How Australia and Indonesia supported each other in time of need

The Bali tragedy saw Australia and Indonesia grow closer at a professional and personal level.

Ross Tysoe, Consul-General in Bali, meeting with family of the victims.

Day three, October 15, also happened to be my daughter Eloise’s 11th birthday. She remembers that birthday as being different, mostly because I wasn’t there, although she does acknowledge that I made it home for cake. She understood why I was hardly present, as my work was all over the news.

As expected, distraught relatives of the victims began to arrive in Bali that day.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade officers were assigned to meet them on arrival – or at least those we’d been told were coming. The team ensured they were booked into appropriate accommodation, and they were each assigned a family liaison officer.

Our people established a consular help desk in the arrivals area of Denpasar airport to try to catch incoming families who hadn’t let us know their plans. The pressure on the local team was building quickly, but further consular reinforcements, social workers and counsellors were arriving to assist.

Disaster victim identification specialists and investigators were also making their way to Bali – about 20 Australian Federal Police officers had arrived by the end of October 15, and that number doubled 24 hours later. This was just the beginning of one of the most difficult and resource-intensive operations the AFP had ever undertaken.

Former commissioner Mick Keelty led the Australian Federal Police response to the Bali bombing. Picture: Alan Porritt/AAP

They responded to the disaster with enormous energy and focus under the steady leadership of their quietly spoken commissioner, Mick Keelty, whose close working relationship with his Indonesian counterpart, General Da’i Bachtiar, paved the way for the impressive collaboration that would follow between the AFP and the Indonesian National Police on both the investigation and identification process.

Other key AFP figures included national counter-terrorism co-ordinator Andrew Colvin and the operational commander in Indonesia, Graham Ashton. Colvin went on to become the AFP commissioner and Ashton the head of the Victorian Police.

Peter Cosgrove in 2003 on the first anniversary of the bombing.

The Australian Defence Force under General Peter Cosgrove was no less impressive, continuing to fly return sorties between Bali and Australia, transporting the seriously wounded. The logistical skills and can-do attitude of Australia’s men and women in uniform is second to none. Only three hours flight away, and with a fully functioning hospital, Darwin was the obvious first Australian destination for the emergency evacuation, but within the first few days even its medical facilities began to be overwhelmed, necessitating a further domestic airlift from Darwin to Perth and other southern cities, conducted by the RAAF and the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The federal and state health departments stepped in to help us manage this process.

Family members arrived in Bali full of desperate questions. Many still held out hope that their missing daughter, son, sister or brother would turn out to be alive. Some had accepted the inevitable, and simply wanted to claim the body of their loved one. Because of the horrible disfigurement of the injured and the dead, though, there were no simple answers; in many cases a long and painstaking DNA identification process was required. This was not at all what families wanted to hear. Our officials were themselves only beginning to grasp the immensity of the process that lay ahead, and in some cases struggled to explain what needed to happen.

The understandable anguish and confusion of the families, and in some cases publicly expressed anger, gave the media outlets exactly what they wanted: a new angle. The tone of media and broader public commentary quickly became more critical.

Indonesian police investigators search through debris at the Bali nightclub bombing site on October 17, 2002 in Denpasar. Picture: Edy Purnomo/Getty Images

“Why is it taking so long?” became the refrain, and media commentators began to make snap judgments about the adequacy of the resources we were putting in place. Politicians of all stripes started to get involved. The foreign minister’s office was peppered with questions from local MPs whose electorate offices were under telephone siege from people desperate to locate their friends and relatives.

The victim identification process soon became a nightmare. Families started appearing at the hospital and the morgue, increasingly frustrated at their inability to locate their loved ones. This reflected confusion at the hospital and the scale of the disaster. For the first couple of days, the focus had been on identifying and assisting those who were seriously injured. The dead had had to wait.

Amateur photographs began to appear on noticeboards at the hospital, and this quickly became a particular point of friction. In one case, six Australian families identified, with absolute certainty, the same corpse as their own kin. A consular officer we had sent to Bali from Canberra, Kim Lamb, when confronted by one particularly insistent husband, took him through the identification process one last time. She examined the body very closely herself, turned to the grieving man and asked: “Did your wife have a navel ring?” He said that she didn’t. “I’m sorry,” Kim said, “but this is not your wife.”

As the days passed, the specialists came to the view that only half the estimated 180 bodies could be identified by means of fingerprint or dental records; families would need to provide DNA samples to help identify the rest.

Meanwhile, Bill Jackson and his consular operations team in Canberra, working closely with their colleagues in Bali, had done some impressive work to identify Australians who were safe, those seriously injured and those who had likely been killed. This detective work brought relief to several anxious families, but left many others distraught. It was even more complex than it sounds.

Establishing who had actually been present at the two nightclubs was the first step. This was a little easier if an individual had been with a group of friends, and if one of them was conscious and in a position to speak to authorities. But this was not always the situation.

The survivors with the worst injuries, and certainly the deceased, were generally unrecognisable because of their horrific burns. Despite these challenges, the team had managed to narrow things down substantially, by methodically staying in touch with families and friends, regularly scouring the hospitals, and checking flight and immigration records.

By the end of the second day, the number of Australians feared dead had been reduced to 148.

But something was bugging Bill, and he kept returning to one of the names on the list. It was a young man from Perth; let’s call him Bruce. He had been spotted early in the evening at Paddy’s Bar by someone who knew him, but no one had seen him since. The hospital searches had unearthed nothing, and the mobile phone number provided by the family was all we had to go on.

Bill had rung Bruce’s mobile a couple of times himself, he told me, but kept getting a message that the number was unreachable. I replied that Bruce was likely among the rubble of the two nightclubs, which was still being picked through by forensic specialists.

“You’re probably right,” Bill said, but added: “I reckon I’m just going to keep ringing that number – just in case.” The team began arrangements to source a sample of Bruce’s family DNA.

Drawn and exhausted

Within a week or so, I flew to Bali to review the situation and check in on our staff, and I was also able to attend a Balinese cleansing ceremony with families who were still waiting for news of their loved ones. Most put on a brave face, and some even engaged in classic Australian banter. But they were all drawn and exhausted. And many spoke about their concerns for the Balinese.

Diplomat Ian Kemish in 2003.

While in Bali, I also had the opportunity to talk to some of the police specialists who had deployed there from all over Australia as part of Operation Alliance, the AFP-led operation established at the invitation of the Indonesian police force to assist with victim identification and the criminal investigation.

I was deeply impressed by how officers from state police forces across Australia were working seamlessly with their federal and Indonesian counterparts to bring clarity to the victims’ families, and to help bring the perpetrators to justice. For the AFP itself, Bali was a watershed moment that led the force into a new pattern of engagement with their counterpart organisations across the Indo-Pacific region, especially the Indonesians.

I was fascinated then, and on several other occasions in the years that followed, to see how police officers from radically different cultural backgrounds quickly established trusting relationships with each other.

Not long after I returned to Canberra, Bill walked into my office with a big grin on his face.

It was by now about 10 days after the bombing. “What are you smiling about?” I asked.

“I just spoke to Bruce,” he replied.

Bill had rung the phone number yet again that morning, and this time someone answered. After establishing that it really was Bruce he was speaking to, Bill asked him where he had been. Bruce confirmed that he had been in Kuta when the bombs went off, but he hadn’t been injured, apart from a couple of scratches. He had been wandering for a while and had now returned to Australia. Bill said: “Mate, your family think you’re dead – don’t you think you should call them?”

Cover of Ian Kemish memoir The Consul

Bruce’s reply suggested that the idea hadn’t even occurred to him. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. “I’m not in touch with the family much, but I’ll let them know I’m OK.”

When Bill told me this, we looked at each other and shook our heads. I’m pretty sure that, shortly afterwards, Bill rang the family himself – just in case.

Ian Kemish is a former Australian diplomat, ambassador and head of the Australian consular service. This is an edited extract from his book The Consul, published by University of Queensland Press.