They would later realise they were responding to one of the most tragic events of the 21st century: the first Bali Bombings.

Professor Stephens, the then-director of Royal Darwin Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, was attending a medical seminar alongside her senior colleagues and other medical staff.

She was pulled aside by her colleague Dr Su Winter, who had been contacted to prepare to go on a potential mission to Bali.

“The initial information really was that there had been an explosion,” Prof Stephens said.

“That people had assumed it was a gas explosion at that point and nobody knew how many people had been injured but that it was in an area where there were a lot of Australian tourists.”

Hours later Prof Stephens and her colleagues in leadership were asked if they had the capacity to become a response site by then-medical superintendent Len Notaras.

“We all said absolutely, we can do it,” she said.

“And that’s when we started to prepare the hospital to receive an unknown number of victims from the explosion.

“The day unfolded and it became clear that this was potentially a terrorist event which kind of put that awful sense of helplessness, I suppose, about the whole event. If it had been a gas explosion that would have been quite different to it being a terrorist event and deliberate kind of act to hurt so many people and to kill so many people.

“We had a pretty robust disaster management plan for cyclones so we just adapted the cyclone plan to what we were facing.”

Staff readied to receive 100 patients with unknown severity of injuries. They spent hours preparing equipment, drugs and everything possible to expedite treatment.

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Victims of two explosions at nightclubs in the tourist district of Kuta in Bali began arriving in the late hours of Sunday and Monday morning. At least 60 patients bound to Royal Darwin would mark one of the most significant times in the lives of all staff who treated and helped them.

“We were really lucky that on that particular day at that particular time, the Intensive Care Unit only had a couple of patients in it,” Prof Stephens said.

“It was like the stars were aligned for us to be prepared to take that many people.

“From the time that the patient started arriving, it was clear that they were all really severely injured.

“We had about half a dozen patients arrive who their burns around their airway, their face were so severe and were getting to the point where they are about to like close off their airways.

“There were a number of people that needed to have quite difficult procedures to put tubes into their windpipe to allow them to breathe around that swelling. And then there were a couple who arrived whose kidneys, their injuries were so bad that the muscle breakdown had caused their kidneys to fail and so they were kind of on the point of cardiac arrest.

“There were a number of patients and some of these were the same patients with really what we call circumferential burns of their limbs, so burns right around the limbs that cut off the blood supply and so what we call limb threatening burns.

“They needed urgent surgery to cut through the skin and make space for the blood to get through and so the operating theatres were already full operating to capacity and those people needed that surgery done immediately.

“It was really frenetic for many, many hours and the arrivals were staggered, so just as we kind of got control of the first lot of arrivals the next lot would come through so there wasn’t any break in the activity.”

Prof Stephens said amid the chaos and devastation and despite their pain, patients were kind, selfless and brave.

“I remember standing back and just thinking at one point how quiet it was, all these people with really severe burns and this was before we gave them the sedation and put them on machines and you go up and say do you need you know some morphine? Are you in pain? And they go ‘oh no, go and help someone else I’m okay’ and they like had 60 per cent burns of their bodies.

“It was just amazing, the strength of human spirit that we saw in those people that came over.

“When I think about it now, it was a time in the ICU when all of your senses were activated so it smelled bad it sounded bad, it looked bad. It was it was like this total assault on your senses but you just blocked all that out and did what you needed to do.”

Once the patients were stabilised, Prof Stephens was tasked with helping co-ordinate their transfer interstate. There was one death among the evacuated cohort, a Greek national. It took weeks to identify him due to the severity of injuries but Prof Stephens said they were able to eventually reassure the victim’s family he hadn’t suffered.

And once the patients were flown interstate, Prof Stephens and her colleagues were forced to comprehend the reality of the situation.

“We found that there was quite a long time afterwards that it really impacted on the staff and people even today, it’s 20 years later and when we look back and we share memories,” she said.

“It still brings back that sadness and the actual senselessness of it and how could people do that to other people?”

Prof Stephens, now the Foundation Dean at the CDU Menzies Medical School, was driven to join the RAAF specialist reserves following the bombing. She went to Iraq and the second Bali bombing in 2005.

To this day, she’s never experienced such an event as the 2002 Bali bombings response and reflected on it as an incredible team effort.

“No one had seen that many victims of burns and blast injuries at one time in Australian history,” she said.

“The aeromedical retrieval of those Australians to Darwin was the largest aeromedical retrieval of critically injured people ever done in Australia.

“The sheer volume of it, you had to kind of just focus on the job, the person, the tasks you needed to complete that was in front of you and not take in the enormity of it.

“It was really only afterwards when you look back on what we did, you just went ‘oh my god, that was extraordinary’.”