the washing line, she would often find a row of dirty claw marks along the bottom of the sheets, and Maggie dangling like a feathered trapeze artist, swinging back and forth in the breeze.

Jim worked two jobs to provide for his young family. By day he was a salesman in the drapery department at Loneragan’s department store on a salary of eight pounds a week, and by night a ‘steward’—the term used then for a bar tender—pulling beers in the Neptune Bar at the Hotel Mudgee. He was fond of a beer himself and would often stagger home to Horatio Street three sheets to the wind, after a night of bowls at his regular haunt, the Soldiers Club. Jim and a mate were champions in the men’s pairs, in which they played ‘like infuriated soldier ants’ to take the trophy, the Mudgee Guardian reported.

Jim and Bessie had married in Sydney in June 1945 at the tail end of World War II, as Lord Mountbatten was declaring victory in Burma and US B-29 bombers were bombarding Osaka in Japan, a prelude to the atomic bombings that would end the war. Bessie was a dark-haired, high-spirited Mudgee girl who had left school in sixth grade and got a job in the coal town of Lithgow. She worked on the production line at the small arms factory, which made Bren machine guns during the war. Jim hadn’t been Bessie’s first choice. At the height of the war she had fallen in love with an American officer whom she’d met at a dance hall in Sydney while he was on shore leave. They’d become engaged, and at war’s end he had bought her a ticket to fly home with him to the United States. But Bessie’s mother, Lurline, was bed-ridden with heart disease and Bessie had to choose between leaving with her young fiancé and staying with her dying mother. She chose to stay, nursing her mother until her death at the age of forty-nine, four years after the war. From then on, she wore the air of a woman whose hopes had been dashed.

She married Jim on the rebound. The son of a Lithgow coal-miner, his given name was Kenneth Roy Hutchinson, but everyone called him Jim. He had left school at fourteen, worked variously as a salesman in the Sydney department store Mark Foys, a fruit and vegetable vendor, machinist, and telephone linesman for the Post Master General’s Department. He enlisted in the army in 1943, as a private in the Second Battalion of the Second Australian Infantry Division, but never made it overseas to fight, apparently because of extreme myopia. The closest he got to seeing action was at Townsville in north Queensland, home of the Australian Army’s Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery. His war record was distinguished only by an admonition for going ‘AWL’—absent without leave—and another for ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’, the details of which were not recorded. Because he never saw active service over seas, his father-in-law would often joke derisively about Jim’s time in ‘the bucket brigade’.

Bessie’s father, a dour Scotsman named Archibald Roy McCallum, was the bane of Jim’s life. Archibald was the grandson of a Scottish settler, Donald McCallum, who had migrated to the Australasian colonies in 1831, and turned his hand to farming on the fertile plains of the Cudgegong River valley around Mudgee. Donald and his wife Christina had nine children, among them Archibald’s father, John McCallum, born in 1845, who listed his occupation as ‘maintenance man, farmer, Gold miner’. John himself never struck it rich, but his eldest son, John Alexander, found a nugget the size of a cricket ball, enough to set himself up in comfort.

John junior’s brother, Archibald—Robyn’s grandfather— was a gifted horseman who turned his skills to training racehorses for a stud at Cullenbone on the Cudgegong River. Robyn recalls that on weekends Archibald would travel to race tracks around the district to cheer on his charges, dressed in his customary navy pinstriped suit and waistcoat, with his silver-grey hair parted neatly down the middle beneath a grey fedora hat. He drove a mustard-coloured Vauxhall with a wooden dashboard and leather seats, which he polished lovingly with saddle wax. Race days were the only time old Archibald abandoned his stiff reserve. Family folklore has it that the most excited he ever got was when one of his rank outsiders came in first, and he slapped Bessie so hard on the back that her false teeth went flying over the railing.

A God-fearing Presbyterian who never drank, cursed or womanised, Archibald (who was commonly known by his second name, Roy) had no time at all for his hard-drinking son-in-law Jim, who was Roman Catholic, to make matters worse. ‘My grandfather hated him with a passion’, says Robyn. ‘He considered my father beneath him.’

Jim wasn’t the only one who cringed under Archibald’s withering disapproval. ‘Everyone was afraid of my grandfather except me and I think that’s why he loved me’, Robyn recalls. ‘He used to call me his wee bonny lassie. He was the person I loved most in my life—I don’t think anyone loved him except me.’ She called him ‘farv’ or ‘farvie’, short for grandfather. While the others tiptoed around the old curmudgeon, she would fiddle with his fob watch, and blow her snotty nose on the starched white handkerchief embroidered with his initials that peeped from his breast pocket. Only his ‘wee bonny lassie’ was game to tease the peppery patriarch.

‘You’re Scotch, aren’t you?’ she would ask with mock innocence, to annoy him.

‘Do I look like a bottle of whiskey? I’m a Scotsman’, he would indignantly reply.

Archibald’s wife Lurline had been a pillar of the Mudgee citizenry, eulogised in the Guardian as ‘a member of a very old district family … a kindly, charitable lady (who) was held in the highest regard by her neighbours’. After her death, the widower had sold his own property and rented a room in a neat weatherboard bungalow a dozen doors up Horatio Street, owned by an upstanding local family named the Pitts, whom Archibald considered far more respectable than his own unruly brood. ‘They were the epitome of what he approved of—husband and wife, mother and father, solid job, own home, family car, church on Sunday. Their little girl was always immaculately dressed with ribbons in her hair’, says Robyn. Such was Archibald’s scorn for his son-in-law that he refused to set foot in Jim and Bessie’s home. When the children wanted to see their grandfather, they would have to walk up Horatio Street to visit him. ‘It was very sad for my mum. She had been the apple of his eye—until she married my father.’

When their daughter was still a toddler, Jim and Bessie decided to leave Mudgee and make a new start in the city. Robyn’s vague recollection was that her heavy-drinking father had been retrenched from his job, but the urge to escape the pitiless scrutiny of his overbearing father-in-law may also have been a factor in the move. They relocated to the working-class seaside suburb of Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches, where Jim and Bessie took over the snack bar in the beer garden of the Narrabeen Hotel. Their new home had an orchid garden and a backyard swimming pool that had been filled with concrete after a child drowned in it. Surrounded by bushland, it was almost like being back in the country.

George was a serious, responsible boy, who could safely be left in charge of his little sister. She was a scrawny, pale-skinned runt, with a shock of frizzy white-blonde hair and an eye-patch she wore from the age of two to correct a severe astigmatism. What she lacked in physical stature she made up for in sheer pluck, as she stumbled through the bush behind her brother like a pint-sized pirate, game for almost anything.

‘My mother used to say that poem: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid”. She used to throw her hands up in the air and say “Thank God you’re not twins”, because she never knew what I would do next. I didn’t have any fear.’ At age two, Robyn recalls packing a toothbrush, face washer and some scraps of food and striding off into the scrub to collect cicada shells in a paper bag, hoping Bessie could bring them back to life. By the time she wandered home several hours later, the local police were leading a search party through the bush to find her.

While Bessie slaved all hours in the hotel kitchen, Jim spent his time propping up the bar and yarning with the regular clientele. Over time, his drinking got steadily worse, as did his volatile temper. Publicly, he was an amiable enough drunk, but at home after a heavy night he would sometimes lash out in violence. ‘He never beat my brother and I, but he beat my mum’, Robyn remembers.

Her half-brother, Roderick, thirteen years Robyn’s junior, paints a sobering picture of their father. Roderick was one of two sons born to Jim Hutchinson’s second wife. He made their lives a misery. ‘He was always violent’, says Roderick. ‘I love my father but I’ll never forgive him for the alcoholism and the beatings. My dad would come home from the pub each night, and he had two moods—if he whistled he was happy, if he was silent I would cop the beatings. It went on till I was fifteen or sixteen years old. Never once in my life did he tell me he loved me. There was nothing.’ Roderick’s brother Brett, who was a year-and-a-half younger, committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Roderick himself attempted suicide three times and was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which he attributes to his brutal upbringing.

Fortunately for Robyn, Jim Hutchinson was not yet the extremely cruel man he would become. And in any event, Bessie was not one to tolerate such treatment for long. There were constant arguments, occasional bursts of violence, and money was always tight. By the time Robyn was about three years old, Bessie had had enough; she packed up the children and went home to Mudgee.

‘My mother, in the face of damnation, left my father and went back to Mudgee and tried to survive—in a world that did not cater for divorced women. My family was looked down on because Mum had separated. My grandfather wouldn’t support her financially, and she was too proud to take welfare. So she worked. She had to do jobs that were normally done by men, because in those days they paid double the wages that they paid to women.’

Bessie and the children moved into the Woolpack Hotel, a gold-rush–era bloodhouse that still had the old stables out the back where thirsty prospectors would tether their horses when they stopped for an ale. Now derelict and with its windows painted over, the old pub had ceased trading and was operating as a cheap boarding house. Bessie found work as a ‘donkey stoker’ at another hotel, shovelling fuel into the coal-fired hot water system known as a ‘donkey’. Her other tasks included chopping wood for the hotel fireplaces and cleaning out the stinking black sludge from the cesspool where wastewater from the kitchen and bathrooms stagnated before flowing to the sewer. While George was at school, Robyn would trail around after her mother as she worked. ‘I was always at the pub. I hated it’, she recalls. Bessie’s wage was barely enough to put food on the table for her and the two children. Robyn remembers her mother eating bread and dripping while the children ate meat, and buying cheap Dairy Bell margarine that she wrapped in discarded butter paper so the children would think they were eating butter.

The old teetotaller, Archibald, was horrified at his daughter’s new circumstances. In 1950s Mudgee, ‘good women’ didn’t divorce and they didn’t go to hotels at all. Those who did were allowed only in the dining room or ‘ladies lounge’; the bar was reserved for men. ‘My grandfather couldn’t bear it, so he shunned her’, says Robyn. ‘His view was “you are second class”. He felt she had brought shame on the McCallum name.’

As best she could under the circumstances, Bessie instilled in her children a strict moral code, which prized good manners, respect for one’s elders, adherence to the Queen’s English, modesty, frugality and above all honesty. ‘My mum was a very strong woman who taught us honesty and truthfulness and that you stand on your principles. She hated gossip, I guess because she was a victim of it all her life. She taught me very strongly that what’s important is not how people perceive you, it’s how you are yourself. If someone is saying something about you, it’s either true or not true; and if it’s not true, you don’t care what they say. It gave me a very strong sense of self-worth.’

Bessie insisted the children were always neat and clean, even though their clothes were patched and threadbare. ‘Being poor is no excuse for being dirty’, she would tell the children. They only ever had three sets of clothing each; it was all they needed, according to Bessie—‘one on, one off, one in the wash’. A former neighbour, Stephen Gay, remembers Bessie as ‘a rough and tough typical Aussie’ who enjoyed a laugh and a few beers but was a stickler for her rules, which included forbidding the neighbourhood children from running up and down her hallway. ‘She was a genuine old rough diamond’, says Gay.

The only occasions Robyn got a spanking were when she told lies. One time was when her mother sent her to the shops to buy a packet of her favourite Capstan cork-tipped cigarettes and Robyn spent the ha’penny change on lollies, lying to her mother afterwards that there had been no money left. Bessie found out and whipped her with the cord from the electric iron.

‘Do you know why I’m punishing you?’ she asked her whimpering daughter.

‘Because I stole mone...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part 1 Robyn
• Part 2 Rabiah
• Part 3 Umm Mohammed
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright