I Heard the News Today
Travel Stories: Australian Danielle Brigham always lamented that she couldn't find news about home while traveling abroad. Then came October 12.
01.27.03 | 9:57 PM ET
Photo by Jim Benning. As an antipodean traveler in Europe, I wasn’t surprised to go months without hearing news from home. Australia may be the biggest island on Earth, its form distinctive on every map, but for many people Australia still remains a mystery.
“You live with all those crocodiles?” people inevitably ask. “Don’t you have sharks off your beaches?”
Then one day not long ago, in Dublin, where I live, a stranger asked an unexpected question.
“Have you seen the news?”
I hadn’t, and nothing could have prepared me for what came next.
“Do you know where Bali is?”
Then, of course, came the report: A terrorist attack on the Indonesian island had killed some Australians. Maybe hundreds. Entire football teams were missing.
Terrorism. The word kept ringing in my ears, the ugliest word of all. Think Middle East, think New York, but not Australia, and certainly not Bali. Terrorism happened in the other hemisphere.
A wave of dread hit me. I felt sick to my stomach.
“Australia loses its innocence,” read the huge headline in the Irish Times. Not yet owning a television I was spared the immediacy of the images. But opening the Irish newspapers in the days that followed was distressing in the oddest of ways.
Without the moving pictures and sounds of Australian survivors, it was just another silent news item on the other side of the world. Then came the photos of the Coogee rugby team and our leading Canberra politicians surrounded by world media at press conferences. And as I read the names of people and places that were so familiar to me, it began to seem unreal.
Terrorism. Again that word I just couldn’t get past. Even the media saturation of the September 11 tragedy didn’t produce the fear I now felt. Nowhere was safe.
With more than a hundred young Australians confirmed missing or dead, I was relieved that none of my friends were holidaying in Bali at the time. But the world proved to be even smaller than I had thought.
My Irish flatmate was not as lucky as me.
On October 15, she received news that her British Hong Kong-based friend, Edward Waller, had been killed in the terrorist attack. He was on a rugby tour to Bali, and had been due to return home the following day when the taxi he was in caught fire in the bomb blast in front of the Sari Nightclub. She showed me his photos from the newspaper clippings. I felt numb.
A few months ago my friend attended his memorial service in Tipperary, Ireland, which drew hundreds of Ed’s friends and family from all over the world. It struck me how one person’s twenty-six year life had touched so many people in places like Thailand, England, Ireland and Australia.
It was then I felt my initial distress as an Australian had changed to a different kind of sorrow: sadness for a grieving friend, but also a new sensibility as a world citizen. The world had never felt smaller.
When Australians speak of traveling abroad we usually talk about going “overseas.” There is always a great expanse of ocean to be crossed. Traveling too far beyond Asia means financial expense and the bane of daylong flights.
But when it comes to war, and now terrorism—those problems of “the rest of the world”—the seas have always provided some protection. Our isolation has always given Australians a complacent sense of safety.
I used to feel at a loss when the only place to find Sydney in the European newspapers was the world weather section. Like any Australian living abroad, I always had an urge for information about my faraway home. But the intense news coverage of the Bali tragedy has suddenly brought Australia far too close.
Now I look at the world map and the seas don’t look big enough. The world is getting scarily smaller, and yes, there are sharks off our beautiful beaches.
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