Chapter 1

Terror in the Tropics

Natalie Goold and Tim Britten

There are moments in time when the human mind can fail utterly to comprehend the reality confronting it: moments when the world as you know it suddenly fails to make sense, and you just can’t take in what’s happening. Grief induces such moments. So does catastrophe: events that, like a lightning bolt, jam the brain’s receptors, stripping the world around you of all meaning so that you can’t be sure whether you are experiencing reality or dream.

Such a moment would have descended on the revellers at Bali’s Kuta Beach one Saturday evening in October 2002. Except this lightning bolt was far more powerful than nature could summon. As the tourists danced and attempted to make themselves heard above the hubbub of music and party-talk, it is hard to know what, if anything, they sensed first the blinding flash, the ear-bursting boom or the ground trembling beneath their feet, as if a quake, deep from the bowels of the earth, had rippled to the surface releasing its giant waves of energy. But this was no natural tremor. The shock wave passing through this tourist Mecca was entirely man-made, the creation of evil minds intent on inflicting maximum mayhem, in their self-declared war on western civilization.

A 1.1-tonne bomb in the shape of an innocuous Mitsubishi van had unleashed a power so awesome that the resulting tremor registered 0.2 on the Richter scale, lasted five seconds and was felt over a distance of 20 kilometres. It was 11.08 pm on 12 October and hundreds of Australians and other western tourists had just been submerged in the terror of battle.

From its epicentre outside the Sari Club, a popular nightclub for Western tourists, the invisible wave rolled out, flattening everything and everyone in its path. People even 50 metres away were knocked to the ground stunned, while the blinding flash and fireball that followed lit up a scene from Dante’s Inferno itself. Glass and other debris rained down like a tropical downpour.

In that instant Kuta’s carefree, laid-back atmosphere was transformed into hell on earth. Its most popular tourist spot had been razed, the gentle Balinese peace sullied by the terrorists’ bombs. In the few minutes that followed the blast people’s minds were uncomprehending but slowly they began to grasp the full horror of what was unfolding. Lives would be lost and others changed forever and whatever sense of innocence Australians had left in the new age of terrorism lay shattered and burned on the streets of Bali.

 

Kuta Beach was made for Natalie Goold, 22, and her best friend Nicole McLean. Jaded from a year of work and a Melbourne winter, a tropical Bali holiday was the perfect antidote for the two young women. They arrived in Bali on that Saturday afternoon, full of the anticipation and excitement an exotic overseas destination brings. They were to spend seven nights in Bali, then across to Lombok for a few more.

For Natalie, a bank worker from the Melbourne suburb of Croydon, it was her first trip. It was Nicole’s idea; she had been once before and wanted Natalie to experience the beauty and fun of the popular Indonesian resort. Another girl who was to join them had decided not to come, a fortuitous decision if ever there was one. So there were just the two of them on their own.

They went straight to their hotel in the thick of the Kuta Beach precinct and began the slow wind down into holiday mode. After dinner and a nap that evening they got ready to go out and experience Kuta’s famous night life. At this time of year with a number of Australian football teams in town for end-of-season trips, the air of excitement was palpable.

‘We did intend to go the Sari Club but at the last minute Nicole decided we would pop into Paddy’s Bar first, to have a drink to warm up,’ Natalie said.

When they first got there at about 10.15 there was hardly a soul but by 11 pm the place was nearly full maybe 100 people and jumping.

Natalie remembers standing at the bar a few metres away from the dance floor where Nicole was dancing with an old school friend she had happened to bump into. ‘I won’t dance till I have had a few drinks,’ she said.

Calmly watching the action a few metres away was an Indonesian man who had walked into the bar a few minutes before. No one seemed to notice the man or his unusually bulky clothing and as he watched he raised his hand to his chest and pulled a cord.

Then oblivion, as Iqbal,the man later identified as the suicide bomber, detonated several kilograms of high explosives strapped to his body. The explosion rocked the bar, knocking everyone to the ground, killing Iqbal and eight others and fatally injuring many more.

Natalie was lifted up and propelled forward by the shock wave, momentarily losing consciousness. Her first sensation was of an incredible noise and an enormous heat wave, like the hot air that hits you when you open an oven.

‘I was flying forward. And then I was knocked to the ground. At first I thought it was a gas explosion from behind the bar. I was lying on the ground and I came to and I just thought that if I don’t get up I’m going to die.’

Having pulled to a stop outside the Sari Club to drop off Iqbal, the Mitsubishi van had been causing traffic chaos. As the patrons of Paddy’s Bar spilled out onto the street the van’s driver, a man named Arnasan, pressed a switch. Packed with a deadly mix of TNT, potassium chlorate and aluminum powder stuffed into plastic filing cabinets, the deadly vehicle exploded, blasting a crater in the road. Natalie picked herself up from the floor of Paddy’s and felt the ground tremble. She knew then the first blast had not been gas but something far more sinister. She believed at first it was a plane dropping bombs onto the resort.

‘I just stood up and started running. I didn’t know which direction I was running in but as it turned out it was towards the back. I just wanted to get out wherever I could.’

She must have been unconscious for the 30 seconds or so between the first and second blast because as she was running out, the place had already emptied and there were only a handful of people left. This probably saved her life. Some of those who had run out onto the street were killed when the second more powerful blast went off at the Sari Club across the road.

Natalie found herself in a little storage room. She looked around for an escape route but could see no doors leading out, only windows up high and blown out. She climbed up to one and scrambled through it, finding herself outside in the back yard of the bar. There were concrete walls topped with wire and no obvious escape. Stacked against the side wall were some boxes and Natalie was able to climb up on those and over the wall. She dropped down into an alley leading back out to the street.

Her mind racing, she figured the thing to do if these were bombs being dropped was to stick around because they were unlikely to drop a second bomb on the same place.

‘All these things just run through your head. It’s just crazy, all these thoughts and your mind just speeds up. You just can’t describe it. You just go into survival mode,’ Natalie said.

For a young Australian woman who had only ever known safety and peace to suddenly find herself in the heat of a battle would have been impossible to comprehend and the temptation to give way to hysteria overwhelming. But Natalie resisted it and began to think of what to do next. It suddenly hit her that she had not seen Nicole since the bomb went off and that she could still be in there. She ran down the alley towards the street and reached a blown-out window that opened into the main bar area.

She scrambled up to the ledge and stuck her head through and screamed out for Nicole in the semi-darkness. She could hear Nicole’s weak voice come back, ‘I’m in here, I’m in here.’ Barely conscious, she was lying on the dance floor, badly injured.

Natalie jumped up and through the window and ran to her. She was in a bad way, her right arm seriously injured, her right thigh and back with huge holes blown in them. It was as if a shark had come along and taken a piece out of her leg from her knee right up to her bottom.

Nicole had been only two or three metres away from Iqbal when he pulled the cord, and was among those who took the full brunt of the explosion. Nicole was unable to move but she was conscious. Around her lay several bodies and another who was badly injured. Natalie said later she felt guilty about not being able to help anyone else. But she had to focus on saving Nicole.

Iqbal’s bomb, being smaller then the Mitsubishi bomb, meant there was not the extent of fire in Paddy’s as there was now enveloping the Sari Club. There were little spot fires burning, but they were starting to gather pace.

‘It was deathly quiet at this moment. It was really eerie it was so quiet. And it was dirty and smoky and smelly. I knew Nicole was really bad and I honestly thought she was going to die,’ Natalie said. She struggled to comprehend the horrific sight of her badly injured friend and quell the overwhelming fear that she wouldn’t live.

‘You know when you are watching a horror movie and it’s really bad and you have to say to yourself, “it’s alright, it’s just a movie”, well this was the opposite. It was like a dream and the whole time I had to keep telling myself this is real, this is real. I had to convince myself this is not a dream. We were in a bar having fun and then all of a sudden we were in hell. I had to keep telling myself that it was real and I have to act now otherwise Nicole’s going to die,’ she said. Nicole herself thought she was not going to make it and whispered to Natalie to leave her there; to get out and away from the danger.

‘But I thought to myself how could I go home and face Nicole’s parents,’ Natalie said. ‘I’d have to say, “Oh well yes she was bad but she told me to leave her there so I did.” I had to do something.’

She tried to lift Nicole but she was too heavy for her. Natalie could see her right arm was badly injured and virtually severed and she was worried if she tried to pull her along her arm would fall off.

She screamed at the top of her voice for someone to come and help. There was no one else in the club who could come to her aid, but she could see people outside. No one came. Eventually after several minutes of shrieking a man appeared out of the shadows at her side. With Natalie supporting Nicole under one arm and the man supporting the other, they carried her out onto the street through the smoking, smelly debris.

As they sat Nicole up on a chair Natalie realised the full extent of her friend’s injuries. Blood just started to pour out of her, her face went blue and she whispered that she could not breathe, Natalie said. Beside herself with fear Natalie became even more determined to save her friend, saying to herself, ‘You are not going to die here, not in this way.’

It was chaos out on the street. There were people running everywhere. Some were screaming and hysterical, others were dazed and unspeaking and all around the buildings, including the Sari Club, by now were fully ablaze. Everyone was coated in a black, sooty mess.

It would have been frightening enough at home, let alone in a foreign country she had been in for only a matter of hours. But here in Bali the strange location, the different climate and culture, which otherwise would have been exciting, now simply exaggerated the nightmarish feelings.

Natalie knew she had to get Nicole to the hospital as quickly as possible but she barely knew the way back to her hotel room, let alone where the hospital might be. She screamed at anyone, everyone, to get an ambulance but soon realised there probably were no ambulances and even if there were the scale of death and injury was overwhelming. Since the bomb had gone off no ambulance, no police or officials of any kind had appeared on the scene.

‘I realised no one was coming to help,’ Natalie said.

Natalie’s only thought now was to stop Nicole’s bleeding. Two blokes were just standing there, staring at Natalie and Nicole as if transfixed by the surrealness of it all. She screamed at them, ‘Take your bloody T-shirts off.’

That broke the spell. They pulled the T-shirts off and turned them inside out to put the worst of the black sooty mess on the inside to avoid contaminating Nicole’s wounds. Natalie tied one across the top of Nicole’s right arm and pushed the other into the gaping wound on her thigh.

She then saw that other people were making their way down the street to get away from the chaos. At the end of the street there was a ute onto which people were loading themselves. She and the man she never found out his identity picked up the chair and carried Nicole 50 metres down the street to the ute.

‘‘I was screaming the whole time at people to help us. I just couldn’t understand why they were just standing there doing nothing. It really, really annoyed me,’ she says with classic understatement.

Natalie struggled to carry the chair but eventually another man took over from her and carried it the rest of the way. Two girls got off the ute to make room for Nicole and Natalie. They sat on the tailgate and Natalie held onto Nicole, all the time pressing the T-shirt into her thigh. Nicole was saying she was tired and all that she wanted to do was go to sleep. Natalie, fearing the worst if she did, kept encouraging her, ‘Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep,’ and slapping her on the face.

 

Tim Britten, a Western Australian police officer, was heading back to his hotel about 800 metres from the Sari Club when the almighty boom of the second blast stopped him in his tracks. He had been at the Hard Rock Café enjoying a drink. As he walked back all the lights went out for a second or so and glass began showering the street as the windows exploded from the force of the blast.

Tim was in Bali on leave from East Timor where he was on secondment to the federal police and the UN Peacekeeping force. He had been in Bali barely a day. Being a policeman, Tim at first wondered if it was someone blowing a safe. A major bank and jewellery store were located in the street and he thought maybe someone was trying to do a break-in. He ducked into the shadows and waited to see if the culprits would come his way so he could nab them. But then Tim could see some people pointing across the street and as he stepped back out he saw a mushroom cloud billowing up. He then decided it was probably a bomb.

While in East Timor Tim had been given a briefing about the threat of terrorist attacks in Indonesia. ‘There had been a substantial amount of fertilizer stolen in West Timor or somewhere and I thought that’s what it was. You could tell it was a large explosion and some form of bomb had gone off. We were in that mindset. Being in East Timor there was the threat of terrorist attacks and threats had been made to Australians over there.’

For most people the most overwhelming emotion at that instant would have been gut-chilling fear and an irresistible instinct to seek safety from the enormous threat that existed. But rather than run away from the scene Tim did exactly the opposite. Seeing the cloud and people running in panic towards him, he realised he needed to go there and see what he could do to help.

Tim knew that terrorist action defies any semblance of fairness or compassion. He knew they often planted further bombs after an initial one so as to inflict maximum mayhem and death and injury. By setting off a bomb minutes after the first you can kill or injure others who run in to investigate and help.

He was pretty certain that sort of thing was going to happen but he continued on anyway. Still unsure of where the explosion was, he just followed the tide of fleeing victims coming the other way, fighting against them to get through. Many of them urged him to go back, saying there had been an explosion and it was very dangerous.

As he arrived even his police training could not have prepared him for the shock. Flames were leaping 50 metres into the air as what was left of the Sari Club and surrounding buildings was incinerated. People were wandering around dazed and shocked. Even the few Indonesian policemen who had arrived were as shocked and terrified as the civilians.

There was a certain fatalism that Tim adopted that despite the threat to his life, he had to help. ‘I thought we’ll try to get as many people out as we can before anything else happens,’

he said.

Now in front of the Sari Club he identified himself as a police officer and asked if everyone was out of the burning wreckage. A group of people pleaded for help to free a girl trapped in the inferno. Wearing just a singlet, shorts and thongs on the hot tropical night Tim ran into the club, picking his way over burning debris and exploding gas bottles. He found a woman conscious but badly injured and pinned down by a piece of iron. Unable to free her and suffering from the intense heat and flames Tim retreated. He called on another man outside the club, Richard Joyes, to help him. ‘I said to him, “Mate, can you give us a hand to help this woman, she is going to die,” and he said “yes”.’

Richard, a mining engineer and also on a holiday, had come down to the scene after hearing the explosion from his hotel. He had been feeling unwell and was lying on his bed while his friends were at the Sari Club, but now he had rushed down to try to find them.

‘He was worried sick about them,’ Tim said. Later Tim thought Richard must have been a copper too, given his ability to handle the situation, but was surprised to learn he was a civilian.

The pair of them went back in. All around the flames leapt and debris fell, the heat so intense it was burning their skin. In the back of Tim’s mind was the nagging thought of another bomb going off.

‘I was pretty scared, no doubt about it, and the fire was like a storm. One minute it was over there and the next there was like a wall of it, blocking your path and then it would go again. It was quite weird.’

They tried to approach the woman but the heat was too much, forcing them to retreat again. Some of the crowd drenched the pair with bottled water and they went back for another go. This time they reached her but she was pinned down by rubble. They tried to pull her free but she wouldn’t move.

‘I was just about to let her go because I was getting my arm burnt and she came free. We just dragged her until we got away from the most intense heat then two other people came to help. We each grabbed an arm and a leg and carried her out.’ It was a struggle: her body was so heavy and slippery.

‘It was like trying to swim laps underwater in a pool,’ Tim said.

On the street they put the woman on a truck and she was whisked away to one of the increasingly crowded clinics and hospital where the injured were now gathering.

But rather than finish then, Tim, now badly burnt himself and with deep cuts and abrasions to his arms, legs and feet, continued to search the rubble with Richard for more victims. They found one more man with badly smashed-up legs and got him out, but after that there were only lifeless bodies and the white hot heat finally beat them back.

‘It was unbelievably hot and with only shorts and a singlet on, my arm and fingers got burnt and my feet were cut up by glass. It got to a point where we couldn’t hear or see anyone alive after that. It was no point risking ourselves for the dead. That sounds horrible and I hate saying it and it makes me feel sick when I say it but it’s just one of those things that if they were alive we would have kept on trying but all we could see were dead in there.’

Tim and Richard decided there was little point making further forays into the club, and began helping the injured, shocked and traumatised victims back to safety. They were everywhere and the injuries shocking, one nursing a nearly severed foot bandaged in a T-shirt.

For the next hour Tim and Richard helped ferry the injured to waiting vehicles some 150 metres away up the street. Tim would put them in a fireman’s carry position while Richard supported their heads and reassured them as they jogged up the street.

The situation was devastating. Some died in their arms as they carried them up, in which case they had to put them to one side to allow the injured onto the vehicles.

Everyone was in such a heightened state of fear even the policemen were not sure who was safe and who might be the terrorists. At one point coming back towards the Sari Club during their ferrying of the injured, Richard and Tim were confronted by an Indonesian policeman pointing his rifle at them, ordering them to turn around and go back. Once Tim flashed his UN police identity card he and Richard were waved through.

After they had done as much as they could Richard left to try and find his three mates. Tim stayed to help the Indonesian police until there was no more they could do. Then he finally relented and made his way back to his hotel. On his way back Tim was touched by an act of kindness by a little Balinese woman who approached him on the street with some towels.

‘She was crying and started patting me down with these white towels. They came off coated in red and fluids. I thought I had been hit by something but it was only after an inspection of myself that I realised it was the blood of the people I had been carrying.’

But his feet were badly cut and his arms burned. When he got to the hotel a doctor there dressed his arm and took the glass from his feet. He went to bed and finally slipped into an uneasy sleep. He went to the hospital the next day and his wounds were bandaged again before he flew home to Australia. Later on the burns got infected and required further treatment.

 

As the ute carrying Nicole and Natalie crawled through the crowded streets, Nicole’s legs were dragging on the ground and Natalie had to use hers to prop them up during the 20-minute journey to a medical clinic. The trip seemed to go on forever, the bumper-to-bumper traffic making it agonisingly slow. At one point the ute stopped suddenly and a van immediately behind them ran into the back of them, banging their dangling legs. Natalie wondered if there could possibly be anything else that could go wrong. The Balinese came out on to the streets as if they were watching some sort of bizarre procession.

The ute dropped them at a medical clinic where a single doctor was feverishly trying to attend to at least 50 injured people lying on the floor. Some were seriously injured, and there were so many of them, that there was little he could do. It was awful, Natalie said, with people screaming they were going to die. At first she waited anxiously for the doctor to come to them but he was just flitting from one patient to the next and seemed overwhelmed by the situation.

‘I thought I’ve got to do something here so I went up to him and grabbed him by the collar and just said, “You’re coming to help my friend now”.’

He put in a pain relief drip and did as much as he could with Nicole’s wounds to stop the bleeding and then organised a van to take her to the hospital. By now she was close to lapsing into unconsciousness and was telling Natalie her final messages to her family. ‘Tell them I love them all very much,’ she said. Struggling to deal with the emotion, Natalie told her not to say these things and that she would be OK, all the time, deep down, convinced she was going to die.

When they finally got to the hospital, Natalie had thought everything would now be alright and that Nicole would be properly looked after. But the scene before them was worse than even the medical centre. It was absolute chaos. There were two emergency rooms, one for the critical and one for the less critical. People were lying about, crying and screaming, and blood washed the floor. A TV crew stood in the middle of it all filming a live-to-air cross. Natalie was furious, yelling at the staff to get them out. All she could think about was the families of these people seeing their loved ones on the television and the horror of what they were going through.

At this point the pair was separated as Nicole was taken on to the critical emergency room and Natalie went to the other. As far as Natalie had been aware she was not injured but during the trip to the hospital from the medical clinic she began to feel uncomfortably hot. She realised the hot painful feeling was coming from her back and shoulders and thought maybe her bather top was too tight. She pulled it off and asked Nicole if her back was alright. Nicole said it looked fine. But now at the hospital the pain was excruciating. As she ran her hand over her back she felt huge blisters. Natalie had been badly burned by the blast but with the shock of the aftermath and the focus on Nicole she had pushed her pain into the back of her mind. The photos taken of her back later show the whole back fiery red and the clear white imprints of the dress straps which protected tiny ribbons of skin.

The doctors treated the burns by popping the blisters and cutting the burnt skin off. Natalie refused to take injected pain-killers because she was terrified of infection so she endured the whole experience on just Panadol.

With Nicole now in the emergency room and in the hands of the medical staff Natalie had done all she could and with some relief laid back and rested. But it would be 12 hours before she knew Nicole’s fate. During the long night and most of the next day she did not know whether Nicole was alive or dead.

In the confusion it was extremely difficult to keep track of each patient’s location, let alone progress. Natalie asked one of the staff for news of Nicole but she had been wrongly listed as Michelle. Each time she asked for news of Nicole they said there was no Nicole and she feared the worst. The nurses wouldn’t let her go out to check the wards for herself.

It was lunchtime the next day when Natalie spoke to her dad and told him the news. At that point Natalie feared the worst for her friend, but did not want to say so. Instead she told her dad that Nicole was in a critical condition in the emergency ward. At various times during the afternoon the nurses asked if she wanted to go to the morgue to see if she could identify Nicole there but she could not bring herself to do it.

Later on that Sunday afternoon an Australian woman who was helping out was talking to Natalie about Nicole. The woman asked for a description and said she would go and look for her. She came back an hour or so later and said she had found her. Natalie, still not convinced, asked her to go back and ask Nicole her address, her date of birth and whom she came to Bali with. She didn’t want to get her hopes up and then have them dashed because it was the wrong person. But it was her. She was alive! Late that afternoon the Australian rescue mission arrived and the sense of relief was overwhelming. Natalie felt the nightmare was over.

‘They came into the hospital and just sort of took over and it was just fantastic. I can’t praise them enough.’

Natalie was reunited with Nicole when all the Australians were gathered into one room. She vowed that they would not be separated and that whatever happened they would both be evacuated together. With the approval of the Australian medical team, they were taken to the airport to be the first to fly out that night on a Hercules, but Nicole deteriorated badly. So the team decided to operate in their makeshift hospital on the tarmac. They were worried that she would lose her arm if they didn’t restore blood vessels and so they took a vein from her leg to graft into her arm.

Natalie and Nicole made the second plane out with about 20 others and were flown to Darwin.

‘As soon as that plane took off I thought, “Ohhh, thank God.” There was this feeling of such huge relief. And when we touched down in Darwin even though I had never been there before it was like “Ohhh I’m home”.’

Up to that point she had been so focused on getting Nicole home alive that she did not dare allow herself the luxury of falling apart. Later at the hospital, talking to her boyfriend on the phone, Natalie finally was able to let go and broke down in tears.

At the time Natalie had gone to Bali she had split up with her boyfriend but afterwards they got back together. She realised the events that led to their separating were just so trivial compared to what she had just experienced and that they belonged together.

After further surgery for Nicole and a few days recovering they were flown back to Melbourne. Unfortunately the doctors’ efforts on the tarmac at Bali were too late and Nicole’s arm had to be amputated. Her massive leg wound healed but required further surgery. Today Nicole is looking to the future with a positive attitude.

Back in the peace and tranquility of her home in the foothills of the Dandenongs Natalie reflects on the nightmare she finally emerged from. Did she feel surprised at her response which saved the life of her best friend?

‘It was almost like I knew it was going to happen. I always knew that I could do something like that. It was like I had I don’t know trained myself for it or something.’

Natalie said it was a quirky part of her personality that she was always mentally prepared for some sort of emergency event. She often walked into a place and took note of the layout where the exits were and so on and sort of prepared an escape plan if anything went wrong. She knows not many 20-year-olds think like this but she does.

‘I had always had thoughts at times, like if there was a fire in the house, then I’ll get the mattress and throw it out the window and do this or do that. I always knew that if it came to the crunch then I could do something but to what extent I didn’t know.’

‘But if I would do it again I don’t know if I could. If I had to be put in another situation like that I don’t know if I have used up everything that I have and don’t know whether I could do it again.’

Natalie said she saw a counsellor after the event to help her work through the trauma and who told her she did not have to doubt herself. ‘You’ve proven that is the person that you are, the counsellor said.’

Her sister says she has always been a strong character thinking clearly and logically and being prepared. Natalie experienced the ordinary childhood of a suburban upbringing in the outer Melbourne suburb of Bayswater, the youngest of three children.

She can’t put her finger on any particular aspect of her upbringing that led her to this except the love and inspiration of her parents and the security of her family. She hasn’t done any leadership training as such but she thinks a sense of taking control of things may come from her father. In one way though she is not a stranger to danger, having been involved in a bank robbery the week after she started work at the bank.

Natalie’s mum Elwyn said Natalie was always a very determined girl, particularly in sport, saying she would never give up. She always had empathy for other people’s predicaments and while shocked at the events in Bali she said she was not surprised at what Natalie did for her friend and was immensely proud of her.

Reflecting on whether she unnecessarily risked her own life, Natalie said for a split second she did think about the fact maybe it was too risky to go back in there and that she should run for safety, to get away from what could easily be more bombs.

‘But then I thought she is my best friend and there’s no point me living if I know that I hadn’t done anything for her. That’s what ran through my head. What are best friends for if you can’t help each other? How could I live with myself knowing that I didn’t help my best friend when she most needed me?’

Natalie said she is not normally a spiritual person but that night she felt as if someone was with her, urging her on to help Nicole, telling her what to do.

At the point after having got Nicole out onto the street and seeing how bad she was she almost felt like giving up. But a voice was telling her no, to go on, stop the bleeding, and get Nicole to help. Natalie believes it was her late grandmother there, a no-nonsense direct woman who did what had to be done, and was now giving her strength.

While Natalie still carries a few physical scars of her trauma the emotional scars are nearly all healed. Counselling had been very helpful, particularly helping her to deal with some guilt about the fact Nicole was so much more badly injured than she was.

‘You keep asking yourself why and it is an answer you can never get to. Because I’m a logical person I think that if I think about this long enough I’ll get the answer for it. But you don’t ever get an answer as to why she was more injured and I wasn’t or why we had to go there that night or why it had to be that night the bombers attacked, or why we even decided to go to Bali in the first place. Because you keep thinking if only we hadn’t gone out that night or went somewhere different. But in the end you just go round in circles and you never get an answer. So you then say there is no answer to that so why do I even bother with it?’

Natalie suffered some anxiety attacks in the months after Bali and she was still slightly fearful of enclosed crowded places but she was getting better with it. In some ways she feels more vulnerable than before but in other ways she feels stronger for the experience.

‘I think I’ve been through that one and I’m OK now so I can do it again. I sometimes think that I’m proud of myself for reacting in the way that I did but never would I say that I’m a hero. I just think that I did what had to be done. You just do what you have to do.’

Natalie did not follow the trial of the Bali bombers; her predominant feeling was not so much anger as incredulity that someone could commit such a stupid and pointless act.

Natalie was proud to receive her award, the Star of Courage, but had doubts about whether she really deserved it. ‘Heroes to me are those that went into the Sari Club and saved people they didn’t even know. That is a hero to put your life on the line for someone you don’t even know. I was just helping my best friend.’

As for the man who helped her carry Nicole out of Paddy’s Bar she never saw him again. But she is forever grateful he came to help.

And as for Nicole and Natalie’s friendship, it has reached a level stronger and deeper than ever before. ‘We share a bond that no one else could ever,’ Natalie said.

 

Tim Britten and Richard Joyes were awarded the Cross of Valour, Australia’s highest civilian bravery award. There have only been five awarded since the decoration began in 1975 – for acts of conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme peril.

There is little doubt Tim and Richard’s extreme courage and level-headedness helped many people that night. Tim said he had never encountered anything as traumatic in his career as a police officer as that night.

‘I’ve attended car accidents and things like that but nothing will ever come close to this in my mind.’

While he was proud to receive the medal it still did not sit well with him. It seemed wrong to be celebrating something like this when it arose out of such an unspeakably nightmarish situation, and so much loss and grief.

‘Nothing good came out of that night. Nothing good happened.’

It was one of the worst acts of violence perpetrated on innocent Australians and Balinese and to be enjoying the limelight of a medal and a reception and photos and all that seemed insensitive to anyone who lost a loved one, Tim said.

‘We get given a medal and we go and see the governor in Canberra and have a dinner and a big deal is made about us, but there are people out there still hurting.’

Medals were no help to anyone who had lost a child or a mum or dad, Tim said. ‘I went to the memorial in Perth this year [2004] and there was a guy standing there with his head down and tears pouring out of his face and I couldn’t do anything for him. I just ended up patting him on the shoulder and just walking off. People are still hurting and there is little you can do.

‘It’s a very strange feeling to be awarded something on such a horrible incident. It’s not something I get any pleasure thinking about. I said to Richard the only consolation, the only good thing I get out of it is the fact I made a good mate that night.’

The two have since become great friends and spent many hours going through what happened that night. A year after the event Tim told a newspaper reporter he was still haunted by the night of terror, the nightmarish images of the fires and the injured and the sound of screaming still flashing back. ‘Sometimes it gets in my head and once it gets in you can’t get it out,’ Tim said. But hardest of all was not knowing the fate of the first woman they rescued. ‘I would give anything to think that maybe she survived,’ he said.

Tim said he had a vivid picture of her in his mind and later a doctor sent him some pictures of the injured taken that night. Tim was sure he recognised her but unfortunately he was told she had died of her injuries. Her feet and legs were very badly burned so it was not surprising but her death was very hard to accept, as was the whole tragic event, he said.

Tim finds it hard to put his finger on just what motivated him to risk his life that night. He doesn’t know if there is anything other than the very simple explanation of wanting to help. People were gravely injured and you couldn’t just do nothing. It was as simple as that, Tim said.

As a policeman you were trained to lend assistance in an emergency situation and as a person he wanted to see that he could help. There was no thought of running away despite the fact he had a strong feeling there may be greater danger.

‘It’s your job you’ve got to go and do that sort of stuff. I mean you are not going to let anyone suffer if you can do something about it. I don’t know, I didn’t really think too much about it, I thought I’d just go and lend a hand.’

And while he thinks perhaps his own training as a policeman was a factor, Richard wasn’t a trained policeman or anything and he helped too. Everyone has their own reason for doing things, Tim said.

There was a point during their rescue of the woman, when confronted by those walls of fire, that Tim thought this was it, that he was not going to make it out of this one. Funnily enough a sense of calm descended and the fear disappeared.

‘I thought I’d probably end up dying there. I think Richard felt the same. But while you are still going and there’s people in there screaming and crying you are not going to let them die if you can do something are you?’

‘I like to think that if it was me in there that someone would try their hardest to get me out. So that’s what we did.’

Tim thought hard about whether faced with a similar situation he would do the same thing again. ‘I would like to think that I’ve got it in me again but I don’t know. It’s one of those things where until you are faced with the situation you are not going to know how you are going to handle it. I pray to God that such a thing never comes to our shores.’

After the event Tim went back to his old police job at the seaside town of Dunsborough, south of Perth, before joining the police’s elite tactical response group. Even after all that happened Tim said he never contemplated a change of career and a quieter life. ‘I love it, I really do. It’s a great job and it’s done a lot for me. It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my working life.’

There were dozens of Natalies and Tims and Richards that night, all with similar stories of unimaginable horror, of unfathomable courage and selflessness. Some 35 people were awarded bravery medals and commendations. Despite Tim’s insistence that nothing good came out of that night, everyone, including the families of the victims, can draw some comfort from the fact that these brave people helped others in their most desperate hour of need.

It is an ironic and sad twist to these stories that terrorists, exhibiting the most detestable form of human behaviour, inspired the most honourable behaviour in others.