‘Things work differently in Bali’: When Amanda’s son died, she learnt a difficult lesson

This story is part of the February 8 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

When I visit Amanda Lennon at her home in one of Sydney’s most expensive neighbourhoods, it’s only been six weeks. Six weeks since her life was upended, turned inside out, left in ruins. Six weeks since August 22, 2024, the day when the body of her 18-year-old son, Aston Looker, was pulled from a swimming pool at the Bali villa complex where his father, Saxon Looker, lives.

Six weeks since the day Aston joined the ranks of Australians who’ve either died or become seriously injured in Bali. The annual numbers run to more than 100 – a significant toll for Indonesia’s most beloved resort province, where Australians spend an estimated $2 billion each year.

But today, on this perfect Sydney spring afternoon, the drunk tourists, disco bars and noisy scooters of Kuta are a world away as Lennon invites me into her Vaucluse home and into Aston’s bedroom. Aside from the palpable sense of sadness, the thing that strikes me about her son’s room is its neatness. It doesn’t feel like the room of a teen boy, let alone one who had significant psychological troubles. From the creaseless all-white designer linen to the tasteful navy trim on the matching decor, to the giant conch shell placed artfully on a shelf, the room could easily feature in Home Beautiful. An expensive candle burns and calming music plays. On a shelf amid all this sits an elegant urn, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and brass, with a gold necklace and crucifix pendant draped over it.

None of Aston’s beloved surfboards or wetsuits are here. There are no Balinese souvenirs from his many trips there. None of his school drama trophies. No footy socks or clothes dangling from drawers. No posters of his celebrity idol, Jim Carrey. No Xbox console or school bag to trip over. It’s not so much a still life minus the detritus of an 18-year-old’s existence as a mournful depiction of utter lifelessness.

Aston in Bali, “where he always had his happiest moments”, according to his dad.Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Lennon

I’ve known Amanda Lennon for 30 years. A 1990s sports magazine cover girl who modelled swimwear, a well-connected eastern suburbs philanthropist and designer and a regular subject of Daily Mail stories, she and I had often crossed paths on the heady Sydney cocktail circuit. But today we’re standing in a bespoke mausoleum, and no scented candle can mask her anguish.

For the past 17 years, she’s been married to Nicholas Lennon, scion of a property dynasty, Lennium Group, which develops suburban housing projects across Australia. Amanda had two sons by Saxon Looker, Aston and his older brother Hunter, and a third, Nixon Lennon, with Nicholas. Their Vaucluse home is worth more than $20 million and they have an equally impressive getaway in the Blue Mountains. There are two Bentleys parked in the Vaucluse driveway and their life, as seen regularly on social media, involves designer labels, fine restaurants and exclusive resorts. But the one thing their privilege has been unable to protect them from is the death of a beloved son.

Amanda and I fall silent as we stand in Aston’s room. I instinctively place a consoling hand on her trembling shoulder. We both take a deep breath and contemplate the events which led us here.

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The daughter of Earle Cameron, the late millionaire Sydney apartment developer, Amanda Lennon and her two sisters inherited the family’s lucrative property empire, which includes a large industrial estate called The Cameron Centre in western Sydney. She met Saxon Looker, then a high-flying Sydney property developer, at a 1994 magazine party for Inside Sport, on whose cover she featured. They broke up when Aston was a baby, after which Aston and Hunter lived primarily with their mother in Sydney. The boys holidayed regularly with their father in Bali; Saxon and Amanda had moved there in the 2000s and developed luxury villas. Following their split, Saxon stayed in Bali, set up a surf shop, married a local woman, Ibu Desak, and had another child.

At the end of his HSC in 2023, Aston travelled to Bali. The idea was for father and son to reconnect and indulge in their shared love of surfing. His mother hoped it would be a chance, too, for Aston to find peace after years battling mental health and behavioural issues.

Amanda Lennon with her three sons (from left) Hunter, Nixon and Aston.Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Lennon

By any measure, Aston had been a difficult teen. While “incredibly creative, affectionate and caring”, according to Amanda, he was disruptive and constantly in trouble at school. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in early high school, he started at The Scots College in Bellevue Hill but after a hard time there, Amanda pleaded with St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill to take him on. “It was a very different culture at Joeys,” she says. “I think it was easier for him … at least for a while, they let Aston be himself, have his shirt untucked, wear bobby socks if he wanted to.”

Aston dreamed of being a performer like his hero, Jim Carrey. He also battled severe bouts of depression, writing about it at 16 in a moving letter he gave his mother, including the feeling that he lacked a “strong connection” with his parents. “I’m afraid to talk to anyone about how I feel because I never do it,” Aston’s handwritten note says. “I feel very misunderstood by everyone around me and I just want to be nice to others and want people to like me.”

Amanda says Aston’s mental state deteriorated during COVID-19 lockdowns and when physical school resumed, she worried he may self-harm. For years she accompanied him on a carousel of visits to school counsellors and child psychiatrists, collecting mood-altering medications to treat his ADHD on the way through. “None of it ever fixed the problem,” she says. “I think a lot of it even made him worse … he hated taking the medication, he hated the way it made him feel. After a while he just stopped taking it, even when I begged him to stay on it.” Despite this, she calls him “the light of our family”, someone who was “really great at living” but whose fearless exuberance worried his mother. “He was always the kid who would suddenly backflip into the ocean off a bridge and not consider what might be hidden in the water.”

Seemingly against the odds, Aston completed his Higher School Certificate in 2023, during which he excelled in dramatic art. His reward was the trip with his father, which began with skiing in Aspen and was to include a stint of six months or more in Bali.

The Lennons were in Dubai in May when Amanda received news that Aston had unexpectedly returned from Bali some months ahead of schedule. “He was in a bad way. I had to organise for him to go into a psych ward for three days from Dubai. When he got out his father got him a ticket to go back to Bali, but it was only a day or two later when I got another call saying he was really bad,” she says. “I went to Bali to be with him.”

Renting a beachside villa, she stayed with Aston for several weeks and took him to see a psychiatrist. Aston was prescribed several drugs, including lithium, and his mental state started to improve. “It was a really nice time for us, he started to open up, and he agreed he needed to get more help,” she says. “He wanted to get better, to plan for the future.”

Aston (at left) in a drama production in high school. Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Lennon

Amanda booked him into an upmarket Balinese retreat called The Place, which bills itself as “an award-winning, luxury psychotherapeutic retreat that focuses on mind, body and spiritual healing”. A week or so into Aston’s three-week stay, however, Amanda stopped hearing from him. “He called me as he was checking out so I could fix the bill. He was going back to his father’s villa,” she explains, adding that she’s since asked The Place to share Aston’s case notes with her, so she can get a better understanding of his state of mind shortly before he died. “They have given me nothing.” The Place did not
respond to requests to comment from Good Weekend.

Three weeks after Aston checked out, he was dead. It’s the events that followed that Amanda wants to alert other families about – from the difficulty of finding out exactly what happened to the fact he was cremated before she’d even arrived in Indonesia.

“I want to warn others,” she says, acknowledging that other family members do not agree with her decision to speak out. “To remind them of how little control we have in a place like Bali when things go wrong. We take a lot of things for granted in Australia … The local police didn’t even know Aston had died until we told them … by then, he’d already been cremated.” She pauses, then adds: “I can never go back to Bali, not after this.”

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Ever since Ngurah Rai International Airport, just south of Kuta, was inaugurated by then Indonesian president Suharto in 1968, Australians have been going to Bali in droves. In the early 1970s it was primarily surfers who were drawn to the pristine, uncrowded waters, many inspired by the iconic film Morning of the Earth, which showcased the then-undeveloped island.

By the mid-1980s, mass tourism to Bali was a reality. Australian political rock band Redgum even had a hit about it in 1984, I’ve Been To Bali Too, a pointed critique of working-class Australians joining the jet-set age and seeking sun, sand and magic mushrooms.

Today Bali ranks as our top international holiday destination, offering everything from cheap hostels and dive bars to six-star international resorts, fine dining and boutique shopping. More than 1.4 million Australians visited in the 12 months to mid-last year, accounting for almost a third of all international visitors, according to the Bali Central Bureau of Statistics.

“More Aussies are dying or getting seriously hurt every year in Bali than died in those [2002] explosions.”

Mick Featherstone

The huge numbers make Bali one of the busiest territories for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which managed 401 consular cases there in the year to June 30, 2023. Almost 7 per cent (28) involved someone being arrested and of them, about two-thirds were male. Just over 28 per cent (114) involved an illness or hospitalisation – and about 27 per cent involved an unexpected death. That’s 107 Australians dying in Bali a year – more than two a week.

Long-time private investigator Mick Featherstone agrees that in the public consciousness, Australia’s most defining moment in Bali occurred in 2002, when 88 Australians died in the devastating terrorist bombings. “I think most Australians today would be unaware that more Aussies are dying or getting seriously hurt every year in Bali than died in those explosions,” he says. “This is not a criticism of the people of Bali, who are some of the most gracious and welcoming in the world. But there are fundamental differences in how things happen there and it’s a reality visiting Australians should be better aware of.”

Amanda Lennon hired the Gold Coast-based former detective to investigate the circumstances of her son’s death, along with his straight-talking associate Darren Bowen, a former Queensland automotive industry worker who has since spent decades in Bali, and understands the “local ways” well. “They’re the sort of guys you want on your side in Bali if you want to get answers,” she says. To assist with their investigation, Featherstone and Bowen engaged Balinese legal figure Ni Luh Arie Ratna Sukasari, a minor celebrity in Bali known as “Sari”, whose firm, Malekat Hukum, translates to “Angel of Justice”. Despite glaring gaps, the trio have prepared a chronology of what they believe happened the day Aston died.

Lennon and Aston before his year 12 formal. His mum calls him “the light of our family”, someone “really great at living”.Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Lennon

At about 5pm on Thursday, August 22, security guard Wayan Murdika, who manned the gatehouse of Saxon Looker’s villa complex, saw Aston on his bike “passing quickly”. This was considered unusual as he often stopped to greet Wayan, offering cigarettes, or just to chat. Ninety minutes later Aston’s body, dressed in red swimming shorts, was found face-down in shallow water in the complex’s swimming pool by a resident, a Russian national named Ilya. Ilya notified Murdika, who pulled the still-limp body from the water. The guard immediately recognised that it was Aston.

Murdika rushed to Looker’s villa to raise the alarm. The men returned to the pool, where Looker performed CPR on his son while Murdika called for an ambulance, which didn’t arrive. Looker later told Nicholas Lennon that he had worked on Aston for 45 minutes, trying to clear phlegm and blood coming up from his son’s lungs.

Looker’s wife, Ibu Desak, drove them to hospital as her husband continued to perform CPR in the back of their car. They became stuck in traffic and opted to stop at the nearest doctor’s practice. At about 7.40pm, the doctor on duty determined that Aston was dead. Looker and Desak then took Aston to Siloam Hospital, where at about 9.30pm, he was formally declared dead.

On the morning of Friday, August 23, Amanda and Nicholas Lennon were at the family’s weekender in the Blue Mountains when they received a text message from their youngest son, Nixon, that Aston had died in Bali. Nixon had been told the news by his oldest brother, Hunter, who’d been alerted by Looker.

Aston’s body was cremated the next day, Saturday, August 24, four days before the Lennons were due to arrive. (Nicholas explains that his wife was too distraught to travel to Bali any sooner, and that they needed time to make arrangements to repatriate Aston’s body.)

Looker sent Amanda a text about their son’s wishes: “[He] recently communicated to [me] only three months ago two particular things he wanted in the event of his death,” the text read. “Firstly he expressed his desire to be cremated here in Bali where he has always had his happiest moments, secondly he asked me to make sure he was cremated [after] no more than two days as he wanted his spirit to be free as soon as possible, he had a phobia of being put in any kind of box. To ensure that I honoured his wishes, we cremated him this afternoon at 2pm and his spirit is now set free. His ashes will be available from tomorrow under certain local regulations and I encourage you and his extended family to use his ashes in the cleansing.”

Amanda Lennon reads me this text through tears. “I was just gobsmacked, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Why would he have done that?” She describes as unfathomable the day she arrived in Bali to collect her son’s ashes. Somehow given the wrong address for the funeral parlour, she spent time placating an increasingly frustrated Balinese driver. “I found myself cracking jokes trying to console the driver rather than facing the reality of my situation,” she says. “It was ridiculous.”

Aston was “incredibly creative, affectionate and caring”, Lennon says. Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Lennon

When she arrived, she was given a small cardboard box and told it contained her son’s ashes. “They could have given me anything; I had no idea if they were really his ashes,” she says. “The staff were sniggering, I guess they found my questions funny for some reason … When we asked about how they knew it was Aston’s ashes, they showed us a photo of his body before the cremation as proof. I was a mess, standing there holding a box of my beautiful boy’s ashes on the backstreets of Denpasar. It was the lowest point of my life.”

Lennon hired a local lawyer, who went about informing the authorities of her son’s death. On Tuesday, September 3, almost two weeks later, Mengwi Sector Police visited the property. They examined the swimming pool area and its surroundings, and interviewed Looker and his wife, along with the security guard and the neighbour who found Aston’s body. No evidence of criminality was found.

While Featherstone has pieced together the events of the day, he’s reticent about talking to Good Weekend, conscious of separate high-profile fraud charges relating to a Queensland telemarketing business that he has been fighting for 11 years and denies. That matter is unrelated, he says bluntly. What he wants to emphasise is that Australians visiting Bali need to remember that “they are no longer in Australia, where we rely on the system, rules and regulations to protect us. Those fundamentals we take for granted are very different in a place like Bali, and when things go bad Australians are often left shocked and confused – that’s where we come in.”

“Things work differently in Bali. You have to play by a different set of rules,” says Lennon.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Bowen is more willing to discuss their work, but errs on the side of caution. “You tread carefully when you get the local authorities involved. Things take time over there, nothing happens quickly. It’s a different way. They are not resourced like we are in Australia, they don’t have ambulances you can rely on or high-tech emergency departments everywhere. It’s an island of 4.2 million people; they’ve already got their hands full, there is plenty going on,” Bowen says. “We’ve found no indication of foul play, but without an autopsy, we simply do not know if Aston drowned. Did he fall and hit his head? We just don’t know. There’s no CCTV footage to help piece together what happened. The pool was meant to be closed but the gate was unlocked, and the lighting was not working.”

Saxon Looker did not return calls for this story.

Could Aston have taken his own life? His mother doesn’t think so, but really doesn’t know: “I just don’t think he would have killed himself in the shallow end of a pool. Aston would have gotten a bottle of pills or something if he was going to end it.”

Amanda Lennon is unimpressed by the support she received from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which confirms it has been in contact with the family but declines to provide any comment or details out of “privacy obligations”. While Australian consular assistance may include support and guidance to families and liaison with local and Australian authorities to assist with funeral arrangements or repatriation of remains, the embassies have no authority to intervene in local matters or pay for funeral or repatriation costs.

“They gave me the wrong funeral parlour address, for starters,” Lennon says. “Nor did they phone Aston’s stepfather, listed as his emergency contact, to let him know Aston was dead,” she says. “I felt DFAT gave us a pat on the back about our terrible news; that’s why I hired a private investigator. I realise not everyone can do that but we had the means to. Things work differently in Bali. You have to play by a different set of rules; I needed someone who knew that.”

Years after high-profile cases such as those of Schapelle Corby, Michelle Leslie and the Bali Nine made headlines, media coverage continues to paint a grim picture of Australians finding themselves in trouble – or worse – in Bali. In 2023, 24-year-old Melburnian Benjamin Ward was left with multiple broken bones and serious injuries following a late-night motorcycle accident near Kuta. A GoFundMe page raised more than $40,000 for his surgery and medical evacuation to Melbourne. The body of 25-year-old Perth woman, Niamh Finneran Loader, was found in a Kuta hotel bathroom in 2022. Her family are still waiting for answers after an autopsy and toxicology report at Bali’s Sanglah Hospital were unable to conclude a cause of death. It’s been almost two years since local police have given an update on their investigation.

Bailey Chalmers was only 19 when he came close to losing his life during a 2019 footy trip to Bali, where he suspects he was the victim of methanol poisoning after drinking just two cocktails from a “reputable bar” in Seminyak. “I was in a bad way,” he tells Good Weekend. Suffering headaches, nausea, excruciating stomach pains, body aches, dizziness, difficulty breathing and blurry vision, he was sent home from hospital in Bali after being told there was nothing they could do for him. “The doctors seemed more interested in getting my travel insurance details than finding out what was wrong with me,” he says. “After I left hospital, it was my family back in Australia who got the advice I believe saved my life.”

Bailey Chalmers (pictured with mum Danielle), came close to death from suspected methanol poisoning.

Chalmers’ mother Danielle, a nurse who was aware that methanol poisoning via black-market alcohol was an issue in Bali, contacted Colin Ahern, a Perth man and regular Bali visitor who set up a Facebook page, Just Don’t Drink Spirits in Bali, to raise awareness among Australians of methanol poisoning. “In Bali, a bartender is not going to stop serving you because you’ve had too much to drink. They will keep serving you as long as you have the money to pay – that is the reality,” Ahern says. “And you can’t really blame the individual bar because methanol has infiltrated the whole industry there. Pinpointing it is virtually impossible. People travelling there are still unaware about this. I suspect it doesn’t get the attention it probably should because operators are trying to protect their business interests; they don’t want to scare off tourists.

“I don’t want Aston to be forgotten, for this to be swept aside like nothing happened.”

Amanda Lennon

“But if you are drinking free-pour cocktails in Bali, even ones with pretty umbrellas in fancy bars, you are putting your life at risk. We say, ‘Stick to bottled beer and wine.’ ” It’s a message Australians heard loud and clear in relation to Laos late last year, when two young Australians, Holly Bowles and Bianca Jones, were among six tourists who died from suspected methanol poisoning after consuming spirit-based drinks.

Bailey Chalmers took Ahern’s advice to find a bottle of sealed, duty-free vodka and drink from it. Ahern, who stresses he is not a medical professional, called the vodka a “metabolic blocker” – similar to ethanol, which helps slow the body’s ability to break down methanol into the dangerous compounds of formaldehyde and formic acid. Within hours, Chalmers started feeling better and went straight to the airport. It would be several more weeks before his vision fully returned.

“I’ve been back to Bali several times since and still love the place, but I go there now knowing a lot more than before,” he says. “I tell people my story all the time; it’s up to them if they take any notice of it.”

It’s been nearly two years since hairdresser Beth Bradley’s much-loved 28-year-old Sydney real estate agent brother, Charlie Bradley, died in Bali. She’s still unable to “fathom” the treatment she and her family received and holds little hope of ever discovering exactly what happened to her brother.

Charlie Bradley died after drinking at a Bali beach club. His sister Beth says “no one has helped to find answers.”

Charlie died a few hours after drinking at a beach club in Canggu on the evening of April 16, 2023. Bradley called a taxi to return to his villa shortly after midnight but somehow ended up outside a medical clinic at about 4am. Collapsed on the road, he was turned away before a local taxi driver and two bystanders took him to Siloam Hospital. “He was already dead,” taxi driver Dani Siswanto told the ABC at the time. “I could tell because he wasn’t breathing. There was no movement in his chest.” Witnesses told police they’d seen him leaving a restaurant 250 metres from the clinic, shaking uncontrollably and repeatedly falling over on the street.

Beth Bradley took on the investigation herself. She was told by the restaurant staff that they had checked its CCTV cameras but there was no evidence he’d been there. “No one has helped to find answers. Everything we know is through myself contacting the people who saw him last and local Aussie business owners over there,” she told the ABC in the days following his death. “Something doesn’t seem right.”

Amanda Lennon and I return to Aston’s bedroom to look at a recently assembled collection of silver-framed photos of the handsome blond, who was 18 for only eight months. Attempting to lighten the mood, I mention how unexpectedly neat the space seems for a teenager. “It’s the interior designer in me, I had to put a few touches in here,” she says, forcing a half-smile. She explains why she’s speaking out, so early and while she’s still in so much pain. “I know people are going to look at my life and judge me, but I don’t want Aston to be forgotten, for this to be swept aside like nothing happened, as though he didn’t matter.”

As I turn to bid her farewell, tears stream down her half-smiling cheeks. If only she could have tidied up the tragic events in Bali quite so seamlessly.

For help, call Lifeline: 13 11 14

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