Episode 5: The morning after the bombing

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Prologue: Brutal reality

Joe Frost

On 2 October - the day after the bombing - Mum woke me at dawn. 

“Dad wants you to go to the hospital with everyone’s passports,” she said. 

Being a doctor, Dad had gone to a nearby hospital the night before to help with the injuries. Still, I was confused.  

“But everyone’s OK,” I said. “Why do they need passports? Who’s leaving the country?” 

Mum said she didn’t know, just that Dad asked for me to get the passports of everyone who was in hospital and get over there as soon as possible. 

I made my way around the hotel halls, knocking on doors to pick up passports.  

Dane Griffiths, Vicky and Kim’s son, told me he was coming. Dane had been my best mate in primary school and – having been to Bali plenty of times before – he had been showing me the ropes over our first few days. I was glad to have his company.  

When I knocked on Dietmar Lederwasch's door, he said he was coming too. Dad's best mate, Diet and I had always been close. But we had walked through Hell together the night before. Our bond was now inextricable.  

Within an hour, Diet, Dane and I were in a taxi headed for Sanglah Hospital in downtown Denpasar, arriving in the blazing sunshine of what was already a stifling Bali day. 

Dad stood out the front of the hospital, hugged each of us individually, then gestured for us to follow him.  

The largest medical facility on the island of Bali, Sanglah was unlike any Australian hospital I had ever been in. From the outside, it looked like a simple two-story building. However, Sanglah spread out over a large area, with the various wings connected by long, outdoor corridors, covered from the elements by Balinese-style roofs.   

Sanglah had been overwhelmed when hundreds of people came through its doors in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali Bombing, unprepared for the amount of brutal burn injuries. In response, the Australian Government had given a multi-million-dollar gift to establish the 12 October Australia Memorial Centre at Sanglah.  

It was in this newly built ward where Dad was now treating the people from Newcastle he had come on holiday with. 

We stopped at the doors to the ward and I finally asked, “Dad, what’s going on?”  

He laid the extent of the devastation out for us.  

Fractured limbs. A destroyed eye. Detached retinas. Shrapnel wounds that Dad compared to being blasted with a shotgun. 

These injuries would change people’s lives forever.  

Peny and Paul Anicich’s lives were still hanging in the balance – I remember Dad using the phrase “circling the drain” to describe Paul. 

But Dad had saved the real gut-punch for last. 

“And Jennifer Williamson,” he took a moment.   

“Jennifer has passed away.”  

Diet, Dane and I were all too stunned by what we had just learnt to truly come to terms with it all.  

Then Dad took us into the ward and we saw first-hand the devastation that had been wrought by Salik Firdaus and his backpack. 

Act 1: Blood, shrapnel and priorities  

Joe Frost

Around about the time I being awoken by the phone call to get the passports, someone else in Bali was also waking to unexpected news.  

Tony Abbott was then the Minister for Health, but on that day in 2005, he just happened to be on holiday in Bali with his family. At around 5am, the landline in his hotel room rang. It was his sister. 

Tony Abbott

And she said, ‘Are you all right?’   

And I said, ‘What do you mean are we all right? Of course, we're all right.’   

And she said, 'There's been a bombing.’   

And I was momentarily incredulous. And then when she explained that there had been a bombing and that a number of Australians had been killed, and number of Australians were badly hurt, I thought, well, I'd better, I suppose, do something, because at that time, I was the health minister in the Howard Government, and I figured that ... as the man on the spot when Australians were in trouble, I should be as useful to them as I could be. 

So I put my running shoes on, ran down into the heart of Kuta, where one of the bombs had gone off. Obviously the police had blocked off the street. There were security people all around. I managed to find someone who appeared to be an authority, and I said, ‘Well, what's happened to all the people who were hurt?’ I was told that they'd gone off to the Sanglah Hospital. So I then ran back to the hotel, told Margie and the girls that I wasn't going to be able to be with them that day ... but I then jumped in a taxi and got to the Sanglah hospital. 

Joe Frost

My Dad, Dr Adam Frost, had almost 30 years’ experience. While his day-job was as a suburban GP, he also worked as a surgeon’s assistant. 

Adam Frost

It was mostly joint replacements, but ... a lot of general orthopaedics and we did our share of semi-urgent trauma - fractures, compounds, people who couldn't be seen quick enough in John Hunter we’d look after, come in after hours.   

I'd done a few amputations, so – there wasn't anything as horrific as the injuries were - but I think I was a little accustomed to that.    

Joe Frost

So had you been in a mass casualty event at that point?   

Adam Frost

No. 

Joe Frost

After Dietmar and I had arrived safely back to the hotel the night before, Dad had made a beeline for a hospital in Kuta called BIMC, ready to treat these people who may have been his patients, but who were also his friends. 

My Dad is an understated man. He considers his words carefully, he is humble, and he has no desire to be in the spotlight.  

Basically, We are complete opposites.  

So I won’t correct him or offer a different point of view on what he remembers. I will simply say that our memories diverge – not on what happened, but on the size of the role he played.  

Because in his recollections, he paints himself as a glorified passenger.  

But I was there too, at least for a while.  

I saw him make phone calls in which he gave family members back in Australia awful updates on the long-term health of their loved ones. 

At one point, I had to fetch him from the hospital morgue, where he was identifying the deceased. 

And people who had been there the night before told me the difference he made at critical moments. 

But here’s how he saw things: 

Adam Frost

By the time we got to BIMC, everything was sorted... That was amazing, they just, the authorities - doctors, medical staff, ambulances - they just had everything sorted. It was like, ‘you’re dead, you go in this pile here, you’re injured you go here, you're seriously injured you go to Denpasar.’ ... The triaging had all been done by the time I got there...  

I must admit I thought it could be useful, just to help deal with trauma. But, as I said, you were either dead or - I’m not trying to downplay the injuries - but you were alive and still talking. And all of the people that I saw, I thought, 'as bad as your injuries are - eye injuries, ear injuries, shrapnel injuries - you're going to survive’.  

And the only person I thought would not survive was Paul Anicich.  

And my triaging of Paul was, he’s gonna die.

Joe Frost

On 1 October 2005, Paul Anicich was the Chairman of Sparke Helmore – a law firm that had operated in Newcastle for more than 100 years.  

A big man with a bigger personality, Paul and his wife, Peny, were a picture of success.  

Peny Anicich

Well we lived a charmed life. We had this house, we both worked, James was away at school so most weekends we went to Sydney, to a flat we had at Potts Point. And we went to Joeys for the football. 

We’d a house at Blueys, which we spent a lot of time at, so we had a charmed life. But Paul worked hard and I worked, so… that was life. 

Joe Frost

Peny Anicich is the face that stands out when I think of that morning at Sanglah Hospital.  

English by birth, Peny has an accent to complement her personality and sense of style. 

So I remember the shock of seeing her laid up in a hospital bed, her hair a mess of blood and sand, her body a patchwork of shrapnel blasts. 

Peny Anicich

I think when you’re that close to the end you’re beyond pain... I got cut from my chest to below my navel to take shrapnel out... My lungs had collapsed. The retinas had been torn off. Some of my teeth had gone missing.  

Because the bomb had sucked everything out of you, it sucked the oxygen out of your lungs as well. Think my lungs had collapsed.

And I can remember Julia being there. And according to Julia, I was very calm. Even though I said to her, 'do you think I'll die?' 

Joe Frost

But if Peny’s wounds were life-threatening, her husband’s appeared life-ending. 

Adam Frost

Paul Anicich seemed to have copped the bulk of the ballbearings.

When I first saw him he was unconscious. He obviously had multiple shrapnel wounds. He was in shock. The monitor attached to him showed his pulse rate was tachycardia - 150, his blood pressure was low, they had fluids up and and he was in fast AF - fast atrial fibrillation.

Joe Frost

One of three doctors in our family – my oldest and youngest brothers followed in his footsteps – Dad's got a habit of peppering conversation with medical jargon and thinking I know what he’s talking about. 

So I’ll defer to Dietmar, who was taken to the Intensive Care Unit to see Paul. 

Dietmar Lederwasch

He’s just lying on a table... he looked like a white whale washed up on the beach covered in red dots where all the shrapnel hit him. And I thought, ‘I’ll never see Paul again.’ So I bent over and kissed him on the forehead and said, ‘see you later mate.’ 

Joe Frost

A woman from the hotel turned up during the course of the morning, having been given the awful task of finding out what had happened to whom. She introduced herself and was almost immediately in tears, apologising for what had happened.  

She had in her hand a piece of paper, which was divided into three columns: those who were alive, those who were deceased, and those who were missing.  

Jennifer Williamson was in her ‘missing’ column. We told her that Jennifer’s name would need to move, and she broke down in tears again.  

A few other names we were able to help her account for, then Dane asked after the two people we had not been able to find.  

“Have you seen Colin and Fiona Zwolinski?”  

She looked at us, then pointed down to the piece of paper.  

Their names were written in the ‘deceased’ column. 

Act 2: Politics 

Joe Frost

My morning at Sanglah Hospital was a series of awful tableaux: witnessing a parade of bodies covered in yellow plastic sheeting being taken into the hospital morgue; watching my father tell one of my childhood friends the worst news of his young life; being told by multiple expats to be very careful not to say anything negative about Bali. 

It was nothing I had ever experienced before, a constant stream of cognitive dissonance. Then, at some point in the morning, the future Prime Minister of Australia arrived, and introduced himself to me simply as “Tony”. 

Tony Abbott

By that stage, it was probably about eight o'clock, nine o'clock in the morning... And it was shortly after that that I ran into your dad, who looked like a man with many cares.  

I then spent most of the rest of the day with your father in the various places where the Australians were being treated. 

As someone who has been in hospital much more often to comfort others than to be treated myself... there's not a lot of practical help you can give not being one of the professional staff, you can sort of feel like the third wheel when you're in hospital. But because of the authority, which I guess a minister of the crown in a situation like that has, I was able to put in phone calls to ministers back in Australia. I was able to speak to the media with a degree of authority. I was able to talk to some of the advisors of the Indonesians who visited. I mean, to the great credit of the Indonesians, both the then President SBY and his predecessor, Megawati, both came to the Sanglah hospital that day to, amongst other things, I suppose, express solidarity and sympathy with the Australians who'd been who'd been so horrifically injured. So the Indonesians... to their great credit, really went to all the lengths possible to do the right thing by the injured Australians. 

Joe Frost

While his standing as a senior minister in the Howard Government would come to bare, a lot of the help Tony provided was simple, practical and – for Vicki Griffiths – provided some relief. 

Vicki Griffiths

And I remember I said to Dane, ‘now Dane’ – my bag was still on the beach and it had a credit card in there and all my cash and stuff – ‘I said “you’re going to have to cancel my credit card mate”’ and he said, ‘rightio I’ll do that, I’ll find out how to do that.’  

And he’s walking out of the hospital and there’s a guy walking towards him, and Dane said, ‘hey mate I don’t know who you are but I know you’re somebody important,’ and it was a Sunday, ‘I need to cancel my Mum’s credit card, do you know how I could do that?’ And it was Tony Abbott.  

Dane knew he was someone important but he didn’t actually know it was Tony Abbott and Tony Abbott said, ‘yeah mate, give me the details, I’ll get it done for you.’ 

Joe Frost

I asked Tony about this exchange, and he reminded me of the simple fact that 20 years ago, instantaneous communication from a foreign country was still relatively rare. 

Tony Abbott

Not only did we not all have mobile phones back in 2005 but I daresay mobile phones with international coverage would have been I mean, we take it all for granted now, but just 20 years ago, things weren't quite what they are.

I had a mobile phone, and so I was probably able to make phone calls that couldn't otherwise be made. So... I'm pleased that I was able to be useful.  

Joe Frost 

Dad remembers Tony Abbott's mixture of practicality and humanity. 

Adam Frost 

I thought he was very effective, just at organising people. He knew who to contact, he was aware of the diplomacy, who he could talk to and what he could say. He was very careful, he did not criticise anybody. He was fairly deprecating, if anything - you know, ‘I'm a tourist, I'm not the health minister for Australia.’   

There were a couple of times where he just pulled back and went, ‘let them do what they’ve got to do.’   

I think of David Maher’s essay about Tony Abbott, where people hate him with a passion but anybody who knows him says he's a really good bloke - and that was my impression.

In the burns unit, Tony walked in one day and he had a whole tray, like a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnut...  

So he’d gone to the Krispy Kreme shop and bought all these Krispy Kreme doughnuts and then took them in for the staff... He was just so well meaning, he always wanted to buy you a coffee or something else, and a tray of donuts.

Joe Frost

Given Tony Abbott was such a central figure that day, I had always assumed that he had played some sort of loan hand in communicating to the government the seriousness of our situation.  

And I don’t doubt that his presence made a world of difference. 

But, much like I didn’t grasp how many people it takes to plan and execute a terrorist attack of this size until years later, it was only after speaking with former AFP Detective Superintendent David Craig that I got a proper grasp of just how big an operation it was to bring us all home safely. 

David Craig

Your focus is on human life. That's the most important thing. Like, of course, we want to catch these people, but not as much as we want to save the people that have been harmed by it.  

So our first, primary effort then was to get Australians medical help – and not just Australians, obviously everybody.

So I stood up a coordination centre in Canberra to be staffed 24 hours a day... Probably about 100 people in total in Canberra working full time on it within a number of hours. 

We're very lucky because we had some people from the counter terrorism unit in Jakarta actually in Bali at the time, so that was really good because they'd been involved with Bali 1 already. They were able to establish a small forward command post there, which was great. So they were my liaison immediately. So right away I had boots on the ground there and I was getting updates. I was just saying ring me every half hour, I want to know everything's going on so. 

And that was the start of a 31-hour shift that I worked and the other guys on the ground would have worked at similar hours I would expect, because there is no way to step down when there's, you know, human lives at stake and you're wanting to get people flown from Bali to Singapore, to Darwin, to, you know, Perth – to wherever we can get the best medical care.  

And then you've also – the back of your mind is we also don't want to lose all the evidence that may be on these people, that these people may have or other tourists may have. So I've got every international flight from the time of the bombing for the next two days met by Federal Police with questionnaires for people asking for  film or photos from around that time, because we just didn't know who or what we were actually looking for to start with.  

Joe Frost

As mentioned in a previous episode, David was not supposed to start in his role as head of counterterrorism until the following Monday – so you couldn’t even say this was his first day. Yet he was on a flight from Queensland to Canberra that night.  

In the capital, he attended the International Department Emergency Task Force, which consisted of some 14 government departments. 

Initially reluctant to make his voice heard, he soon came to realise he had the strongest understanding of what was happening on the ground.  

David Craig 

And it wasn't because of me. It was just very fortunate that we had good people on the ground in Bali and they had good communication with them. And so we have really up-to-date information and that helped gauge how many RAAF flights that defence were going to send over to Bali to bring people home. To, you know, a crisis hotline, Centrelink were involved. Yeah, it was a whole-of-government response. 

And, I have to say, if ever you're overseas and part of a major catastrophe like this, as you were Joe, then rest assured, there's a lot of good Australians working very hard, all political differences, everything's aside, it's all about the job.  

And it was very rewarding for me to be part of that. 

Joe Frost

So it had taken more than Tony Abbott to make it happen – a lot more, as it turned out – but as the afternoon of October 2 wore on, it was Tony Abbott who finally delivered some good news to my Dad.  

Adam Frost

But as it became apparent over the first day that everyone was sorted, they were appropriately looked after, they were - the serious injuries were awaiting transfer to Singapore and everyone else we were just waiting to get to Darwin - I can't remember at what stage we ran into Tony Abbott, but that was reassuring that he said, ‘you know the RAAF is coming to take everybody.’   

Act 3: Departing Bali 

Joe Frost

I had never really considered just how much planning and logistical support was required to ensure that none of us from Newcastle involved in the October 1 bombing woke up in Bali on October 3. 

There may have been some flights that departed after midnight, but for all intents and purposes, the Australian government had us all out of Bali the day after the bombing. 

And our destinations were not a simple matter. 

First and foremost, Peny and Paul Anicich, as well as Jennifer Williamson’s husband, Bruce, needed the kind of medical care that could not wait for a flight to Sydney.  

Peny remembered her flight, as well as her concerns for her still-unconscious husband. 

Peny Anicich

And then of course I was airlifted to Singapore. Not in a big plane, I was strapped up to the roof, it was like a stretcher, it was an emergency plane. And my body was actually totally shrapnel and burnt by the sand. So I just went immediately into hospital and was scrubbed down... I didn’t know where Paul was, although what I did think on the way there was, ‘he won’t recover. I’m in so much pain, Paul won’t survive this.’  

Joe Frost

For those whose injuries were serious but not life-threatening, the Royal Australian Air Force sent Hercules planes to airlift them to hospital in Darwin.  

However, it was not a simple matter of leaving Sanglah Hospital and boarding the plane, as Julia Lederwasch remembers. 

Julia Lederwasch

Then the army started coming in, or the air force or something, to work out how they were going to transport us out but they couldn’t have any charge or any opinion or anything because we weren’t their property. We were the property of Indonesians while we were in Indonesia. And that was all political.

And then next thing they transported us, I think, that night by ambulances to the airport. And once we got on the tarmac to get on the plane, once there was the handover on the tarmac was when we became the property of the Australians.  

Joe Frost

But before being handed over to the Australian presence, Vicki Griffiths received an unfortunate but unforgettable farewell. 

Vicki Griffiths

So they put me on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance and they went to pull me up but they forgot to put the legs down. So I dropped from about six foot – not six foot – quite a few feet high, straight down to the ground. If you can imagine, the gurney hit the ground before I did, so I was quite high up in the air, hit the ground.  

And the Balinese are funny, when they get nervous they laugh or when they get embarrassed they laugh, which is not our custom, so they were laughing because they were embarrassed, but that’s the way they are.   

Joe Frost

Did it hurt?  

Vicki Griffiths

No, I didn’t get hurt. 

Joe Frost

Despite not being a patient, Dad was also afforded a seat on the Hercules. 

I asked him that most basic airline question – how was the flight? 

Adam Frost

Uncomfortable! What I remember about the Hercules was talking to one of the RAAF crew and he said, ‘this plane is fitted out to retrieve bodies... roughly 90 bodies.

The beds were three high. Obviously we only took 12 beds or something.

And the other amazing thing about the Hercules was just how organised and well trained the RAAF staff were. They must've done drill for that so many times, because I've been working in hospitals for nearly 30 years. It's just never done right! The wardsmen change, the nursing staff change - you know people saying, ‘you get there, no you get the feet.’ When you're in the army it's drill. It was very impressive. So you didn't want to get in their way.   

Joe Frost

The drills and efficiency, however, did not leave much room for bedside manner, as Vicki and Kim Griffiths learned. 

Vicki Griffiths

They’re not trained to be polite, ‘hey, how you feeling’, they just fix things, you know.  

So they said, ‘are you all right?’ I said ‘yeah I’ll be fine but weirdly my finger is really causing me a lot of grief, it’s dislocated.’  

So, he didn’t even say, ‘well just take a breath while I do this’, he just got my hand, yanked my finger like [gestures, laughs] yelped, like screamed, and he just went ‘there you go’ and went on to the next person!  

That’s how they’re trained, like they’re trained for warfare these medics, so they don’t say ‘you’ll be right love’ or ‘I’ll give you an injection or painkiller’ or anything.  

Kim Griffiths 

Well the guy, the same medic, came and said, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ I said ‘not too much’, I said, ‘I’ve got these stitches here, where a piece of glass was.’  

And he looked at it and he said, ‘they wouldn’t have scrubbed that.’ He didn’t say, ‘you’ll probably get an infection’, he said, ‘they wouldn’t have scrubbed that’ and he got a scalpel out and just cut the stitches out.  

Vicki Griffiths

Without even saying, you know like – that’s what they were like.  

Kim Griffiths

And I went [guttural sound].  

Vicki Griffiths

He fainted.  

Kim Griffiths

I blacked out!   

Kim being sliced open on the tarmac stood out in Dad’s memory as well – although he was somewhat sympathetic to the Australian Defence Force doctor cutting out stitches.  

Adam Frost

There were other Australian doctors there and they were stitching up shrapnel wounds - which is a no-no, you don't do that. Cos you’re just trapping infection.  

Most of the people had all their minor injuries sown up, so when the RAAF doctors flew in, the first thing they did was pull all the stitches out. All those wounds healed up, you’re talking about up to 10 cm scars, torn-open flesh, but often hiding shrapnel - ballbearings or something.  

One of the emergency surgeons who - I think he came from Adelaide in the RAAF - was annoyed that the number of people who had stitches, including Kim Griffiths, and he was just picking stitches out while Kim was standing up and Kim was saying, ‘what are you doing?’  

And then Kim fainted and I said to this doctor, ‘listen, go easy would you, there’s no need to be this aggressive. If you gonna take the stitches out, it’s hardly an emergency. Do it when he's lying down.' 

Joe Frost

With the stitches removed and the Australians aboard, the Hercules was preparing to take off – although there was one final diplomatic hurdle to be overcome, regarding a Japanese citizen who had been injured in the bombing and needed further medical care. 

Adam Frost

When the Hercules was getting ready to take off, Tony Abbott said, ‘I don't want this to appear that Australians have flown in, grabbed their own, and disappeared. Can we make it obvious to the Indonesians that anybody who needs transport to Darwin is welcome on the flight.’   

But then there was this diplomatic to and fro, where Tony Abbott couldn't say, ‘we're taking the Japanese guy’, or the RAAF couldn’t - that’s abduction. But they could take him if the Japanese government asked.  

And so the message had to go back to Tokyo, ‘Australia has a Hercules about to take off, is there anything we can do to help?’  

So we were held up for half hour or so before the Japanese guy was transferred, which was the right thing, but I think Tony Abbott also wanted to say that the Indonesians were – or anyone seriously injured could come to Darwin.   

Tony Abbott

Look, I honestly can't remember, but certainly I was determined that the Australians would get the best possible treatment as quickly as possible. Any help you can give to others is great, but in the end, your first duty, your principal responsibility, is to your fellow Australians.  

Your father, because he was so involved. I mean, this would have been one of the most, if not the most traumatic day of his life to suddenly find himself dealing with an atrocity involving everyone who he'd been traveling with, and indeed his own son.  

For me, this was an extraordinary day. I've had quite a few extraordinary days over the years. For your dad, this would be a day that would have been utterly seared on his in his memory. 

Joe Frost

Finally, there was the matter of getting the rest of us home – around 30 people in total, of whom the vast majority were teenagers.  

And the parents of most of these kids were either flying to a hospital in Singapore, a hospital in Darwin, or would never leave Bali.  

As for the parental presence, it was really down to just two people - Geraldine O’Connor, who was the one other parent who hadn’t gone to Jimbaran the previous night, and my Mum, Margaret Frost. 

Adam Frost

That was one of the things I thought was never really acknowledged - there was Margaret and Geraldine with all of those kids... Trying to keep them all safe and in the motel and reassured about their parents.   

Something never really acknowledged but I think Marg and Geraldine did a lot. And they then had to organise everyone to get on planes back home. 

Joe Frost

As for Mum’s take on that situation, she gave credit to those teenagers – although she also had the foresight to ensure everyone’s safety all the way to the airport. 

Margaret Frost

But the kids, the little kids went and packed up their parents’ rooms, they were amazing, had to get them to get all their passports and they had to give them to this woman who was the embassy official. 

And then Qantas came to the fore and said ‘We’ll make sure everyone gets back safely.’  

And I remember just saying to this woman, they were going to organise a bus, and I said ‘we have to have a police escort’ [laughs].  

And she's gone, ‘what?’  

And I said, ‘we have to have a police escort to the airport, because I’m really worried they’re going to blow us up. They want to kill us and they’re going to blow us up.’ 

She’s going, ‘yeah all right.’ [Laughs] 

So we did, we got a police escort. 

Joe Frost

If the police escort seems like overkill, well, all I can say is that at the time, I was just glad it was there, because I was scared to death. 

I remember getting onto that coach for the airport. 

I remember surveying the scene in front of me - a busload of pale, exhausted, terrified kids. 

And I remember thinking, ‘this isn’t happening.’