Bali survivor reflects on night a tight-knit footy club was blown apart

Twenty years on, Julian Burton remains in near awe as to how lucky he was to survive the Bali bombing – but the road back was long and tough.

Bali survivor Julian Burton at home in the Adelaide Hills with a flag from the Sari Club. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

October 2002 started as one of the greatest months in the history of the Sturt Football Club. The Double Blues achieved the unprecedented feat of having two of its own players tie for that year’s Magarey Medal, the Brownlow equivalent in South Australia’s SANFL competition.

Tim Weatherald and Jade Sheedy both scored 16 votes to share SA football’s highest honour. One week later, they were lining up as underdogs as the unfancied Sturt tried to break its 26-year premiership drought in the grand final against the powerhouse Central Districts.

Sturt stunned Centrals in the opening quarter taking a five-goal lead and powered on to win 13.14 (92) to 6.9 (45).

The boys couldn’t get up to Bali quickly enough. Forward Julian Burton was 29 and at the end of his career. He decided to join his young teammates on the trip, including then 22-year-old Tim Weatherald, thinking that as an older bloke he could keep an eye on things if they got out of hand.

Sturt footballer Julian Burton (back) with Damian Squire in a swimming pool in Kuta before the bombing.

Get out of hand they did. It was a wild night at the Sari Club with Weatherald stripping down to nothing but his Speedos and cutting loose on the dance floor. Burton told him it was his shout, so Weatherald put his shirt on and walked to join Burton at the bar. When the bomb went off the force was so great it blew Burton across the bar. As the spirit bottles exploded and the alcohol went up in flames, his back was scorched with third-degree burns that almost cost him his life.

Of the 88 Australians who died that night, three were from SA: Sturt Football Club’s former ruckman and club runner Bob Marshall, 68; a reserve player for the club Josh Deegan, 22; and 19-year-old tourist Angela Golotta.

Twenty years on, both Burton and Weatherald remain in near awe as to how lucky they were.

The most obvious manifestation of their joy at still being alive is their families, both of which are big by modern standards. Burton and wife Kay have five children, the eldest boys Max and Archie from his previous marriage along with Sebastian, AJ and May; Weatherald and wife Marnie have four daughters, Lucie, Katie, Elle and Brooke.

Both Burton and Weatherald were working as PE teachers at the time of the bombing, Burton at Woodcroft College and Weatherald at Prince Alfred College.

Weatherald was uninjured in the blast but in such a robot-like state that just nine days later he was back in the classroom at PAC as if nothing had happened.

For Burton the road back was longer and tougher, with weeks in hospital and months of rehabilitation before he returned to work in 2003.

He is a pragmatic bloke whose parents have led the tough life of farmers in the remote Eyre Peninsula town of Cowell. But he keeps one box of memories from the bombing. It includes a handpainted Australian flag taken from the walls of the Sari Club, the compression suit he wore for months after the blast, and hundreds of drawings, cards and letters drawn by his students and other schoolchildren across SA.

Sturt footballer Julian Burton arriving at the Adelaide Airport via a RAAF Hercules aircraft on October 15, 2002.

Those cards, along with his parents and brother, were the first thing he saw when he came too inside the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

“My parents always raised me with the attitude that in life things go wrong but you can only sit in the corner and cry for so long,” Burton tells The Weekend Australian. “Then you have to pick yourself up and go again, and only you can do that.

“Don’t get me wrong, there were times when I wallowed, when I was hurting physically and emotionally. But there was also a time when I looked around my hospital room and there were cards from all these kids, and there’s my mum and dad and brother, who was in Bali too and also survived. It was very hard not to look at all that and think: hang on, I’m lucky here.”

Weatherald says the aftermath of the terror attack and the loss of Marshall and Deegan created an awkward dynamic inside the footy club. “For a long time people were afraid even to ask us about it,” he says. “At the footy club it was quite a big issue. We became quite divided. There were the Bali 18 boys who returned, there were the boys who planned to come but pulled out at the last minute, and they had mixed emotions thinking they should have been there. Then there were people who were new to the club who weren’t involved. And no one would talk to the Bali boys. We became quite separate because people were too scared to ask us anything.

“We had a Sunday session in 2003 when me and Curto (defender Michael Curtis) and Whitey (halfback Andrew Whiteman) decided to speak to our teammates and tell them everything about what happened that night.

We said to everyone: “Just ask us. Don’t be afraid to ask us.” But there are players from that group who came back and still do not like talking about it. But for me, talking about it has been good.”

While Weatherald spent much of the first five years after Bali giving speeches at schools and in prisons about living life to the fullest, Burton immersed himself in charity work, partnering with his surgeon, Professor John Greenwood, to establish the Julian Burton Burns Trust.

The organisation raised some $20m for burns research and treatment and has since led Burton and Greenwood into business, where they have patented a brand of composite skin that eliminates the need for grafts.

“Being a country boy from Cowell, I suppose my attitude was that you have to give back, you have to help people,” he says.

“I am not a psychologist but when trauma happens you have a choice about how you move forward. You can either use that trauma as a motivating factor, or let it define where you are and where you stay in life. Or you can say the trauma is just part of my life, and I will use it to move forward.”

Tim Weatherald with wife Marnie (second from left) and daughters (from left) Lucy, Katie, Elle and Brooke in Bali this week.

Both Burton and Weatherald say they do not feel as though they have been mentally affected in a negative way by what happened that night, although occasional things do trigger them.

“I only really think about it when I get close to fire or when I hear a loud bang,” Burton says.

“If I’m back on the farm and back burning or lighting a fire I will get a flashback.”

Weatherald is up in Bali this week with his family on the 10th visit he has made there since the bombings. He says he has struggled previously to attend the memorial at the bombing site and is uncomfortable with crowds.

“Right after the bombing I vowed I was never going overseas again,” he says. “Marnie and I got married in January 2003 just after the bombings and we had a big overseas honeymoon planned and I cancelled it.

“But in 2004 we travelled through America and Europe and on the way home booked one night in Bali. It had got to a point where I felt like I wanted to come back and see it. My wife didn’t really understand where I was at.

“When we came here I walked the exact walk that I had done on the day of the bombings. I walked with Marnie, we went to the site and had a drink and flew back to Australia the next day. It was like taking off a backpack of rocks that I had been carrying around for a couple of years.”