Celebrations of life, not death

CLINT Thompson was a larrikin and a ladies' man. He played rugby league with Sydney's Coogee Dolphins and really liked a beer.

CLINT Thompson was a larrikin and a ladies' man. He played rugby league with Sydney's Coogee Dolphins and really liked a beer.

On October 12, 2002, he was one of six Dolphins players who died in the bombing of Bali's Sari Club. He was just 29 years old.

Clint's brothers - Trent, Zaide, Ryan and Brock - gathered to remember him yesterday, after hearing the bombers responsible for the deaths of 88 Australians had faced the firing squad.

They raised a glass at Clint's local watering hole, the Coogee Beach Palace hotel, but it wasn't to celebrate the execution.

No, the Thompson boys celebrated Clint's life, and the lives of so many others lost in Bali. They pinned a photograph of him flexing his muscles on the hotel wall, and regarded it fondly.

They remembered him, in a good way.

The gentle celebration was but one of myriad reactions from Sydney to Perth to Bali from survivors and the families of victims to the predicted, yet still surreal news that the gloating bombers - Amrozi, Ali Ghufron (alias Mukhlas) and Imam Samudra - had been taken from their concrete cells shortly after midnight on Saturday; strapped to wooden crosses and shot by three firing squads, working simultaneously.

It was a milestone in the journey undertaken by those touched by the sharp and shocking death of so many Australians on foreign shores; by the horror and confusion on the streets outside the bombed clubs; the darkness and the smell of the make-shift Bali morgues.

Then, too, there have been six years of anguish as the bombers gloated and giggled like school girls for the media; and the sad acceptance that the death of so many young Westerners was something that some people wanted to celebrate.

David Byron of Bondi spent much of October trying not to think about the executions, and thinking about it nonetheless. His daughter, Chloe, died in the blast. She was just 15, and liked to wear a frangipani in her hair.

"You'd move heaven on earth not to have to go through this," he said, last week, when still waking in the night, wondering if it had been done. The feeling is: what will it be like? How will I feel? Will I be relieved? Am I going to be joyous? Am I going to cry? For my girl, maybe. Or will I feel nothing?"

Former South Australian magistrate Brian Deegan, an opponent of capital punishment, whose son Josh, 21, was killed at the Sari Club, said: "It's the weirdest feeling. I just feel hollow".

Gayle Dunn, who lost her 18-year-old son Craig, remembered him as the boy with so many friends, whose favourite saying was: "Hey, Mum, what's for tea?" The NSW south coast resident still hears those words.

Former Sydney Roosters forward rugby league Craig Salvatori, who had to find the remains of his wife 38-year-old Kathy in the morgue, said: "There's not really a sense of satisfaction. There's no great relief".

On the other hand, there was Sydneysider Mary Kotronikis - whose sisters Elizabeth, 33, and 27-year-old Dimmy were killed - who said, quite frankly: "We are over the moon."

Kevin Rudd focused entirely on the families, saying: "Their lives remain shattered. They've been changed fundamentally by that murder. So it's their lives that we think about today."

As Jan and Restiani Laczynski paid tribute at the site of the blasts to lost friends news of the executions reached the Bali Nine, too. Pastor Ed Trotter, who has visited three of those young Australian drug mules on death row, said: "It's really brought it home to them, what they're facing and how serious the Government is".

Then, too, there is the knowledge that whatever happened to the bombers yesterday, nothing can bring back the lives of those 202 who were lost.

"That absolute gut-ache has diminished a bit," said Mr Deegan, but as to whether there would ever be closure, well, he doubts it: "You can only live with it," he said. "I think that's the best one can expect."