In the name of my daughter

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.

- 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.”