Remembering Bali / 20 Years On
by Sean Davey/Oculi
On Sunday 13 October 2002, I received a telephone call from my then boss, the picture editor of the Sun-Herald newspaper. I was near the pit lane at the Bathurst 1000 Supercar race when I took the call. Everyone had heard about the nightclub bombings in Kuta, and there, in the midst of the smell of race fuel and rubber, I was asked to be ready to go to Bali on Tuesday morning.
I was the youngest of the newspaper’s photographic team at the time, and had only completed my one-year photographic traineeship at the end of 2000. I remember being excited at the thought of covering such a big event, and also a bit shy, as I soon heard that more than a few senior colleagues were unimpressed that they had been overlooked for the assignment for the most junior photographer on staff. I was 23 years old.
‘This is the hardest flight I have ever had to make’, said the QANTAS captain over the 737’s cabin speakers. He was audibly choking back tears as the plane reversed from the gate at Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney.
I was sitting next to Matthew Benns, the Sun-Herald journalist who I would be working with over the next week. I pushed myself up in my seat to look around the plane, it was almost empty. From memory I counted no more than 12–15 other passengers onboard.
This 11am flight from Sydney to Bali was scheduled specially to bring people back to Australia, and as the captain tried his best to welcome the small number of us onboard, it was obvious that the majority of those on this flight were relatives of people who were now missing after the attacks, and who were travelling to Bali to look for their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.
I let myself down in my seat as a flight attendant approached, and I began to cry. I had never felt anything like it before, the gravity of the situation and the emotion overcoming me. I felt a hand on my shoulder as I tried to hide my tears by looking out of the window towards the terminal building.
The attendant gently and lovingly tried to console me. I felt like a fraud. There I was, a young news photographer, in an almost empty plane, about to undertake a six and a half hour flight to Bali to report on what had happened, and I was the one being consoled. Only a few rows away, each small party, spread out from the others, sat in silence or in hushed conversations. The plane taxied to the runway for take off.
An hour or so into the flight, my colleague Matthew and I started talking about our approach to the story and what we would do when we landed. I remember him suggesting that we should try and talk to some of the people onboard.
‘How on earth can we do that!?’, I thought to myself. I was still so green, and while I wasn’t afraid of approaching people I didn’t know, the sensitivity of the environment and the sombre emotion in the almost empty cabin precluded any possible thought (on my part at least) of being able to approach anyone and ask them for an interview. I told Matthew I would not approach anyone on the plane.
A few hours into the flight, and after a few alcoholic drinks, I walked to the toilet at the rear of the plane. As I passed down the aisle, I was greeted by two men sitting together in the middle row. They introduced themselves as Dave Dunn and Rob Lewis. Rob told me to come back and have a drink with them when I got back from the toilet.
As the empty plane was still flying above the Australian continent towards our destination, I sat down with Rob and Dave. A flight attendant brought us all drinks. The men started to tell me why they were on the plane, they were travelling to Bali to look for their sons Craig and Danny, who they hadn’t heard from since the the blasts.
Craig Dunn, 18, and Danny Lewis, 19, were best mates from Ulladulla on the NSW South Coast. It was Craig’s first overseas trip, Dave told me. We ordered more drinks and the men spoke about their boys. Not having recalled this conversation for many years now, it sends shivers down my spine to think of what the men were going through and how vulnerable they were, sitting there with me, 23 years old.
‘We’re going over to bring their bodies back. We know that.’ Rob said.
I sat there, drinking and listening. I couldn’t do anything else, and I was scared to tell them my own reason for being on the plane. But eventually it was my turn to speak. And by this time, we were quite pissed.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m a news photographer. I’m going over to cover the story for the paper.’ I was ashamed, I felt like a fraud after these men had opened up to me so personally.
‘Mate, I’m so sorry’, came the reply (I can’t recall which of the two men said this).
‘This must be really hard for you.’
We continued drinking and I told them I was just at the Bathurst 1000. We sat there together for at least two hours and got quite drunk, me more than them I suspect.
Rob pulled some A4 sheets of paper from a backpack. The men had photocopied handmade posters of the two boys, one for each of them. Each was printed in black and white, and had personal details of the boys on it; name, age, hair colour, height, eye colour. We continued drinking and I suggested that we make a photo of them holding up their posters. They agreed.
I returned to my seat to get my digital camera and a flash which was in my backpack. By this stage, I was well and truly pissed, swaying with a kind of delirium. I still had the presence of mind however to know how I wanted to photograph them and what settings to put my camera on.
Dave sat on one side of the aisle and Rob on the other, they were the only two people in the camera’s viewfinder, surrounding them rows upon rows of empty seats. They held up the posters and I composed a frame, and with a bright flash, made a photograph. Without taking my face away from the camera, I made two or three more photos before photographing each of the posters individually. I sat down with them again and we continued drinking.
I remember vividly the conversation I had with the paper’s picture editor and newsroom’s chief of staff before Matthew and I left Sydney. It was a big deal that I had been asked to go and I was certainly aware of the trust being placed in me. As a weekly newspaper, published on Sundays, Matthew and I had four days to get a story that no other media organisation published during the week. With Australia’s and the world’s media having already descended on Bali a few days earlier, it was a big ask, but I felt confident in my ability to find stories. Both the picture editor and the chief of staff impressed on me the importance of my role in this assignment.
Sitting there, all three of us together on the plane, Dave and Rob weren’t yet part of a story. They were two men who asked me to have a drink with them, two men whose sons had been killed a few days earlier in a terrorist attack in a foreign country. How I came to photograph them, each holding posters of their missing sons on an empty 737, I never could have imagined.
Matthew was excited — in that journalistic sense of a ‘good get’ — of me having met Rob and Dave. I introduced him to them and we organised to see them again after we arrived in Bali.
The plane landed at Denpasar Airport on Tuesday afternoon, two hours behind Sydney time. Kuta was swarming with Australian and international media. I knew quite a few of the Australians, some by face, others were well known colleagues; television presenters, camera operators, sound recordists, photographers and writers. Even with the final death toll from the three bombs unconfirmed at the time (202 people died in the attacks, 88 Australians), we all had the same job of trying to interview and photograph survivors and their families.
The first stop for both media and relatives who had traveled to Bali was the local morgue, where conditions were horrific. Covered bodies lay scattered on the concrete floor, the staff using bags of ice to try and preserve them as best they could. There were too many to be refrigerated and I remember hearing people talk about the power generators being overloaded. I’d only ever seen pictures of such carnage and mayhem in books and on television, and there amongst it all were parents lifting the covers one by one, escorted by medical staff, looking to identify their kids who hadn’t been heard of since the blasts. Both Dave and Rob would later head to the morgue to look for their sons’ bodies. They wouldn’t find Craig’s or Danny’s bodies.
The fathers told me they were staying at a hotel on Kuta Beach and that I should come over and see them. Matthew and I, along with many other international journalists, were staying only a few hotels up the road, within easy walking distance. I remember stepping out in the afternoon without my shoes, thinking to have a look at the beach, and within only a few steps the hotel’s bitumen driveway burnt the soles of both my feet, and would leave significant blisters that stayed with me for the next week. On subsequent trips back to the morgue with Matthew, the pain in my feet was a reminder of the conditions the staff were working under to keep bodies from deteriorating. From melting.
A year earlier, in October 2001 — four weeks after the World Trade Centre attacks on September 11 — my friend James and I touched down in Bali for a two week holiday. I was 22 years old, James was 25. We were only a few years older than Craig Dunn and Danny Lewis. We did what many young Australians did, and aside from visiting other parts of the island, we spent a week in Kuta, recovering by the hotel pool during the day after long and messy nights of drinking and dancing at the clubs on Legian Street.
October is a busy tourist period in Bali, and this was obviously not lost to those who planned and carried out the bombings in 2002. End of year football trips often include Bali as a destination, and walking the streets of Kuta, Bali’s main tourist district, it was usual to see just as many foreigners — if not more — than Balinese people. Bintang singlets, thongs, board shorts and burnt shoulders were uniform.
Dave and Rob were staying in the same hotel that Craig and Danny had booked. Hotel staff said the boys hadn’t been back to the room since Saturday, not since the bombings. Over the phone Rob and Dave invited me down for a drink by the hotel pool, and still with painfully burnt feet, I walked the few hundred metres from our hotel to theirs. When I arrived, I stood motionless for a moment. It was the same hotel that James and I had stayed in a year earlier to the week.
After a few drinks by the pool, we walked up to Craig and Danny’s room. It was exactly as the boys had left it on Saturday night before they headed out. I walked in behind Dave and Rob, the three of us were let in by a sombre and sincere hotel worker, he offered condolences to both men as he unlocked the door. The first thing in the room I remember seeing were two open suitcases and a bottle of bourbon, no doubt purchased from duty free on the boys’ trip over.
Rob and Dave started going through their sons belongings. It was a small room, made even smaller with the three of us in there together. I was permitted to make photographs of the two men going through their sons’ things, and I remember my lens not being wide enough to show as much of the room as I had wanted. As I photographed, I couldn’t help think of my time in the very same hotel a year earlier. Dave put Craig’s suitcase on a bed as Rob went through his own son’s possessions. One of them picked up a camera belonging to the boys. It was a point and shoot, disposable film camera that has one roll of film and is destroyed when the film is developed. The film counter indicated 12 pictures had been taken.
I asked the fathers if they wanted to see the pictures, and if so, I could find a photo lab to get the film developed and printed. Both Dave and Rob said they did, and I was handed the camera as they continued to go through their sons’ things.
After leaving the hotel, I told Matthew Benns what I had just experienced with Dave and Rob. He made some notes over the phone as I recounted what had happened. I then found a photo lab and handed the camera over for development. It would be ready in just a few hours. I went back to my hotel and uploaded the photos of Dave and Rob in the boys’ room. There was a narrative starting to take shape, and professionally I felt that we were building a strong story that no other media outlet had access to.
Later the same day the film was ready to be collected. I called Dave to tell him that the photos were ready and that I’d bring them over to their hotel. I had already looked at the photos when I picked them up from the lab to see whether they had turned out. A lump had formed in my throat.
The men were having drinks by the pool, it was hot. We embraced with hugs and ordered some more drinks from the bar. We sat on deck chairs and I handed the envelope of photos to Rob and Dave. Amongst the 12 photos were images of the boys in their hotel room, drinking, mucking around and getting ready for a night out.
‘This must have been right before they went out’, said Rob, holding a photo of Danny.
The lump in my throat grew. James and I had also brought a few bottles of duty free alcohol when we left for Bali in October 2001. We drank in our hotel room before going out nightclubbing in Legian Street. We took pictures of each other in our room, just like Craig and Danny had done a few days earlier, and we too had made strong drinks with our duty free bottles of Jim Beam and Coke.
Rob and Dave looked a the pictures for a while longer. It was the last pictures of their boys alive. I hugged each of them again and I told them how sorry I was.
The afternoon light was softening quickly, the sun close to setting over the Indian Ocean. Rob told me that a group of Balinese had heard about them being in Kuta, and had placed two commemorative wreaths on Kuta Beach for their sons. They asked me to come and photograph them with the wreaths.
The light was disappearing quickly as we walked across Kuta Beach Road and onto the beach. There, in the soft sand, were two wreaths made from different coloured flowers. One displayed the name Craig Dunn, the other Danny Lewis. A few people milled around, all of them Balinese. The sun touched the water and it quickly disappeared, turning the sky orange before eventually slipping out view. Darkness came quickly and I made some portraits of Dave and Rob with the wreaths while explaining to some local onlookers that these two men were the fathers of the boys whose names were written across the colourful array of flowers. Condolences and handshakes were offered and accepted. It was so dark that I had to use my flash, holding it in my outstretched left hand, using an infrared remote control to trigger it from the camera.
I remember looking through the viewfinder, it was so dark I couldn’t see much at all. I framed the scenario as best I could and pressed the shutter button, the flash illuminating the wreaths and the reflective material on Rob’s shorts. I checked the digital camera’s screen to see the pictures and there, against the black background were two iridescent, temporary memorials in honour and memory of Craig Dunn and Danny Lewis from Ulladulla on the South Coast of New South Wales. Their fathers, standing there next to them, looked straight at the camera.
By the time we left the beach it was completely dark. I accompanied Dave and Rob back to their hotel and we embraced again, saying our farewells. I walked back along Kuta Beach Road to my hotel and went straight to the bar. The gravity of what I had just experienced welled up in me like a tidal wave. I saw some familiar faces and took a seat amongst the crowd. I sat next to Sydney Morning Herald journalist Stephen Gibbs and The Australian’s newspaper photographer Renee Nowytarger. When they asked me how I was doing, I put my head in my hands and started to cry. I tried to explain what had just happened, how I had just delivered two fathers the last pictures of their sons they would ever see, about the boys’ hotel room and the beach memorial. It was all too much. I started to ball my eyes out.
Gibbsy, an experienced news reporter, grabbed me and pulled me into him.
‘It’s alright mate. It’s alright.’
I cried uncontrollably. Gibbsy hugged me tighter and didn’t let me go. Renee was equally as caring, putting her arm around me, consoling me with tenderness.
Gibbsy ordered me a beer and we sat there in silence for a while, his arm still firmly around my shoulder. I recounted to them the story, from leaving Sydney in an empty plane to having been with Dave and Rob on Kuta Beach. I told them that I’d taken the same trip as Craig and Danny, that I had stayed in the same hotel with my friend, a year ago almost to the day. Telling the story put all the pieces of my evolving grief together.
The next day was Friday, a day before our deadline for publication. Dave and Rob had done an interview with Matthew and looking at the photos from the past week, I was confident that we had an in depth and deeply personal account of their story, their journey to find Craig and Danny. I filed the photographs, but it was still hard to believe that so much had happened in the space of only a few days. Dave and Rob told me they were happy their story would be published.
A call came from an editor as the newspaper in Sydney. The story and pictures had been received, but there was something else we needed to do. They had got wind of a 16 year old Australian girl who lived in Bali with her family. She had assisted some of the victims at the local hospital, and they wanted her story. Matthew and I went to meet her and her mum, both of whom had cared for people with injuries after the blasts. There wasn’t much to the picture of her, it was a portrait in a nondescript outdoor location. She smiled as she looked at the camera, a natural response for anyone, let alone an amenable sixteen year old.
‘Please don’t smile’, I asked her.
I’m ashamed of what I asked next.
‘Could you please look a bit sad’. I knew it was what the newspaper wanted.
And there, after spending a week with two fathers who had lost their sons in the explosions, who had travelled to Bali looking in grief for their boys, who had visited the morgue surrounded by bodies, who were the first people to enter their sons’ hotel room since the boys left for a night out, and, who ultimately knew that they would never see Craig and Danny again, I was asking a young girl to look sad, to compose a photograph for the newspaper.
I filed the pictures and Matthew wrote the story.
I was numb. I was angry. I was upset.
On Sunday, still in Bali, I was keen to see the story on Rob and Dave. I can’t recall when I first saw that Sunday’s newspaper but when I did my heart sank, my stomach churned. Perhaps it was my own naivety, a lack of experience and knowledge of the internal workings of the newspaper, but I fully expected to see the fathers on the page one. I had done what had been asked of me, and with Matthew, we had found a story that no one else had published before Sunday.
The story on the young Australian girl was published with a large portrait on page 5. Dave and Rob’s story was smaller and further back in the paper, on page 7, 9, or maybe 11, I can’t recall exactly where. Two small photos accompanied a short story on them.
I didn’t know what to say to them. I was embarrassed.
That Sunday night, 60 Minutes, a current affairs program, aired on Channel 9. Tara Brown had been in Bali and had interviewed Dave and Rob. It was the program’s lead story. I was very happy that the pair were able to tell their story to a large national audience, but professionally I was disheartened that my own newspaper hadn’t published their story with greater interest.
I apologised to Dave and Rob for the way in which the newspaper ran their story, and I was ashamed for a long time, both personally and professionally. I felt like they had put their trust in me and I had let them down. Both Dave and Rob could see I was devastated by it, and they said they understood the decisions on what was published was out of my hands. They didn’t blame me one bit.
On Monday or Tuesday, a week after arriving, Matthew and I left Bali and returned to Sydney. I kept in touch with Dave and Rob after returning to Australia and I sent them a selection of the photos we made together in Bali.
In no small way, after this experience, the writing was on the wall for me as a staff press photographer. The following year, in March 2003, I handed in my letter of resignation. After three years I needed to do something else, to explore photography in a more personal way. I spent a year travelling in Europe and America, researching photographers, visiting galleries and museums, and making my own pictures that were free from story, instead based wholly on personal experience. I was leaving the news photography environment and moving into a more personal space of documentary photography with personal experience and feeling to guide me.
Unbeknownst to me, or perhaps due to a lack of memory, I didn’t realise that during my week in Bali I also carried a film camera loaded with black and white film. Only a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of the Bali bombings, I was researching some negatives in my own archive when I came across some rolls of film I made during that time.
With the anniversary approaching, I decided to scan the film to see what I had shot all those years ago. There are no photos of Dave or Rob amongst the negatives, or the time we spent together. All of those pictures were made on a digital camera, filed to the newspaper and subsequently archived in the Fairfax Image Library. I didn’t keep any of the work photographs for myself.
The black and white images dotted throughout this story weren’t made for work, they were made for me on a silver Nikon FM2, a camera I used to carry around with me from time to time on assignments, as well as in my own personal time. While my main focus in Bali was always work, I did take the time to shoot a few rolls of film, seven in total, mainly taken on Kuta Beach.
20 years on from this major and catastrophic incident, it was time to sit down and put these memories into words. What I experienced on that trip to Bali in 2002 pales in comparison to what many people endured and experienced, Dave and Rob included. In a small way this is simply a record, my record of that week in October, when the world’s attention was focused on a small island in Indonesia. Even now, having written it down, the memories remain.
