Stoic compassion in a place of nightmares

By GREG ANSLEY in KUTA BEACH

Nigel Allardyce is back in Jakarta now.

It is not easy street: New Zealand, along with many other Western nations, has upgraded its warnings on Indonesia and advised Kiwis who do not need to be there to leave.

Mr Allardyce knows what this can mean in the volatile streets of the capital of the world's largest Muslim nation.

First Secretary at the New Zealand Embassy for the past two years, he has seen a barrage of riots and bombings in the city.

The embassy, with other Western missions, is almost certainly reviewing its security and checking through its contingency plans for the evacuation of its nationals.

But anything is better than Mr Allardyce's past five days.

The tall, grey-haired 48-year-old, in khaki pants and flak jacket, arrived in Bali last Sunday with Colonel Alan Goodwin, the New Zealand defence attache in Jakarta. What they found was chaos, tragedy and agony.

The normal run of diplomacy does not send first secretaries into the kind of carnage that Mr Allardyce and Colonel Goodwin found at Sanglah, Bali's main - and totally inadequate - hospital. Packed along veranda were bodies by the score, burned and contorted, some barely recognisable as human.

Mr Allardyce's recollection is appalling beyond belief. "I thought, 'If I can take this, I can take anything'."

Bodies poured into a hospital with a morgue able to accommodate just 16, and wards filled with patients blackened by burns or truncated by missing limbs. Painkillers ran out.

The hospital was overrun by relatives and friends frantic for news of the missing.

Hour after hour, Mr Allardyce, sleeve rolled above a trademark wrist tattoo, hunted through Sanglah with Colonel Goodwin, searching for New Zealanders, working from a list of about 12, which they prayed would not grow.

After Sanglah, they moved to eight other hospitals and clinics, then back to Sanglah.

In the early hours of Monday morning, they had firm news of six, but had seen only two. It was time to start the rounds again.

By Tuesday morning they knew the worst: at least three dead.

Nobody, Mr Allardyce said, teaches you this in diplomacy. In his 23 years in the foreign service he has worked in Canada, Bahrain, Samoa and Rarotonga.

On Tuesday morning he was working at the Sanglah morgue, standing amid refrigerated units packed with colour-coded body bags: black for the unidentified, orange and yellow for the few whose identities were known.

When others were identified they were laid in rows in the courtyard behind the morgue and packed in dry ice awaiting removal.

"The conclusion you must make is that if you know someone was severely affected and not evacuated as one of the significantly injured, then the reasonable assumption is that they are in here," Mr Allardyce said.

With Mr Allardyce was Martin O'Neill, a Kiwi environmental engineer asked to help identify New Zealand victim Mark Parker.

They spoke briefly with Kate Fitzpatrick, an Australian Federal Police disaster victim identification specialist, consulted notes and prepared for what lay ahead.

The numbered body bags were to have been placed in a specified order; instead, the containers had been mixed and some numbers lost.

The only way to find Mark Parker was to examine them all. Teams of police and soldiers unloaded the bags one by one, and placed each on the ground for inspection: some were twisted by the contortions of the body inside, others were horrifically small.

Some were simply full of body parts.

For hour after endless hour, Mr Allardyce and Mr O'Neill, faces covered in sterile masks, zipped open a bag, checked the face inside, zipped it up again and moved to the next.

Mr Allardyce remained stoic, articulate and a man of practical compassion. It was, he believed, the best he could do to help relatives living with the anguish of uncertainty.

By day's end Mark Parker had been found, and Mr Allardyce had one more day checking the hotels of Kuta for New Zealanders still reported missing by frantic relatives.

To those who saw him at Sanglah, Mr Allardyce is an exceptional man.


Bali messages and latest information on New Zealanders
New Zealand travellers in Bali, and their families around the world, can exchange news via our Bali Messages page. The page also contains lists of New Zealanders in Bali and their condition.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade

* Latest travel advisory for Indonesia

* Bali Bombing Hotline: 0800 432 111

Feature: Bali bomb blast

Related links