Bali 9: The Untold Story (16 page)

V
icki Czugaj was desperate to fly over to Bali and see her son Michael on the eve of his court case. He was to be the first of the Bali Nine to face trial and she wanted to boost his spirits, remind him of how much his seven brothers and sisters loved him, and make sure he was looking after himself. She worried about him nonstop and wondered whether the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach would ever subside. Some days it was under control; others, like the day leading up to Michael’s birthday, it was insufferable.

Vicki had been driving to Brisbane that day when it all got too much. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she was oblivious to the cars around her, or the traffic lights in front. She didn’t know what to do or where to
turn. Her son was facing the possibility of the death penalty, and he was not yet out of his teens. She wanted to scream.

Pulling over, Vicki reached for her mobile phone and put in a call to one of her lifelines, a woman who had offered her support. She hadn’t had a day like that for a while, but it wasn’t getting any easier—for her family, or for Michael.

The Czugaj family liked to split up their visits to Bali, so Michael had someone there on a fairly regular basis. Vicki booked a flight in October 2005, on a Sunday; Bob Lawrence and his wife, Jenny, did the same. They had only been over to visit Renae once—that’s all their finances had allowed, despite all the scrimping and saving they could muster. By coincidence, they were flying out on the same day as Vicki, their travel and accommodation this time met by a group of lawyers who had volunteered to help the families of the Bali Nine.

Robyn Davis, Matthew Norman’s mother, boarded the plane in Sydney just like the Lawrences—the same flight, to the same destination. Robyn was a sickly woman whose ongoing illness made it difficult to give Matthew all the support she wanted to. But she would do anything for him and she was on the same flight, courtesy of the same group of lawyers, to see her boy. Three parents, all on the same lonely journey to visit their children in Bali’s Kerobokan Jail.

It was only six months earlier that those children had boarded another flight, traversing the same skies,
but on a very different journey. Renae Lawrence and Matthew Norman had shared a flight to Bali, but never acknowledged each other. The co-workers sat in different rows, avoided eye contact and pretended to be strangers. That was the order given to them, and they obeyed it—to do otherwise could have proved too costly for them and their families.

A couple of days later, Michael Czugaj had to ignore fellow travellers on his flight too. Chatting with his Brisbane school friend Scott Rush, he never spoke to Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen or Myuran Sukumaran. If he knew they were on the plane, he never let on. They’d never been mates, but even if they had been, he wouldn’t have acknowledged them.

Friendships had been cast aside and acquaintances forgotten as the group of nine young Australians set off on their Bali odyssey; now their parents were doing the same. Three families whose children were intricately bound together in life or death. And no real bond between them.

The same goes for the other families of the Bali Nine. Each family member felt the terror that gripped the pit of their guts when they were told their child had been arrested; each knows the frustration and, sometimes, anger that comes as their households are pushed from being private property into the realm of public circus. Each family knows that the future has been dimmed for the children they love so dearly. But instead of that creating a bond between the families—in the same way that sharing a tuck-shop roster or
working backstage at a school concert might begin lifelong friendships—most of the Bali Nine families are going their own way.

Petty arguments, small jealousies and a desperation to blame someone else have marred the relationships between some of them. Their children are bound together for ever, but they see little reason to befriend each other or to seek support from those who might truly understand their anguish. Each set of parents is searching for an answer to the unfathomable: how their child could have ended up in this mess. And finger-pointing and blame have grown from the tiniest of issues. In a particular instance, one family arrived back in Australia with a birthday card for a member of the family of one of the Bali Nine and a request to pass it on; they posted it, as requested, with a brief letter and to their disappointment did not even receive a ‘thank you’ in response. One father claims to have been abused by one of the other families for not rushing to his son’s side. Another father admits to wanting to punch someone else after they spooked some of the women with their talk of the death penalty. The blame game goes on for many, despite some allegiances being formed.

In the battle to employ lawyers in a country which few of the family members have visited and where few people speak English, things can grow tense. One father claims that some families are trying to lessen the evidence against their children by pointing the finger at others. A split can also be seen between some of the
mules’ families and those of the Nine caught at the Melasti without drugs strapped to their bodies. One family took great umbrage when a husband and wife showed snapshots of their previous week in Bali, unable to comprehend that they were not spending their time hidden away in a cheap motel room between the fifteen-minute visits they were granted four times a week. They couldn’t understand how the pair could enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the country that would soon decide their son’s fate.

One father, a reluctant public figure, scoffs at the idealism of others. Some of them really believe, he says, that they will return to Australia with their child at the next visit; that the whole sordid mess is nothing more than a big mix-up.

At Lee Rush’s Brisbane workplace, a friend says mates have kicked in a slice of their pay to help out with his expenses. The offer was unprompted. So was the generosity shown to Bill Stephens one day when he answered the door of his home. The father of a boy Martin Stephens went to school with stood there, bearing a $40 cheque. A group of children told Vicki Czugaj at a fundraiser for Michael that they had raided their piggy banks in order to hand over the small change they’d saved, and a friend of Michael’s brother sent a cheque for $500 from his hospital bed. An anonymous businessman funded Bob Lawrence’s first trip to Bali, and Australians have contacted media outlets to lend a hand to Matthew Norman’s mother, Robyn Davis.

The munificence shown by strangers has astonished many of the families who, without exception, come across as hard-working, law-abiding Australians hoping for the best for their kids. Almost all of them have other children, many of them still at school. And all of them, from the moment they were contacted and told of the arrests in April last year, are struggling to understand how their child could be involved in what authorities painted from day one as a sophisticated, complex, international drug-smuggling ring.

Like parents across Australia, those involved like to think the best of their children. Martin Stephens’s parents, Bill and Michele, believe he is too trusting; Michael Czugaj’s family wish he wasn’t so naive. Bob Lawrence regrets Renae’s immaturity; Scott Rush got mixed up with the wrong crowd, and Matthew Norman was deeply affected by his parents’ divorce. Even Andrew Chan was, apparently, as loyal as the day was long. The defences come thick and fast, as do the childhood stories of youngsters who would care for their siblings, teenagers who stuck by sick friends and sometimes spent their spare time helping collect for charity. They were normal Australian youths—perhaps reckless in not thinking through the consequences of what they were being offered, but good kids at heart.

It’s a double-edged sword for those parents who genuinely still believe their children were threatened with their lives and the lives of those they loved: an odd comfort in knowing that their children didn’t, allegedly,
do it of their own free will, but scared witless that, despite that, their children will pay a lifelong price for being the clueless victims forced to surrender their bodies to an international crime network.

Bob Lawrence’s house in Wallsend, the small western suburb of Newcastle set up in the mid-1850s as a coal-mining town, is not flash. But it’s spotless and he concentrates on making sure that not a skerrick of ash from his cigarette drops onto the coffee table. The television drones on in the background.

Renae has inherited his eyes—you notice it immediately—but his have dulled in recent months, and they fill with tears easily as the pensioner blames himself for his twenty-eight-year-old daughter’s bleak future.

‘I was too strict on her,’ he says. ‘I was too overprotective. No one said it to me then, but they have since. I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. That’s why she left home
.‘

The row they had soon after Renae’s eighteenth birthday keeps replaying in Bob’s mind. Over and over. If only he had let her come and go as she pleased, then maybe—just maybe—she wouldn’t be sitting in a hot, smelly Indonesian jail cell contemplating the most miserable of futures.

In the search for answers, Bob Lawrence is not the only parent pointing the finger towards themselves. Another parent, a mother this time, shakes her head and wonders how her son could have ended up in this
mess. Were there warning signs she ignored? Could she have stopped it?

Lee Rush tried to stop his son—he had a family friend call police and tell them that Scott was leaving the country the next day and might be in trouble. He feared for his son and wanted to prevent him coming to harm. And now some people, despite much evidence to the contrary, are wondering whether Lee was to blame for the capture of the Nine. Someone, after all, had to be to blame for all this.

The finger-pointing is made trickier by the fact that, in nearly all instances, the Bali Nine share wonderful and warm relationships with their parents. They don’t forget birthdays, or weekly phone calls home, or important anniversaries. None of the parents had lost faith in their child before the arrests and none expected them to make headlines as an accused drug smuggler. Certainly, some of the Nine had struggled as teenagers—a couple even notching up lengthy criminal records—but that mirrored the trials and tribulations of parents nationwide.

This was different. The descriptions of their children now being plastered across the international media could not be true. Were not true. And yet, when foreign affairs officials made the life-changing call to each of the parents on a Sunday in April 2005, none of them even believed their child was in Bali. Scott Rush was supposed to be elsewhere, Michael Czugaj was in Cairns, Renae Lawrence in Sydney, Martin Stephens in Darwin. Or so some thought. Si Yi Chen’s parents
believed that their son’s disappearance was so out of character, they reported him missing to local police.

That first visit to Bali to see their child remains the hardest single moment for most of the parents. And it’s been played and replayed in the photographs that have graced the front pages of newspapers and filled television screens around the world ever since: Christine Rush, a Brisbane schoolteacher, wipes a tear from her eye as her husband, Lee, clutches the arm of his nineteen-year-old son Scott, who looks like he could be in his mother’s class—a schoolboy desperately trying to keep it together, to be a man; Michael Czugaj doesn’t try as hard—he rests his head in his hands as his mother, Vicki, cradles him like a baby while his heartbroken father, Stephan, looks on. Renae Lawrence’s face is pressed hard up against the bars, her eyes willing someone to come and set her free.

The images are of torment: youths looking for reassurance and parents trying to answer the impossible. They all know that words are useless, and a hug under the heat of the world’s media cannot turn back the clock. So the younger boys, not long out of school, cling to their mothers desperately, and parents whose faces have aged in hours leave after their allotted visiting time, wondering where it will all end.

Michele and Bill Stephens’s first visit to their son Martin coincided with their thirty-second wedding anniversary. What a way to celebrate. Ordinary people, with all the love in the world for the boy behind the
bars, had as their anniversary gift the look in their son’s eyes when they told him they continued to believe and support him.

Vicki Czugaj couldn’t wait to see her son—she held her lad’s face in her hands. And as soon as she laid eyes on her boy, she needed an answer: ‘Mate, why did you do it?’ she asked. Having received the answer, she now shrugs her shoulders in telling the story. Michael said he had no choice—if he didn’t follow orders, his mother and the rest of his family would be killed. ‘And after that,’ says Vicki, ‘I started thinking of him as my hero rather than as an easily influenced, silly little boy.’ Vicki wears her confidence in her son as her armour; it helps on those days when she could scream with sadness.

Parents will do whatever they need to in order to cope. Bob Lawrence handled his first visit to Renae a hell of a lot better than his farewell. That tore at him—the need to say goodbye, not knowing when the anonymous charity of a local benefactor might again allow him and his wife to visit. Now he spends most of his days thinking of how he could make his only child’s life a degree or two easier. The invalid pensioner saved up his pennies, bought an MP3 player on sale and prepared a list of his daughter’s favourite songs; he shopped for the clothes she wore to one of her court appearances; lined up to get a Harry Potter book thinking it might distract her, and walks in hope to the mailbox every single day. And when there’s a letter or card from his only daughter, like the handmade one she
sent for his birthday, he feels like a lottery winner. ‘To my dearest Daddy, happy birthday, have a beautiful day,’ his last birthday card read. ‘Sorry about the card it was the best I could do. Have a drink (or two) for me. Love you more than words can say. Lots of love Your Daughter Renae.’

As hard as it is for the young Australians in jail, it is sometimes even harder for those left behind. Like Michael Czugaj’s little brother and sister—delightful children forced to be adults way too soon. They looked up to their big brother, just as he adored them. After news of Michael’s arrest broke, his little sister took two days off school—partly to allow her family to take stock and decide on the best way to handle things, and partly to avoid the relentless media glare. By the time she returned, teachers and students had been briefed and told not to raise the issue with her. A confident young girl, she was, however, encouraged to talk about it as much as she liked.