Soldier father Abu Kassim airbrushed from wartime history

It has taken nearly a lifetime for Patrick Dodson to uncover the sad, maddening story of Sergeant Abu Kassim.

Patrick Dodson with his sister Faye in Broome. Picture: Nik Buttigieg

It has taken nearly a lifetime for Patrick Dodson to uncover the sad, maddening story of Sergeant Abu Kassim. The Malayan-born pearl diver was soldier enough to serve with the army’s best in the crack Z Special Unit in World War II but not Australian enough to be allowed to wed the woman he loved, the Labor senator’s Aboriginal mother.

Instead of the hero’s welcome he deserved when he returned home from the war, Kassim had been barred from rejoining his family in the West Australian town of Broome and died a lonely death from illness and war wounds in distant Perth.

He was buried in an unmarked grave in what was then the Muslim section of Karrakatta cemetery.

Dodson’s mother, Patricia, lost custody of his half-sisters before she was finally given permission to marry the man who would become his father, Snowy Dodson, a truck driver of Irish descent who looked past the prejudice of the time and promised Kassim he would take care of them all.

A guiding figure in Indigenous reconciliation, Dodson, 74, still bristles at the callous, casually ­inflicted racism that caused such heartache to his family and denied Kassim the recognition he was owed for his wartime feats.

“It’s a tremendous injustice,” he told The Weekend Australian from his hometown of Broome, where he lives next door to older half-sister Faye, 85.

“It really does surprise me that there is a history here totally untold. It was part of the reality of life in the Australian landscape that has never been reconciled, not only for my family but for many others.”

Dodson said an Anzac Day marking the 80th anniversary of the war’s darkest period for Australia – with Darwin bombed by the Japanese, Sydney and Newcastle attacked by midget submarines and the nation threatened by invasion – was a good time to start the conversation, lest we forget how far race relations had come.

Kassim was not only denied his due, but airbrushed from history. The Z Special Unit memorial on the Broome foreshore erroneously records him as killed in action when he somehow survived six months of spine-tingling combat deep behind enemy lines in ­Borneo in 1944.

Like many Z Special forays, the mission was so hush-hush it ­remained secret for decades. A wiry man with dark, deepset eyes, Kassim had fallen head over heels in love with Patricia after moving from then Malaya to dive for pearls off the Kimberley coast.

Faye, left and Georgina Dodson with their father’s medals.

He volunteered for the army in June 1942, leaving behind his “unmarried wife” in Broome with Faye and her little sister, Georgina, now 80. Patricia, a forthright Yawuru woman, would have hated that they had to “sneak around”, Dodson said. Kassim had repeatedly applied for permission to marry her, to no avail. The local “protector of natives”, typically a police sergeant, wouldn’t consent.

As far as the narrow-minded authorities were concerned they had three strikes against them: she was Aboriginal while he was Asian and Muslim to boot. Because their relationship was unsanctioned, the girls were taken into care at the local orphanage. Faye remembers their father bringing them ­lollies when he visited.

Kassim and his Timorese friend, fellow pearler Teh Soen Hin, initially went into an army water transport unit, probably as landing craft operators. But they soon came to the notice of the embryonic special forces. Best known for the daring Krait raid on Singapore in 1943 in which a team of commandos paddled into the harbour to plant mines that sank or holed seven Japanese ships, Australia’s Z Special Unit was 1800-strong by 1944.

Undercover squads were parachuted into Borneo to scout an amphibious assault on the jungle island by Australian troops and entice the local Dayak people to rise up. Kassim and Teh were “countrymen” for six other infiltrators led by expatriate New Zealand major Toby Carter, the eyes and ears of the team who spoke the language and could pass as locals.

“It was amazingly dangerous,” said Australian National University researcher Christine Helliwell, whose book, Semut, on the covert operation has been short-listed for the prestigious commonwealth Templer Medal award for military writing. “There was no means of help if anything went wrong and they could have been betrayed at any moment to the Japanese.”

Kassim spent six long months undercover, kitted out in a lap-lap and tribal headdress. He suffered a bayonet wound in vicious hand-to-hand fighting. He would never regain his health. By the time he was discharged in 1946, the young man was also battling leukaemia, a death sentence in those days.

CAbu Kassim, front right, next to mate Teh Soen Hin and other Z Special Unit members.

By then, Patricia had been with Snowy Dodson for nearly two years. They met in extraordinary circumstances: she had been evacuated to the Catholic mission at Beagle Bay, 130km north of Broome, where she had an altercation with the priest. As punishment, she was sent with Faye and Georgina to even more far-flung Moola Bulla Station near Halls Creek.

Snowy encountered his future wife while they were being trucked there, chained like animals outside the hotel at Fitzroy Crossing. He and a mate released the bedraggled trio and went on the run with them through the Kimberley. Eventually, Patricia decided enough was enough and gave herself up with the girls at Moola Bulla. Snowy broke her out for a second time and copped an 18-month prison sentence for his trouble. The deal for them to marry – an option open to Snowy as a European man – was they leave WA for the Northern Territory, where Dodson was brought up.

Evidently Kassim was on board. At some point he and Snowy reached an agreement. “He said to my dad … ‘Snow, you look after these girls because I can’t’,” Dodson said. Kassim was getting sicker and sicker. The poor fellow was sent to Perth for hospital treatment but died there, alone, on March 3, 1949. His recorded age was 29.

If Kassim went unrecognised by his adopted country, his memory was proudly kept alive by his Australian family. Patricia treasured his gift of a turtleshell comb that she kept in a green bag until her death in 1960, when Dodson was 13. “That was a touchstone to him and she talked about him, how he had gone to war,” the senator said. “We didn’t know much about Z force … or how dangerous it was for him in Borneo. But we knew he had done something important.”

Snowy also died in 1960, leaving the children orphaned. It was the start of a journey that led Dodson to the Catholic priesthood – he became the first Indigenous man to be ordained – then into the fight for Indigenous land rights, founding chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and on to federal parliament.

He never stopped wondering about Kassim. As a presiding member of the royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, he was able to access an army personnel file, but the limited information on record did little to answer his many questions.

The family had lost Kassim’s service medals in a flood in Katherine, their home in the NT, and had little else to go on. They wanted to know where he was buried so they could at least pay their ­respects. Faye’s son, Eric, lived near Karrakatta cemetery and made repeated attempts to find the grave. One day, Dodson fell into conversation with Labor MP Luke Gosling, a former officer in the commando regiment who holds the marginal Darwin-based seat of Solomon. Could he help? You bet.

Gosling arranged to have copies of Kassim’s decorations struck and scoured the archives for ­additional clues to his fate. He confirmed that the young man had amassed 250 days of overseas service at the sharp end of Z Special’s Operation Semut in Borneo. A medical file referred to complications from the bayonet wound, but provided no details of the ­severity of the injury or how it had happened. “I was just really keen for people to know a bit more about the story,” Gosling said. “It’s part of our history and we should tell our history warts and all.”

Abu Kassim’s army personnel file in 1942 listing Patricia Djiween as Kassim’s ‘unmarried wife’ of Broome.

He reached out to Rick Moor, national vice-chairman of the Australian Special Air Service ­Association, who offered to fund a headstone if the grave could be found. The search is ongoing.

Dodson said: “I think my sisters feel cheated that they weren’t given the opportunity to really ­engage with Abu Kassim because the racist policies at the time. For all these years, they have recognised him and acknowledged him as their father, and wondered why all these things happened in the way they did. They are forgiving people.”

Faye vividly remembers standing at the fence of the orphanage with her sister, waiting for Kassim to visit. “I was about five when he went (to war) and when he came back and when I met him I was turning 11,” she said. “My mother was remarried then. He used to take us out on the (pearling) luggers … he got on well with Patrick’s father. But I didn’t really know him very well because in those days you weren’t allowed to talk about things like this.”

As Helliwell points out, Kassim was a fine soldier who earned his sergeant’s stripes in the toughest military outfit going. That he put his life on the line for a country that ultimately turned its back on him because of his ethnicity and religion was “deeply shocking”, she said. Worse yet, his case was not isolated.

Other “allied aliens” such as his friend, Teh, recruited into Z Special for their language skills and ability to blend in in occupied southeast Asia, were treated just as shabbily after the war. Teh spent years pursuing the housing and income benefits he professed to have been promised, but was rebuffed at every turn. The fact that some operations such as Semut remained classified until the early 1980s helped keep the disgraceful episode in the shadows.

No longer. National RSL president Greg Melick welcomed the Dodson family’s decision to tell Kassim’s story. “I don’t think it hurts on Anzac Day to reflect on how far we have come as far a ­social justice is concerned for ­people who fought under the flag and did the right thing by this country. It’s more than appropriate.”