Australia’s Innocence Lost in Rubble of Blast

SYDNEY, Australia -- Australians call this continent the Wide Brown Land and have long been nursed and cursed by its desert emptiness and the vast oceans that ring it off from the world. Cursed isolation can mean economic and cultural hardship, nursed because the world’s big troubles seemed so far off.

Until a car bomb ended that innocence along with the lives of nearly 200 people.

“This has touched our country in a way that nothing else has,” Prime Minister John Howard told a shocked nation. “The 11th of September was bad, there were Australians killed there, but this has come to our very shores almost, and the people whose lives have been taken are in the main young Australians with so much ahead of them. That is what is so terribly sad.”

In Australia’s official political and defense circles the polite phrase “the threat from the north” always means Indonesia. Publicly, Australia continues to be greatly supportive of a closer relationship with Indonesia, but the measure of its unease is seen in the new military air bases built across the remote north, the large army forces there, and the new railroad to provide rapid transport to the northern seaboard in any conflict.

It is starkly apparent to most Australians that their safety is now tightly bound to security in Indonesia; that if terrorism gains a toehold in Indonesia, then Australia’s part of the world will never be the same. Howard even warned that the unthinkable was possible: terrorists striking on Australian soil. He ordered a review of the nation’s anti-terrorism capabilities and said he would fly to Bali to assess the situation and attend a memorial service.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said today that Australian citizens should leave Indonesia because of “disturbing new information of generic threats to Australians.”

He gave no details.

The 5 1/2-hour flight from Australia’s populous eastern seaboard, northwest across the outback, to the Indonesian island of Bali, has long been a rite of passage -- the resort a place for the young to party, to taste a foreign culture, to see an island of gentle people, Hindu temples, monkeys and jungles. All with the reassurance that comes from large numbers of compatriots and plenty of Australian beer and television.

Whoever planted the bombs that ripped apart the entertainment district of the Balinese town of Kuta on Saturday night must have known that scores of vacationing Australians would be killed and injured. Sunday will be a day of national mourning.

Australia has never lacked for leaders fond of sending its young men off to other people’s wars in faraway places. And every year, young Australians flock to the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, where thousands of Australians died in World War I. This week, as the nation has watched footage of bloodied young men and women being airlifted back to Australia, comparisons are being drawn between uniformed young men of past wars and the casualties in Bali.

The comparisons are apt especially in the way the images have caught the national imagination by showing the Australian ideal of mate-ship. Viewers were captivated by the eight teenagers on holiday from Perth. Friends since grade school, only five made it out of Paddy’s Irish Pub right after the nearby blast. They went back into the blazing ruins to rescue the other three. As one said: “Either all eight of us are coming home, or none of us are.”

They plan to get tattoos that proclaim: Circle of Friends.

As in war, it is the terrible losses inflicted on their young that have most moved Australians.

“It doesn’t feel like I’ve lost one brother. It feels like we’ve lost six,” a sobbing Ryan Thompson told a Sydney Morning Herald reporter Tuesday.

Thompson’s older brother, Clint, 29, has been confirmed dead in the bombing as have four of his teammates from Sydney’s Coogee Dolphins rugby team. One more is missing.

They had gone to Bali, along with at least 10 other Australian teams to celebrate the end of another Southern Hemisphere winter season. The club’s secretary, Mal Ward, said: “We’re only a small club but we’re good mates. We’ve lost half our committee basically.”

Craig Salvatori, 39, and his wife, Kathy, 38, were one of eight Sydney couples who linked up each year for a Bali holiday. This year they had 15 children among them, including the two Salvatori daughters.

On Saturday, they all dined together in Kuta and then Craig took his daughters back to the hotel so his wife could move on to the Sari Club to celebrate her birthday with her girlfriends. Kathy and her friends were believed to have taken the full force of the bomb when it destroyed the nightclub.

The next day Craig joined other husbands scouring Bali’s hospitals and morgues.