Surviving a Tragedy

A father rubs the tattoo on his arm depicting the face of his lost son. Before each game, a teammate kisses the stone taken from the explosion site. And the coach talks into a tape recorder, its tiny microphone capturing the rage, pain, fear and frustration that he cannot otherwise bring himself to express.

For the Kingsley football club, this is how solace presents itself -- away from the crushing embrace of a country grieving over the Bali nightclub bombings of Oct. 12, 2002, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. Seven of the 20 Kingsley players who made the trip were among the dead.

The last that people remember, 20-year-old Corey Paltridge was on the dance floor of the Sari Club, lost in his air-guitar solo to AC/DC’s “Jailbreak.” Soon after, a backpack loaded with explosives was detonated near the DJ’s booth.

Kevin Paltridge likes to remember his son as the life of that last party.

He carries this mental image with him to the club’s practices and games, volunteering as a match official for the team from Kingsley, a northern Perth suburb. “The boys that came back were our son’s mates,” said Paltridge, whose upper arm now bears a tattoo of Corey’s face. “To me, they are now our sons.”

Besides Paltridge, the players killed in the explosion were Jason Stokes, 31; Anthony Stewart, 29; Dean Gallagher, 18; Byron Hancock, 22; David Ross, 20; and Jonathon Wade, 21.

The Bali explosions became Australia’s version of the American Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, obliterating a national sense that the world was an essentially benign place. The bombs were planted by a radical Islamic military group, Jemaah Islamiyah. Three members of the group have been sentenced to death by the Indonesian Supreme Court for their part in the attack, and a fourth to life in prison.

Bali, and particularly the city of Kuta, at the southern end of the island, was to Australians what Cabo San Lucas has been to many Californians: a tropical holiday destination, close, cheap and exotic -- foreign travel for beginners.

The Kingsley players and their countrymen were enjoying what Bob Carr, the premier of New South Wales, would later call “our kind of freedom, Australian freedom, the good, free, pleasant life in the sun without malign intent; freedom that hurts nobody.”

Kingsley was celebrating a season of unprecedented success, one in which the low-level amateur club had won its league championship and earned a promotion to a higher division.

After a day of eating and drinking, the players had swarmed the Sari Club, packed with more than 500 revelers. At 11:05 p.m., a small van filled with hundreds of pounds of explosives blew up outside the club. Ten seconds later, the backpack went off inside.

In Perth, about 1,600 miles away, the explosions were reported on midnight radio bulletins.

Ninety minutes later, Norelle Quayle’s cell phone received a text message from her husband, Simon, captain and coach of the team: “A huge explosion. A few dead. I will keep ringing. I love you. 1:37 a.m.”

Four minutes later, another message arrived: “8 blokes from our crew are missing. Stokesy is one.”

Stokes and Quayle had been friends for 12 years. At the start of the 2002 season, Stokes joined Kingsley as assistant coach.

Norelle messaged back: “What am I supposed to do?”

“They’re missing,” Simon responded at 1:59 a.m. “Just explain what happened. We’re checking medical places.”

Three minutes later, he added: “I’ll keep you posted. I’m safe.”

At Quayle’s suggestion, the players stayed in Bali to look for their missing teammates. His accounts of the night and the aftermath -- polite and unflinching -- helped color Australian perspectives of what had happened.

While the players tried to determine the fate of their teammates, Quayle called their families, keeping them up to date. He and the surviving players stayed behind to identify the remains.

Like several of his players, Quayle, 32, is on medication for post-traumatic stress disorder. He carries a recorder with him everywhere, occasionally emptying his heart into it.

“I’ve got 40 tapes of hourly things, of sessions, just speaking, how I’m feeling, what I’m going through,” he said.

The Quayles have been married for seven years and have two children, Jack, 3, and Harry, 18 months. When his wife wants to know what he is thinking, she goes to the tape.

“I’ve learned more from listening to the tapes than from what he’s told me,” she said in their brick veneer home overlooking the Kingsley football complex. “He might get up in the middle of the night, make a cup of tea and talk into it for 30 minutes. I’ll listen to them once every few days.”

Added Simon: “I get things off my mind. I scream loud in it sometimes. I’m sad in it sometimes. Sometimes it will be disbelief. It definitely helps.”

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Australian Rules football -- a puzzling mix of chaos and athleticism involving 36 players without pads or helmets running in all directions -- is a passion in the country’s southern states, akin to high school football in Texas or ice hockey in Canada.

For the first 10 years of its existence, Kingsley’s aspirations were modest.

“We were an E-grade football side that was going nowhere,” said Kevin Paltridge, referring to the club’s humble ranking. “We were a social team that was never ever going to win” a championship.For a well-established group within the club, that was fine. But then came Quayle and his players from Scarborough, in the amateur league’s A grade, its highest level. They brought ambition, ideas and rules -- if you wanted to play in the games, you had to practice twice a week.

Their methods paid off: The “reserve” team won the 2002 championship, while the “senior” team reached the E-grade championship game, prompting the promotion to D grade.

Then came Bali, and the transformation of an obscure suburban football club into a symbol of a nation’s grief. The legacy of that ordeal was a $500,000 memorial locker room and social complex, built by the community, that opened last month.

But as time went by, the survivors encountered what Australians call the “tall poppy syndrome” -- a national trait that seeks to cut overgrown personalities down to size.

The outstretched hand of consolation became the clenched fist of jealousy, confrontation and insult. The frustrations boiled over in an early 2003 season game against Carlisle.

“You guys are playing for ghosts,” said a Carlisle player, according to several people who were present. A Kingsley player threw a punch at him and was sent off by the umpire.

Fissures within the club became apparent as well.

“The club had sort of become the Bali people and the non-Bali people,” said Kevin Paltridge, a former member of the club’s management committee.

Amanda McIllroy, the club’s secretary, saw her son Brad return as a survivor who dealt with his emotions in part by carrying a stone from the rubble of the club and kissing it before each game. Still, she sympathized with those who saw Quayle as the problem.

“We just felt he needed to take a step back,” McIllroy said. “His problem is, he hasn’t grieved. He was there, trying to find his mates.... He hasn’t looked after himself. He hasn’t got his head together. He’s driving us all mad, basically.”

On May 1, Quayle was fired.

After an outcry within and outside the club, Quayle was reinstated within the week. But for the rest of the 2003 season, which ended in September with another championship-game appearance, the football club remained divided.

“There’s no rule book that you go through in a situation like this,” said Brian Anderson, the club president. “There’s been a lot of emotion, a lot of trauma, and everyone tries to cope with it in their own way.”

Quayle was fired again in late December.

“For about 20 minutes, I felt really disappointed and betrayed,” Quayle said last week. “After that, I felt bloody good.”

Training for the 2004 season starts next month. Quayle will be there as just another player, with five games to go for his 300th amateur game.

Like Quayle, other Bali survivors continue to deal with the attack’s harrowing personal toll.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has left assistant coach Laurie Kerr unable to return to work at the advertising and media agency he founded. Instead, he talks to community and school groups.

“They just want to be assured that life goes on,” said Kerr, who suffered burns over 20% of his body. “I want to move on, and I will. I used to think it was like some girlfriend dropped me....

“I won’t let the people who did this to me and my friends and other Australians beat me. But at this point in time, if you’re keeping score, they’re in front.”