In solitary at Guantanamo Bay, David Hicks insists he thought often of his kids. But back home his ex Jodie was struggling to comprehend why he simply walked out of their lives 10 years ago.
David Hicks is just a name to his children. They can’t remember eating chocolate cake with him, or snuggling together to watch The Simpsons on TV, or driving to the beach on family fishing trips.
Now teenagers, Bonnie and Terry were only toddlers when their father disappeared from their lives one day without a word of warning. They’ve missed him ever since.
The convicted terrorist supporter has never explained why he walked out on his de facto Jodie Sparrow and their children 10 years ago, or severed all contact with them soon afterwards.
To Jodie, it’s a mystery as bewildering and difficult to comprehend as how a “really gentle, thoughtful man; not political, not religious” converted to Islam and linked up with al-Qaeda.
His family struggles to understand what drove the laid-back South Australian to fight for the extremist Taliban in troubled Afghanistan. And there are no easy answers.
Yet amazingly, Jodie is willing to forgive a painful past. Even more remarkably — with David home to serve the rest of his seven-year sentence at Adelaide’s Yatala Prison — she’s happy for the 31-year-old to meet his long-lost kids again.
“I don’t know where all this stuff has come from in the newspapers, that we don’t want to see him,” says the Gawler factory worker, her soft voice rising indignantly. “Me and David are mates; we’re very close and we always will be, no matter what people want to think.
Before he cut ties with his family, Jodie describes David as a loving partner, and parent to Bonnie and Terry, now aged 13 and 12. And he cared for his little stepdaughter Monique as if she was his own.
But the young couple drifted apart, as David spent more and more of his spare time fishing. Even after they split, though, he remained a model father — looking after all three children every second weekend.
Until the dreadful day “he just stopped coming”. According to Jodie, “The kids were waiting for him and he didn’t turn up. I was so angry, seeing their sad little faces, and telling them he might be there soon …
“Later, I popped in to tell him the kids were having operations to put grommets in their ears, all three of them, and he wasn’t interested. That was when I finally realised we had to move on with our lives.”
The struggling single mum didn’t hear another word for five years — until ASIO arrived on the doorstep in January 2002 to tell her David had been captured in Afghanistan, and was being held as a suspected terrorist at Guantanamo Bay…
For the full interview, see this week’s issue of Woman’s Day (on-sale May 28).
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