The plight and prison activities of the 'Bali Nine' continue to fascinate the Australian media.
Sunday's papers carried the headline 'From drug courier to devoted husband, a jailhouse fairytale', featuring a photo of Australian Martin Stephens and his Indonesian wife Christine in the Kerobokan prison. The subtitle read, 'Several of the Bali Nine have found true love and redemption in jail.'
I and fellow Australian Jesuit Michael Kelly tried to gain access to the jail on Sunday but the crowds were too great. The jail is presently running at more than double capacity with 1000 prisoners, many of them foreign nationals doing time for drug offences.
On the Saturday, we had attended the opening of the Made Budhiana and Donald Friend art galleries at the Villa Pandan Harum just out of Ubud, and owned by Darwin lawyer Colin McDonald QC. McDonald had once served on the Australia-Indonesia Institute.
The opening was performed by two respected elders, Nyoman Gunarsa, the maestro of the Balinese artist community, and Richard Woolcott, a once long time ambassador to Indonesia during the troubled days of the invasion of East Timor, and our last representative on the UN Security Council.
McDonald recalled that Ali Alitas had described the Australia-Indonesia relationship as a rope with many strands — the strands of art and culture being the most resilient.
In the audience were Australian lawyers who have supported members of the Bali Nine these past seven years and lawyers acting for Indonesian minors still held in long term detention in Australia without charge, as well as Lee Rush, the father of Scott Rush whose death sentence was recently commuted to life imprisonment.
Woolcott reminded the audience that there was no relationship more important to Australia than that with Indonesia. He acknowledged that among tensions and differences, there were always personal relationships strengthened and nurtured by art and culture.
McDonald expressed the hope that the galleries, featuring the work of a deceased Australian artist who drew great inspiration from Balinese traditions and of a contemporary Balinese artist who had painted Australian scenes including the makeshift interiors of northern Australian refugee camps, would 'make a gentle but sincere statement about the virtues of cultural engagement, appreciation and respect for the other, tolerance and the enjoyment of the exotic, and the enduring importance of art aesthetics and the art instinct across cultures'.
McDonald, long impressed by Balinese myths and morality, has been collecting the works of these two artists since