Bali 9: The Untold Story (6 page)

M
artin Stephens’s face filled the television screen as Renae Lawrence warned him, in conspiratorial tones, against co-operating. The two twentysomething workmates from Sydney didn’t look like they were acting any more. With their disguises gone, their faces were drained of colour. It was a rare event, Stephens taking centre stage as he now did in the surveillance tape being aired across the globe. Mainly he seemed to always blend into the background. At least, that’s how some people remember him. That’s how it was in school, and at work, and in life generally.

Stephens lost contact with many of his fellow students at Corrimal High after his class graduated in
the early 1990s, the born-and-bred Illawarra boy setting out on his own path in life just like the rest of the region’s school-leavers.

It was an interesting time to be a young person stepping out into the world: Paul Keating had led the ALP to its fifth consecutive election victory; Bill Clinton had been inaugurated as the president of the United States, and a young Tony Blair had been elected to lead his party in the United Kingdom. The complexities of native title were being dissected in barbecue discussions;
Jurassic Park
and
Schindler’s List
were big hits at the cinema, and Mariah Carey’s ‘Music Box’, Bon Jovi’s ‘Always’ and Bryan Adams’s ‘Please Forgive Me’ were topping the ARIA charts.

Sydney was not yet claiming Wollongong as a dormitory suburb, although the big restructure of the steel industry would soon make that the case. Jobs were disappearing in the township, and its local economy was embarking on a brave transition. Boys at Corrimal High and the other schools in the area could no longer expect to blindly follow their fathers into the steel mills, as they had their fathers before them.

Across the small community and against that background, Martin Stephens’s class spread like ripples in a pond. Some, like other teenagers the length and breadth of Australia, packed their bags and set off overseas to ponder how they would spend the rest of their lives. Some travelled through Europe, others through Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom, but almost all sent back regular updates of their travel
tales. Others still, keen to make their mark, went straight to the big smoke, enrolling at one of Sydney’s universities; one classmate eventually embarked on an honours program she would proudly complete in a decade. Some looked hard and won jobs in education, childcare, banking and tourism. Two tried the army. Many married over the next seven or eight years; some had children immediately, while others are still planning their families now. Not much differentiated this group of young school-leavers from any other. It could have been any class in any town in any state of Australia. But it wasn’t: it was Corrimal High, where Martin Stephens was a student.

Martin never seemed as driven as some of his classmates, and many of them lost contact with him soon after the final bell heralded the start of their adult life. Tales of his school-yard years are marked more by him being unspectacular than anything else. Some classmates say he was known by his nickname, the same title given by mates to his brother before him: Vegie. That’s all—no surname. Just Vegie. No one really remembers why he or his brother earnt the name originally, but it seemed to suit him and stuck almost immediately; one classmate was unaware of his real name before his arrest in April 2005.

The nickname wasn’t meant in any nasty way, because most people remember Martin Stephens as fairly innocuous. Stephens says the name ‘Vegie’ had come from the Happy Little Vegemites song, but he
says while some people tried to label him ‘Junior Vegie’, the name didn’t really stick. His mother, Michele, also expresses surprise that some people had adopted the same nickname for her second-born as they had for Martin’s older brother.

Perhaps they used it more behind his back than in front of him, and perhaps it was just a particular group that did, but either way Stephens was neither the best student nor the worst. He wasn’t loud, however if he felt comfortable, he certainly wasn’t quiet. He wasn’t the class clown, but nor did he shun a joke. That was Vegie, from primary school right through to high school.

‘He was quiet, polite and nonoffensive,’ remembers one young woman who shared a class with him through high school. ‘He was left alone, never in any fights or in anything really…just one of those kids who blended into the background.’ And the last person tackled in the game of British bulldog too, she adds. That stuck in her mind—he stood out that day because he was the last person tackled in British bulldog.

Most days, though, Martin wasn’t the last. Or the first. Classmates say he didn’t hold a seat in the popular and cliquey school-yard crowd; neither did he seek one out. That just wasn’t him. Stephens would come to school each morning and leave each afternoon, without offending anyone or leaving too much of a lasting impression. He was laid-back, but that didn’t mean he always went along with things. And he could certainly fire up quickly if someone tried to pick on him.

‘He pretty much kept to himself,’ one friend, who was Stephens’s classmate from day one to graduation, said. ‘He had a little group of friends in high school, maybe three or four friends, and they pretty much stayed away from everyone else and did their own thing. He was quiet, but if someone picked on him, he liked to have a fight about it.’

Still another describes him this way: ‘He was kind of a geek—not in a brainy way—but he never had a bad thing to say about anyone. He would talk to everyone and, even though he was never part of the popular crowd, I think he was well liked by most.’

Most people agree with that assessment: polite, courteous, fairly harmless. And they all agree that Stephens had a trademark naivety, and, as far as personality traits go, that one stood out. It was the first thing that came to mind when the telephone calls and email exchanges flooded computer in-trays upon his arrest.

‘To all of us it seems so obvious that you’re going to get caught that we can’t comprehend how you’d have to be so stupid to do it, and then when they said it was Vegie…we all went, “Well, there was one person in the year who was gullible enough to get roped into it”,’ one former classmate explains. And it’s not said in a judgmental way—just as a statement of fact. Out of all of them, Martin Stephens could have been lured into it.

Of course, everyone sees others through slightly different glasses, and Stephens’s parents should know him best. Michele says she never heard him called Vegie;
that nickname had belonged to his brother. And she is aghast at claims her boy was the kind of bland person who blended into the background or who took a back seat in life. That’s not her experience or memory of Martin as a little boy, at school or even now. Michele remembers Martin with a big group of friends, many of them not from his own school, but from other schools—which might explain the differences in how people characterise the young man now sitting in a Bali jail.

‘Martin was always a fun, outgoing guy, he never blended into the background,’ says Michele. ‘I don’t ever remember Martin being quiet; he certainly wasn’t shy in coming forward. He has never been backstage, he has always had plenty of friends. He wasn’t like an in-your-face sort of person. If you saw Martin in a group you would remember him. He would be funny, he might be slightly cheeky.’

Michele says her son would readily take centre stage on the dance floor where he was somewhat of a whiz, with girls lining up for the next dance. But she agrees with assessments that her son was a bit on the naive side.

‘He has always been naive, everyone has always been his best friend. He always believed the best about somebody. He was willing to believe the best of people.’

After Martin’s friends saw his face on the television after his arrest they were on the phone to the Stephens home in shock and disbelief. They wanted someone to tell them it was all a mistake. Drugs were just not Martin’s thing.

Martin Stephens was born in Wollongong on 13 April 1976, to Bill and Michele, and his home remained at Towradgi, the small beachside suburb 5 kilometres north of the Wollongong CBD. His childhood was busy and his parents were supportive; sport took centre stage. Martin was a Towradgi Turtle junior lifesaver (from under-sixes to under-twelves, where his mother was president for about five years) and a Corrimal Cougar footballer (from under-sevens to under-elevens), and he would put up his hand for the chance to have a go at most sports. He also tried his hand at ballroom dancing, proving to be talented at that too, winning medals for both the cha-cha and the jive.

Martin played up like most teenagers, but his parents never worried about the path he would take in the long term. When he returned to Wollongong in 2004 after working for a catering company in Adelaide, they were thrilled to have him home again. He’d been gone for a couple of years, since 2002, and even brought home a steady girlfriend whom he planned to marry.

He’d started off working in a carpentry place in Unanderra making furniture, but he was to soon learn that hospitality, working in bars and clubs, was his true vocation—he loved it. He felt he had a knack with people and loved going to work at the various hospitality jobs he had over the years. ‘I could spill a drink on someone and have them thinking happy thoughts when I left. To me, it’s not a job,’ Martin says now. He loved the
fact that while working, doing things like cleaning the ashtrays in bars, he got to mingle with patrons and meet new people, chat and joke around. He couldn’t ask for more in a job, he thought. He was good at doing the cocktail tricks too.

Stephens did a hospitality course and got the chance to work at the Royal Easter Show and the 2000 Olympics at Homebush in Sydney, as well as at a couple of other bars in Sydney. Hospitality gave him the chance to work in different places and travel. He went to Queensland for a while, to Adelaide and to Uluru.

It was in Adelaide that he first started working for Eurest, the company where he would end up meeting the people with whom he now shares the same fate and same jail. And it was in Adelaide that he met the young woman he thought he would marry. For a time he even managed a strip club there, until his female boss sold the place.

By late 2004, Stephens had been away from Wollongong for four years and it was time to go home; his fiancée went with him. Eurest had said they would give him a job in Sydney, so he made his way home. ‘That’s when my life turned upside down,’ he says now. For it was while working in Sydney that Stephens met Andrew Chan.

As the curtain opened on 2005, Stephens was working at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He worked a bit in Wollongong, too, because of the seasonal slowing at his casual job in Sydney. Bill and Michele Stephens, who
had married as teenagers, didn’t know everything about his life, but they liked the young man their son seemed to have become. They would sometimes join him for a beer down at the club, and were proud he would get up at 2 a.m. to catch a train to Sydney to be at work by 5 a.m. He had respect for others, and he was courteous and kind. He drank, but not to excess. His partner was a credit to him. And he seemed to enjoy life. There’s not much more a parent can ask for.

Along with his trademark naivety, generosity seems to be a second hallmark of Martin Stephens’s personality. One friend stricken with a serious kidney disease relied on him.

Andrew Albornoz first met Marty—as he called him—when he was fourteen. They went to different schools, but a chance meeting in the bush, where Andrew was camping and Martin was bushwalking, saw the beginning of a friendship that both knew would last for life. On weekends, together with their group of friends, the pair would don camouflage gear and play commandos in the bush. They were teenage boys, full of the bravado of adolescence, mucking about at pretend war games.

Andrew remains shocked at Stephens’s arrest. He says it is so totally out of character for his best mate and the man he thinks of more as a brother. Diagnosed at three with kidney failure, doctors told Andrew he would be on a dialysis machine by the time he was sixteen. When it happened, Martin was there for him. On nights when Andrew struggled and most young
people were out enjoying themselves, Martin proved to be a salvation for Andrew, passing up a night out to spend it with his mate, chatting, watching videos and keeping him company. He was part of the Albornoz family.

‘He had no hesitation at all, he just wanted to help me out, that’s what kind of bloke he was,’ Andrew remembers. ‘He is just warm and big-hearted. He wouldn’t harm a fly. He has done so much for me, I don’t know how I could repay him.’

It was Stephens who introduced Andrew to his fiancée, Kirsty Cockayne, six years ago. The pair planned to marry this year with Martin as their best man, but plans for the wedding are on hold until they find out their friend’s fate.

Kirsty cries when she thinks of what will become of Stephens. She vividly remembers the period before the Bali Nine’s arrest: Stephens seemed to have gone quiet; they couldn’t get hold of him on the phone. Finally they found out that he had gone to Darwin and didn’t think much more of it until 17 April. That’s when the questions started and shock set in.

People are willing to come out of the woodwork with other stories of Stephen’s generosity. A schoolmate remembers the party in senior year when he had far too much to drink—Martin, whom he had never been too pally with, carried him to the bathroom and cleaned him up. He hadn’t asked him to; he just did it. Guards in the jail Stephens now calls home think the same: he’s a gentleman, caught smuggling heroin out of Indonesia.

Like most parents, Bill and Michele adored their boy from the day he was born. And it’s a feeling that is returned in spades. He cries sometimes now when reading a letter from his mother, and tells people that the worst moment in life was not his arrest on drug-smuggling charges, nor being thrown in jail, nor even fronting court in a strange country. Not even the spectre of the death sentence plays in Stephens’s head as the worst part of this whole ordeal. The single worst moment in Martin Stephens’s life was the instant he saw his mother’s face, and his father’s face, on their first trip to his Bali holding cell to see him. It was their thirty-second wedding anniversary and he thought he had broken their hearts. He never wants to relive that moment; playing it over in his mind is bad enough.