It is high noon on October 11, 2022 and a hooker sleeps in front of a local convenience store that abuts the Bali Bombing Memorial. The hooker is slumped forward in a sagging plastic chair wearing an obscene black dress, made even more so by the light of day. Exhausted from her previous night’s work, her chin rests on her chest and the areola of her brown right nipple is partially exposed. Her chest rises and falls and her chin lifts and drops, making it appear that she is still saying yes. Her nose whistles softly with each breath and in her lank hand a cheap Chinese cell phone vibrates over and over and over and over. You are reminded of a vampire that has yet to burst into flames. Still in the shadow of the awning, you wonder if she will when the sun starts to dip and hits her directly, it’s only minutes away from her toes. Because the earth is spinning to the east and the shadows will start to stretch at any second now and time will not stand still nor has it in this place for the last twenty years. Though when you look across the street it seems that it has. There lies the one last vacant lot in Kuta, earmarked for the past twenty years to be converted from the annihilated Sari Club into a “Peace Park”, a second memorial to the lives lost on that tragic night that befell here twenty years previous. The lot stands abandoned and weed choked still, despite the endless river of Australian taxpayers money that has poured into it like the blood that was once spilled there, only to vanish as if soaked up by the weeds. But that’s ok, because the GROUND ZERO nightclub and restaurant has gone up next door and is doing a steady business now that the Covid madness is over. And a lot of expats find peace there at the bottom of a warm bottle of beer at noon waiting for the world to end. The business of Kuta is, after all, business. Then there is the Pharmacy right next to this Ground Zero club  that is delightfully selling edible condoms and lube by night and vitamin C hangover fizzies and herpes salves during the day. Cures for all the ills of sin.

And make no mistake, this is a place of sin and every Australian surfer knows it. Especially if today you take the time to stand directly in front of the Bali bombing memorial surrounded by the crowds of mostly Islamic tourists who flock here from Java. Twenty years on, the Memorial is now a bucket list selfie point, not so much as a celebration as a curiosity. And so you stand there in front of the memorial and regard its burbling fountain and the newly installed electric palm trees that at night blink and flash and change colours, throwing their garish reflections of pink and yellow and blue against the huge onyx gravestone that lists the dead, categorised by country and engraved in gold. And if you squint your eyes you can just make out the last two curled and faded photographs taped up to to the Memorial and the dried and crumpled flowers below them. And you realise that those unblinking, smiling eyes in those photographs gaze out over the very brand of surfing’s colonial irresponsibility that got everyone blown to rags in the first place.

It was at this very spot on Bali, at exactly 11:05pm on the 12th of October, 2002 that the first and only terrorist act in history perpetrated directly against Surfers took place. It was here, in the tourist hub of Bali’s Kuta Beach, at two beer soaked nightclubs that catered directly to the hordes of visiting surfers, resplendent with wall mounted surf videos and signed surfboards from all the sport’s heroes, that two massive suicide bombs were detonated within fifteen seconds of each other. In that last screaming instant, 202 souls surrendered to history. Of them, most were surfers. And the worst part of it all? In many ways, these surfers had brought it on themselves. And upon the innocents among them.

Long ago and far away in our surfing’s memory, Bali became a pilgrimage, a rite of passage for every surfer on earth. The floodgates of desire opened and the great exodus began. With blinding rapacity, fuelled by the lust for perfectly shaped waves, Kuta Beach’s new wave of colonisation and subsequent tourist infrastructure was spearheaded by the world’s surfers. And that’s where things started to go deadly wrong. Did these surfers bring their better angels to Bali? In their headlong rush for personal glory and wild moments on the face of Bali’s perfect waves, did they once stop and think about just what the hell they were doing by night?

The Balinese got it and by that one night in October of 2002, surfing was a welcome invasion. A tidal wave of fanatic passion that had dragged in its wake rampant capitalism and its inevitable counterparts. Graft, environmental disaster, prostitution, illicit drugs and rivers of booze that quite literally ran from hundreds of bursting bladders into hundreds of broken urinals, right down the naked streets and directly into the very sea these surfers came to ride. The “Hellzone” of Kuta had reached a zenith of decadence. Sodom and Gomorrah by the sea. Packed with sweaty western revellers feeding off the freedom of the place with a spirit not of joy, but of seedy exploitation, turgid, besotted and sex driven. The Amsterdam of the equator. By the light of a neon moon nightclubs blared away, inviting all comers into their howling, cavernous confines. Hundreds of people, hundreds of slurring voices, hundreds of western souls blowing off steam, popping pills, smoking weed, snorting coke, gobbling mushrooms, drinking to insensibility, getting blown and laid and buggered by any means necessary, holiday makers, schoolies, hustlers and dreamers alike. And surfers, you bet, scads of them, easily the best looking and taking the lead. And the Balinese people, served them all and pocketed it all. The waitresses, the bartenders, the street hawkers, the dealers, the crazy and the beggars grim. Even that steady stream of traffic that threaded its way through the sweaty, sunburnt and beach-braided throng, predatory taxis honking horns and the hookers, sleek as blue sharks, cruising with sly inevitability.

See it, whether you are old enough to or not. Out of the Bounty Club, six drunken, shirtless Australian surfers and a topless woman emerge from a nude mud wrestling pit in a cloud of soap suds and whiskey and stumble over to the packed Espresso Club across the street where a shit faced surfer is belting out The Doors “Roadhouse Blues” with the local band…SAVE OUR CITY! …SAVE OUR CITY!…See it. This site on earth not only a perfect example of the worst visiting surfers can bring with them, but a magnificent target for anyone who hates the west and the inevitable decadence it carries in its back pocket like a loaded gun.

So Islamic extremists blew the place from the face of the earth. Wiped clean by the wrath of their God and twelve hundred kilos of explosives. And that was only a third of what they had on hand. And here is where the anger and the horror and the outrage comes in. See it. Let it flow through you. Twelve hundred Kilos of explosives. Demolition experts say that there is always an eerie, almost undetectable split second of silence that occurs before any bomb goes off. As if nature itself knows the suddenness and the outrage that is about to unfold and it sucks in its breath and holds it tight and clamps its eyes shut against the revulsion that it knows is coming. And then it comes. And with it the separation of human body parts from each other as the brimstone swallows the remains like a biblical monstrosity. 

You see it, now that you stand in front of the Memorial twenty years on and think of all this and realise that none of this matters anymore to the two hundred and two souls that were lost that horrible night. But it damn sure still means something to the people who knew them. And you damn near raise your middle finger toward the raggedy lot of the deserted “Peace Park” and you rage anew at the whole goddamned thing and the terrorist bastards that pushed the buttons. The whole goddamned mess. And then you sit, head in hands, trembling on the steps of the Memorial on October 11, 2022 steeped in your own impotent fury. While behind you, under the giant onyx gravestone of the Memorial, those two photographs and those dried and crumpled flowers stir in the offshore wind that will be grooming the waves you will be surfing by the time the sun hits the horizon and the sky turns blood red. 

And that there, right there, is just the way it is.

Requiem

There is a lot of talk of ghosts these days. Apparently they have been very active around the Memorial. People seeing them all the time. A seance was held just the other night and a hypnotherapist works there from time to time with Aussie survivors who want to forget. I recently drank some beer with two iron-jawed Aussie rugby players who were discussing in hushed tones the apparitions they had seen. Even now, once you get off that plane in 2022, the spirit world is still unquestioned here by the Balinese and by everybody else with half a clue. The unexplained here is commonplace, one of the charms of Bali it is said. And as much as surfers like to think they happen to Bali, the truth is that Bali has always happened to them. Just like the ghosts that have swirled around the Memorial for twenty years.

And it is impossible to come to any conclusions about surfers and Bali without the surfers coming to conclusions about themselves. Though surfers have stamped their feet hard upon the earth here, Bali’s beauty, her intrepid beauty, even here in the hellzone at the memorial amid the tawdriness, her beauty is as undeniable as it has ever been. One need only look up into the evening sky with its citadel clouds glowing sea shell blue in their immensity, to hear the creaking of the bamboo grove outside your window in the dawn’s misty light, to watch the gentle ceremony of the morning Canang offerings, or, for a surfer, the view from deep inside a spinning wave as the sun shines down over the whole show. This is the unaltered Bali for today’s surfer if he or she can see it. Answers here are found not in what you look for, but in what you see. The Bali experience will always be a matter of what surfers bring to it. Evil or saintly. It is unknown which they will gravitate toward now that the border walls have fallen.

Hopefully, and a scant hope is all we have at this point, the beliefs of this island, the balance of good and evil that keep things in check, will tip in neither direction because of us. And the horizon will stay level and true and the ship will not capsize and break apart on the rocks ever again. Hopefully we can all re-discover the beauty of Bali and help the ghosts keep her balanced with our better angels this time. Oh, don’t laugh yet, it’s possible. Just ask the people in those dog-eared and fading photographs taped to the Memorial. Or better yet, ask yourself. Because beauty is never enhanced by the discovery of it.

But it should be.

In respectful memory of those Australians killed in the Bali Bombing October 12, 2002

New South Wales

Gayle Airlie  Renae Anderson  Christine Betmalik  Abbey Borgia  Geradine Buchan  Steve Buchan  Chloe Byron  Paul Cronin  Francoise Dahan  Michelle Dunlop  Craig Dunn  Shane Foley  Simone Hanley  James Hardman  Andrea Hore  Adam Howard  Josh Iliffe   Dimitia Kotronikis  Elizabeth  Kotronikis  Danny Lewis  Scott Lysaght  Linda Makawana  Dave Mavroudis  Lyn McKeon  Marissa McKeon  Jodie O`Shea  Bradley Ridley  Ben Roberts  Kathy Salvatori  Gregory Sanderson  Cathy Seelin  Tom Singer  Julie Stevenson  Behic Sumer  Clint Thompson  Charles Vanrenen  Jodie Wallace  Shane Walsh-Till  Robyn Webster  Chairmaine Whitton  Gerard Yeo  Louiza Zervos

Queensland

Jodie Caerns  Jared Cane  Billy Hardy  Paul Hussey  David Kent  
Nathan Swain  Robert Thwaites

South Australia

Joshua Deegan  Angela Golotta  Bob Marshall

Tasmania

Timothy Hawkins

Victoria

Belinda Allen  Anthony Cachia  Rebecca Cartledge  Bronwyn Cartwright  Donna Croxford  Kristen Curnow  Sylvia Dalais  Angele Gray  Justin Lee Stacey Lee  Aaron Lee  Sue Maloney  Jennifer Murphy  Amber O`Donnell  Jessica O`Donnell  Susan Ogier  Bronwyn Ross  Anthony Stewart  Vanessa Walder  Marlene Whiteley

Western Australia

Peter Basioli  Matthew Bolwerk  Jane Corteen  Jenny Corteen  Andrew Dobson  Dean Gallagher  Byron Hancock  Nicole Harrison  Carol Johnstone  Corey Paltridge  David Ross  Lee Sexton  Jason Stokers  Tracey Thomas   Jonathan Wade