On October 12, 2002, 88 Australians were killed in Bali after terrorists blew up two nightclubs. Woman's Day writer Jacqui Lang recounts her memories of visiting the island just after the blast...
How had I found myself standing outside a makeshift morgue, asking people to wash their hands?
It was October 17, 2002, five days after the Bali bombings which had claimed the lives of so many young Australians.
I'd flown up to this beautiful Indonesian island, where I'd holidayed so many times, to witness the awful aftermath of the blasts. Once my reports for
Woman's Day were filed, it made sense to help out, in some small way, before my flight back to Australia.
"You can help me at the morgue," suggested US expat Fatima Ferentinos, one of the people I'd interviewed.
So there I was, in searing heat outside Denpasar's Sanglah hospital, holding up an old hose — only capable of emitting a trickle of dubious-looking water — and a bottle of liquid soap, demanding that people clean their hands.
"Please wash," I'd wave the hose at Indonesians, Britons, Australians — anyone who walked past.
Doctors had ordered that we get everyone coming out of the morgue to scrub their hands to avoid germs from the decomposing bodies.
Most needed no encouragement. After all, they'd just been in a room full of decaying corpses in green garbage bags, kept cool with ice. Each visitor there had had the dreadful task of opening poorly labelled bags to try to identify the remains of somebody who may or may not be their wife/husband/child.
"I think I'm going to be sick — the smell in there was just, just..." one young man faltered, doubled up in nausea, after a few minutes in the morgue.
I felt like hugging him but worried that that was a bit intense, so I just patted him on the shoulder and told him he'd be fine.
A new appreciation for home
As I stood at our grubby trestle table in the sun — along with the other volunteers, our shoes covered in mud — I kept thinking how lucky we Australians are. We Australians who whinge about our level of health care, but have clean, civilised, hospitals.
Sometimes, a person correctly identified would be carried out on a stretcher, loaded onto a refrigerated truck and taken away by officials. But often a morgue visitor would walk out looking even more traumatised than when they arrived, having failed to find their loved one.
"See that man over there — he's been coming here every day to try to find his wife," Fatima told me, pointing to a tall, distressed man. "He says she has a special necklace on, and I've been looking through the morgue every day with him, but we just haven't found her yet."
Weeks later I would come to recognise that man in newspapers and magazines as an Australian who lost his wife in the bombings.
Deepest despair
Wherever I went in Bali, there was pain and suffering.
From the moment I'd stepped off the plane, the atmosphere was palpably different to the usual Bali.
At the near-deserted airport, I'd been collected by my old friend Kadek Wiranatha — the owner of Paddy's, one of the two nightspots decimated by the bombers. He drove me straight to the scene of the blast. What was once his popular club was now just rubble, bricks, wood and singed materials. The twisted remains of several motorbikes still lay among the rubble.
Together, we picked our way through the darkness, trying to ignore the smell of death. I picked up a small metal belt buckle lying atop a pile of bricks. Where was the person who once wore that belt?
Later that week, police were to cordon off the bombsite, but at this early stage we were still free to walk throughout the area.
"I tripped on something — it turned out to be a human foot," then-Seven Network producer Phil Goyen told me later that week. He looked as drained as I felt.
After more than 20 years, I've interviewed my share of people who've lost loved ones in awful circumstances — drownings, murders, diseases.
But this was different. Not being a war correspondent, I'd never seen the aftermath of a terrorist attack, never seen so many people hurt by one, vile event. In Bali, there were pained faces everywhere I turned.
During my stay, the streets were nearly empty, except for officials, journalists ... and mums and dads who'd flown in to find their children, dead or alive. Instead of the usual chaos of tooting horns and street vendors yelling out to tourists, there was just a deathly quiet.
The Balinese were hurting too, of course. One day, I went to a small village and met half a dozen widows of taxi drivers who had all been killed in the blasts.
"Their husbands were the breadwinners. They don't know how they'll cope," one translator told me.
Unforgettable images
"Think you might need some counselling?" news editor Kate Dwyer suggested when I got back to
Woman's Day in Sydney.
It made sense. I wasn't sure if I had a right to feel so upset. It's not as though I lost a loved one in the blasts, like so many other Australians. Even so, when I left Bali, I felt traumatised. Never had I been surrounded by such pain and anguish on such a scale. Thankfully, a couple of counselling sessions helped.
Bali, too, has got its mojo back. Despite more suicide bombings in 2005 (which killed 20 people), it remains one of the world's most popular travel destinations.
I still love the place. But memories of standing in the dust outside that makeshift morgue six years ago will stay with me for ever.
I still keep that little belt buckle I found, and hope that its owner made it out alive.
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