This was published 7 years ago
Richard Roxburgh on a 'fantastic' Australian miniseries never made
By Karl Quinn
Was this the best piece of Australian television never made?
It's an impossible question to answer, of course, but the Bali bombing series that went into production for the ABC in 2005 certainly has a strong claim to be the most radical ever commissioned.
Michael Jenkins – the man who shot to fame with Blue Murder and Wild Side in the mid-'90s and has resurfaced after a 15-year hiatus with the Blue Murder sequel – and his writer Peter Schreck conceived a two-parter about the dreadful terrorist attack in Kuta in October 2002 in which 202 people, including 88 Australians, were killed. It was tentatively called Mango River, but also known simply as The Bali Project.
The first part, Jenkins recalls, focused on the Australian victims and the police operation in Bali. "It was fairly straightforward in a way, though quite traumatic."
The second part, though, was something else. "It took the position of the bombers. It started with the recruiter, Samudra, going to this dusty little village in the backblocks of Indonesia and sitting under a tree talking to the young men, and it followed it right through – including the fact he couldn't even drive a vehicle and yet he drove the bomb car into Kuta. It was very unusual."
Richard Roxburgh, who was to appear in the series, recalls that the second episode was to be filmed entirely in Indonesian, and screened with subtitles. And for the sake of authenticity, it was all to be shot where the events actually unfolded.
"Michael was so determined this thing had to happen where it happened, in central Java and Bali," he recalls. "People were saying 'it's just jungle; we could shoot this in Port Douglas'."
Jenkins had his way, though, and the show was about four days into production when it fell apart – a collapse that had nothing to do with the demanding standards the director had set.
In October 2005, two more terrorist bombs were detonated in Kuta, killing 20. "They blew up a restaurant, and we heard the explosion, it was so close to us," recalls Jenkins. "And then the whole country went into panic mode. We had about 30-odd permissions [to film] and they were progressively withdrawn."
The Balinese were paranoid, he says, that the production would foster the idea that the island was a willing home to extremism, "which was never our intention". More basically, it no longer felt safe.
According to Roxburgh, the Indonesian military finally shut the production down entirely.
"So we just had to abandon that project," recalls Jenkins. "It was a fantastic idea but we had very bad luck."
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