Worthy of honours

When the call came for help with police work in the bloody aftermath of the Bali bombings, cops turned out from all over Australia. Three of SA’s finest explain just how they contributed.

On his tour of duty in Bali after the bombings, Andy Telfer faced no tougher task than dealing with the grief-stricken families of the dead. Each day, the Forensic Services Branch boss met parents and siblings desperate to find, and take home, their lost loved ones.

He explained the painstaking identification process, for which they would first have to wait, and felt deeply sorry for them.

In the Family Assistance Centre, set up by the Australian Government, Telfer answered their questions, and tried to ease their anguish and frustration. But, in some circumstances, no amount of relief was possible.

“Some of them, in the early days, had identified them (victims),” says Telfer, “(or so) they thought.

“They were convinced that they were their son or daughter or sister, and yet we were saying they couldn’t have them, because they hadn’t been identified to our standards. So that was probably the toughest thing – certainly emotionally.

“It certainly was (challenging) for me. I hadn’t faced a job where it was so intense for so many days. At the time, it was just frantic.”

Within only days of the devastating terrorist attack, Telfer, 52, and a number of his staff, were on aircraft out of Australia, headed for Bali. Once there, they would join a multi-jurisdictional force of police in Operation Alliance, a victim identification effort.

Among the SA forensic team, were Sgt Dianne Reynolds, 42, and Snr Sgt Michael Wright, 57. Highly trained in disaster victim identification (DVI), these and other specialist officers had never before had to contribute their skills to an overseas operation.

Telfer landed on Balinese soil and threw himself into action as DVI commander only five days after last year’s October 12 blasts. But, as chair of the Australasian DVI committee, he had, before he left, helped co-ordinate the response of forensic specialists from across Australia.

Reynolds arrived four days after Telfer. Leaving her husband and three children behind, she had boarded a plane and flown out of Australia with just two hours’ notice.

On the ground, none of the officers could avoid the horrendous images of the bombings’ aftermath. In the tropical Bali heat, tens of charred and dismembered bodies – either in bags or wrapped in sheets – lay in ice on a path outside the Sanglah Hospital morgue, awaiting autopsies.

With the most basic of mortuary facilities, only a few could undergo examinations at one time.

And, in the morgue, officers worked through their DVI processes in dirty, cramped conditions, in which blood and water flowed out through open drainage.

Wright was in no way surprised to find “difficult working conditions”. “I expected there to be chaos,” he says, “and there was. I expected that there would be logistical and administrative difficulties, and there were.

“...it’s certainly the only major bombing with multiple deaths that I’ve ever been to, so, in that sense, it was clearly (challenging).”

Telfer, too, had understood the many obstacles his team would face, such as poor electronic communication, the language barrier between the Australians and Indonesians, and the sheer size of the identification task.

Wright, in his role, managed the comparison and matching of missing-person information with post-mortem data. In cases in which a match seemed evident, he and his colleagues prepared and submitted paperwork to an identification board for its endorsement.

And after the endorsement came other duties: to repatriate the body concerned, and organize any follow-up tests, such as DNA.

“That became increasingly more complex,” says Wright, “largely because there was such a large number of body parts. Of course, all of those had to be linked, and that added to the complexity, both in terms of doing the identification, and negotiation with the relatives.”

Reynolds worked as part of the “property team”, with which her job was to clean, package and record the details of clothes, jewellery and any other items recovered from bodies. She also acted as a scribe during examinations, for such experts as an anthropologist who inspected bones.

“I spent probably half my time (of nine days) in the morgue,” says Reynolds. “We had to present the property in a way that victims’ families could identify it easily, and this property was pretty grotesque.”

Both before and after her morgue duties, Reynolds worked alongside Wright in the comparison-and-matching (reconciliation) area. There, she managed incoming missing-person (ante-mortem) files.

“By the time I got back there, the reconciliation area had really started to heat up,” she says. “A lot of files were coming in. We had a lot of PM forms we’d finished, and they were trying to marry them up.”

Reynolds, during her tour, visited the actual bombsite. She saw a giant crater and other massive destruction from the blasts, but felt most moved by the grief of the local population. Still, neither she nor her colleagues allowed the emotion of grieving locals and 88 dead Australians to compromise their work.

They remained focussed on their sole aim: to identify the 202 bodies – for the sake of the families.

Wright, whose tour lasted seven weeks, remarks: “My role was to go up there, be objective and do the job, and I tried to do that. One of the ways I cope with the stresses of my job is to try to develop a clinical attachment, which is imperative by the nature of our work.

“At a personal level, of course, I would find it impossible to justify anybody doing that (bombing).”

Both Telfer and Reynolds came away from Bali with renewed perspectives on today’s terrorist threat and life in general. Reynolds regards what she saw as a wake-up call, and believes that more such attacks will happen. She now insists that Australians “have to be vigilant”.

Telfer agrees, and adds: “I guess the other aspect is just how important looking after your family is, and how important life is to you. You’d rather get on and do what you want in life while you can, because you never know what’s around the corner.”

Nonetheless, for their commitment to the Bali effort, all three officers won recognition when Governor-General Michael Jeffery announced the Bali honours list on October 17. Telfer, Reynolds and Wright are to receive Medals of the Order of Australia in a special ceremony at Government House on December 11.

All three say they were honoured to be nominated for OAMs, and regard them as recognition of both Forensic Services Branch and its staff.

But would any of these dedicated DVI experts respond again, if terrorists struck another of Australia’s neighbours? To that question, each makes the same response: “I’d go tomorrow.”