Gods and demons, p.17
Gods and Demons, page 17
*
Mercedes, whose relationship with her husband had broken down in 2014, rented another Kuta house for her sister from which their brother Michael came and went. Mercedes relocated to the Gold Coast in 2015 with her children.
Corby’s story had enthralled and appalled her compatriots since her arrest at Ngurah Rai airport on 8 October 2004. She’d been sentenced the following year to twenty years in jail for drug smuggling.
Since my first visit to Bali in 2006, Australian tourists had frequently added a Kerobokan jail visit to their list of Bali attractions. Corby was fair game before the Australian consulate in Denpasar within the next couple of years asked prison authorities to curtail the spectacle. Tourists then hoped for a glimpse of Corby during her rumoured day outings. At a beauty salon near the jail I heard an Australian woman ask, ‘Does Schapelle Corby come in here?’ The local hairdresser didn’t know who Corby was.
The minutiae of her life – a new hairstyle, new best cell friend, her demeanour – was reported ad infinitum.
The frenetic build-up to her parole invited speculation on the media obsession over each nuance; Corby’s future goldfish bowl existence in Kuta; how much dosh had been paid to the Corby industry, and on and on.
Then there was Network Nine’s telefilm, Schapelle, which aired on 9 February, the week before her release. It was based on journalist Eamonn Duff’s contentious book Sins of the Father to add oxygen to the feeding frenzy. But ratings didn’t meet expectations – Schapelle was trounced by Seven Network’s INXS mini-series on rock-star Michael Hutchence.
Aiding the Australian media scrutiny of the former Gold Coast beautician were the Indonesian newshounds and fixers employed to chase her. While other Australian drug offenders had tumbled into Kerobokan jail since Corby, notably the Bali Nine, none had her cachet. As an Australian consular official muttered, ‘Watch the local media turn paparazzi when Corby is out.’ What sort of freedom would it be? Certainly not free-range.
*
Back in 2008, Corby, animated and exceptionally well groomed, in a crisp white blouse and black pants, had sat on a groundsheet amid palls of acrid smoke, food wrappers and cigarette butts, chatting with Mercedes in the prison visiting yard.
One other prisoner matched her sartorial style that day: the Nigerian death-row inmate I was interviewing a few metres from her.
Pressed together in the stifling heat, inmates and visitors wiped sweat from their faces and carved out niches on the floor. As visiting ended, I picked my way through a sea of bodies to approach Corby. Mercedes, ever the eagle-eyed gatekeeper, jumped up to interject. She scrutinised my business card, listening to my request for an interview and promised to call. As soon as I’d turned my back, she screeched after me like an alley cat, ‘S’cuse me, guard, there’s a journalist in here.’
Media were generally vetted, and if anyone knew the rules, Mercedes did. Rarely did Corby venture into the visiting area, such was her dread of photos and media. I never received a call from her sister.
In June 2008, Corby was admitted to the international wing of Denpasar’s Sanglah Hospital with severe depression. It was reportedly precipitated by the death of her father, Michael Corby, in January, along with the rejection of her final appeal against her twenty-year sentence.
She stayed in her private hospital room nearly three weeks, causing a flurry among reporters when she stepped out to a beauty salon for hair and nail treatments accompanied by an armed guard.
A year later, in May 2009, she returned to hospital again suffering depression. I went there with my friend from The Bali Times, William Furney, to try to catch a glimpse of her on her balcony.
Furney didn’t have much time for Corby, writing scathingly about her in his paper. Schlapper, as he called her, got undeserved red-carpet treatment and he was sceptical she was mentally ill.
On 5 June 2009, a story appeared in The Bali Times headlined: Let’s not Rain on Schlapper’s Charade.
Furney wrote in part: ‘I headed over to the international wing, now accompanied by an Australian journalist who was also on the scene. She had been caught by security, the previous day, wandering around the wing’s gardens seeking signs of persons on balconies seeking rare peeks at the world. My friend and I approached the reception and told a flustered woman a family member was thinking about checking in for a procedure and that we had been sent ahead on a type of reconnaissance mission to check out the digs. What we wanted, we said, was a gawk around the rooms. (This was to give us an idea, and photos, of the accommodation of any celebrity patients). Fully booked, we were told, no room at this inn! Top-of-the-range comes in at IDR2.2 million (A$220) a day, we were told. “It’s about the same price as staying at a good hotel in Bali,” my friend said. Hotel Sanglah? I ventured, casting my mind to a similarly themed facility in Kerobokan.’
Sanglah’s chief psychiatrist, Nyoman Ratep, told me Corby was prescribed strong anti-depressants and psychotherapy. ‘She has hallucinations, deep anxiety and insomnia.’
Another of her Indonesian psychiatrists, Denny Thong, whom I came to know well, told me she ‘seemed not to be living in the real world; maybe that’s best in her situation. Her thoughts are wild and fragmented.’ He said she’d told him, ‘I’m naughty.’ What did that mean? we both pondered. He recommended her transfer to Bangli Mental Hospital, in central Bali, but her family wasn’t keen. ‘The best thing for her mental state would be for her to be set free,’ Thong opined. When he treated Corby at the jail clinic in 2009, she arrived with Renae Lawrence who later dispensed anti-psychotic medication to Corby. ‘She was escorted to the clinic by Renae. They were very close at the time and Renae was very concerned,’ he told me. ‘I asked Renae to give her the medication because Corby was being locked up early for misbehaviour.’
Thong later stood by his 2009 diagnosis, saying Corby was seriously mentally ill and hadn’t feigned her condition, adding he hadn’t been paid for his diagnosis.
In April 2014, Lawrence claimed Corby had one night confessed her guilt over the 2004 drug run that put her behind bars. In a secretly filmed interview aired by Network Ten, Lawrence said Corby admitted it was her fourth trip to Bali as a drug mule. ‘She knew the marijuana was in the bag but that the person who was supposed to be at the airport at that time didn’t show up for work … and that’s how she got caught,’ Lawrence said. She also claimed Corby ‘played crazy’ to reduce her sentence.
I interviewed two of Corby’s former prison wardens – Gusti Ngurah Wiranta and Siswanto (who went by one name) – in December 2013 before her paroled release. Their opinions of her differed widely from each other.
I met Siswanto, who was governor until early 2012, at a Starbucks in Denpasar. Clearly not a Corby fan, he had reported to his corrections superiors in late 2010 that she had feigned mental illness and was disobedient. ‘If she really has mental illness why did she decline to be taken to a mental hospital?’ he asked me. ‘She thought that she is always right and she always wanted to win her stance. She really hated me because I don’t like an inmate who wants to rule prison guards.’
On a media tour organised by Siswanto in January 2010, guards unexpectedly flung open cell doors in the women’s unit, Block W. It was the first time I had seen the dormitory-like cells, which reminded me of my boarding-school days. A cosy atmosphere of stuffed animals on neatly made beds, personal photos, mementos and curios weren’t what I had imagined.
While the local media pack rushed to Corby’s cell, I found Lawrence sitting on her double bed, loquacious of spirit and glassy-eyed. For some time, my photographer Lauren Kelana and I were alone with Lawrence.
This was a crucial time for fellow courier Scott Rush in his final appeal against the death penalty, and Lawrence was expected to help him by testifying in court she had made several drug runs into Bali before her arrest. The confession would highlight inconsistencies in the sentencing of the Bali Nine. Lawrence had received a life sentence reduced to twenty years on appeal, yet Rush, who was a first-time courier, was sentenced to death. She denied reports she would return to court. ‘I never said I would testify. I’m not going to court again. I’ve already been punished … I’m not stupid,’ she told me. She would only provide a statement saying Rush was a courier, as she was.
Lauren continuously snapped pictures but Lawrence, unpeturbed by the camera, maintained a running commentary with me. Even when local fixers finally piled in, taping the interview, it was just me and Lawrence. The fixers, transmitting to their Australian bosses, had my exclusive.
Lawrence also denied she and Rush were close friends. Rather, she was closer to Corby, though that allegiance inevitably changed.
Sharing a ten-bed cell in the overcrowded block with 120 women, Corby, unlike Lawrence, wasn’t happy to entertain the visiting media. Scurrying for cover, she locked herself in the bathroom, from where she threw buckets of water through a window at us. She didn’t emerge that day, nor on any celebratory days when most inmates appeared. While almost every Australian seemed to have an opinion on her, she remained enigmatic and inaccessible despite the intense media coverage.
Corby was carefully managed by her family. Few others knew anything real about her beyond those visitors vetted by the family, her jailers, cellmates and occasional doctors and lawyers. Reported media deals and her deep paranoia of journalists generated an obsession for the Australian public, whipping the media into a frenzy at the mere hint of her name.
Impressions of Corby from good Samaritans – those providing rehabilitation programs and jail insiders – reflected her reclusive behaviour. Sydney expat Paula Gillham regularly visited the jail in a charitable role as part of the Bali International Women’s Association, providing food, mattresses and social services to inmates. She said Corby typically ran and hid when they entered the women’s block. ‘That’s how she responds to most people. She would hide in her room because she was told not to talk to anyone because she has exclusive magazine and TV contracts,’ Gillham told me.
The BIWA past president Melly St Ange countered, ‘What do you expect? She gets trauma, stress. Schapelle doesn’t want to mingle with the crowd. I’m not surprised. Visitors, press, stare at her like she’s in the circus, people calling out, “Schapelle, Schapelle.”’ St Ange often took Australian tourists to the jail. ‘Some want to see Corby, I say, “Don’t bother her, she busy.”’ Corby, who had once aspired to open a beauty salon at the jail, passed time doing handicraft such as jewellery, beading and painting, rarely venturing outside her cell.
The campaigning for Corby’s exoneration, particularly online, was well-drilled and intense: those who challenged her innocence could expect swift and fierce rebuttal. She was even compared to Lindy Chamberlain – eventually exonerated in the case of her daughter Azaria’s death – who wrote to Corby in 2005, commiserating about her guilty verdict and declaring, ‘My heart bleeds for you.’
When Patrick Scott, a New Zealand expat, met Corby in 2007 during a Rotary visit to improve sanitation in Block W, Mercedes – whom Scott didn’t know – phoned to ask if he believed Corby was innocent or guilty. ‘I said, “I don’t know,”’ Scott recalled. ‘It was irrelevant to me.’ But Mercedes seemed satisfied. ‘She may well have rung to see if I had another agenda, if I was going to go to the papers,’ he told me. He was ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the encounter. ‘[Corby] was caring of the other female inmates. She looked well groomed, clean and well dressed. I liked her personality.’ If she was depressed, it wasn’t obvious to him. ‘She was bright, she was very together. I thought she was brave.’
After Corby’s hospitalisations for depression, her family arranged, with the backing of New Idea, for an assessment by psychiatrist Jonathan Phillips. In August 2009 the former president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists warned that Corby’s mental health was very fragile and likely to get worse, and urged that she be transferred as a prisoner to Australia and be hospitalised. The effect was explosive in Australia, with then prime minister Kevin Rudd coming under pressure to somehow arrange her repatriation.
But Kerobokan guards were sceptical, according to Bali psychiatrist Lely Setyawati. ‘I would not say she was insane,’ Lely told me. However, after a consultation sixteen months previously, she said Corby had suffered ‘mixed schizophrenia and affective disorders or bipolar disorder’ and might be unable to cope in the glare of public and media attention outside jail. ‘It will not magically dissolve.’
During parole preparations, I also spoke to Sanglah Hospital psychiatrist Sri Diniari, who diagnosed Corby with mild depression and said she was not psychotic. ‘She has normal behaviour … but she is irritable,’ Diniari told me.
Corby’s sentence reduction triggered a barrage of local condemnation. GRANAT, the National Movement Against Narcotics, tried to overturn the clemency grant, and at least one Indonesian MP accused the Yudhoyono administration of doing a secret deal with Australia. What further raised Indonesian eyebrows was that in obtaining presidential clemency, Corby hadn’t conceded guilt for the crime in her parole application, though the law demands this along with ‘justice collaboration’ – implicating others involved in the crime. This apparent partiality didn’t apply to Corby because the law hadn’t been in place when she was convicted, said Justice Minister Amir Syamsuddin at the time.
The balance of Australian public opinion about Corby’s guilt shifted against her across time, though the overwhelming view was that she had done enough prison time. There are still those who found it galling she’d attained a form of celebrity-through-suffering, and there were rumours that some members of the Corby family had benefited financially from her crime and punishment (rumours which were denied by her family). Paula Gillham told me disdainfully, ‘She and her family give the rest of the Australians here [in Bali] such a bad name. I’m not against her getting out early, but I am against the family benefiting from her crime.’
Succeeding Corby’s prison governor Siswanto was Ngurah Gusti Wiratna, whom I interviewed at his Denpasar restaurant in December 2013. Before he retired the previous month, he approved her application to seek parole.
Wiratna found her initially difficult and introverted. But her attitude and behaviour improved ‘after I opened communications. I advised her to be more patient and pray, she became more communicative and not that exclusive. I was thinking maybe it’s because she hopes for processing of her parole, so she is changed, but we cannot have bad thought like that.’
Wiratna had been appointed to Kerobokan in February 2012, after rioting inmates burnt down a large section of the severely overcrowded prison: built for three hundred inmates, it was then holding more than a thousand. He described Corby as essentially a ‘good person’, careful in her friendships and traumatised by fear of media intrusion.
Dubbed ‘ganja queen’ by the Indonesian media, as the celebrity prisoner walked free on parole, speculation over her guilt or innocence was no less impassioned than when she was arrested.
But as the parole process edged forward, Corby was on tenterhooks, especially during negative jail incidents such as the detection of a drugs party in the women’s block a few months previously in 2013.
‘She [Corby] is afraid to get her hopes up,’ a jail insider told me. ‘She’s nervous. She says, “Until I walk out of here I don’t believe it will happen.”’
A soap opera from the start, her journey was also an extraordinary political saga that strained bilateral relations between Australia and Indonesia. Parole left Corby anchored to the island of her arrest for three years, free to roam in a Truman Show-like setting. Local media snapped her swimming, running, larking with boyfriend Ben Panangian (a former inmate she’d met in jail), eating and attending monthly parole check-ups. When she gained weight, it was assumed she was pregnant. But she wasn’t – and she blamed the weight gain on the heckling media. How could she exercise outdoors in private?
On 27 May 2017, she was deported, again drawing frenzied media packs – in which I was knocked to the ground but suffered only shock. The public appetite is not what it was but she has a large social media following. She lives with her mother Rosleigh Rose on the Gold Coast, regularly posting Instagram updates of herself. At the time of writing, the then 42-year-old had no job and was giving a series of Australian media interviews to promote her updated autobiography first published in 2006.
Most importantly, her departure from Indonesia eased pressure on bilateral relations.
17
POSTER BOY
‘Some people get human rights, some people die. It depends on how much money you have, right.’
— Scott Rush, Bali Nine courier
Amid the roar and kerfuffle of the Schapelle Corby media circus, Scott Rush, a despondent figure, was one of the forgotten Australian inmates in Bali. Suspended in the shadows of the convicted trafficker’s spotlight, he was particularly alone. Isolated in Karangasem jail, in remote east Bali at his request, he was at the end of his tether after enduring a prison hell for almost a decade. He frequently spoke to me about death as his only way out.
Since 2006, I had interviewed most of the Bali Nine gang. Rush I’d spoken with countless times, sometimes by phone but usually at Kerobokan jail. He had quietly slipped away from the prison amid the Corby commotion before her release on parole. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I was going, no one knew, not even the rest of the Bali Nine,’ he said with a vague smile.
It was my first visit to the bucolic jail. Three hours from the southern hub, it appeared from the outside more serene retreat than dystopian penitentiary. Leaning in to the thick iron bars separating us in the visiting area, Rush eagerly consumed details of Corby’s release. He seemed to harbour no malice, rather surprise over the furore she’d sparked regarding an alleged A$2 million tell-all TV interview – and to hear she was ensconced in a luxury villa. Eyes bulging, he craved minutiae of a sumptuousness he may never know. He wasn’t jealous, though he conceded that plenty of Australian inmates would be. ‘Good on her,’ he said. ‘She’s lost ten years of her life – she should be compensated. We should all get compensation when we get out.’
Mercedes, whose relationship with her husband had broken down in 2014, rented another Kuta house for her sister from which their brother Michael came and went. Mercedes relocated to the Gold Coast in 2015 with her children.
Corby’s story had enthralled and appalled her compatriots since her arrest at Ngurah Rai airport on 8 October 2004. She’d been sentenced the following year to twenty years in jail for drug smuggling.
Since my first visit to Bali in 2006, Australian tourists had frequently added a Kerobokan jail visit to their list of Bali attractions. Corby was fair game before the Australian consulate in Denpasar within the next couple of years asked prison authorities to curtail the spectacle. Tourists then hoped for a glimpse of Corby during her rumoured day outings. At a beauty salon near the jail I heard an Australian woman ask, ‘Does Schapelle Corby come in here?’ The local hairdresser didn’t know who Corby was.
The minutiae of her life – a new hairstyle, new best cell friend, her demeanour – was reported ad infinitum.
The frenetic build-up to her parole invited speculation on the media obsession over each nuance; Corby’s future goldfish bowl existence in Kuta; how much dosh had been paid to the Corby industry, and on and on.
Then there was Network Nine’s telefilm, Schapelle, which aired on 9 February, the week before her release. It was based on journalist Eamonn Duff’s contentious book Sins of the Father to add oxygen to the feeding frenzy. But ratings didn’t meet expectations – Schapelle was trounced by Seven Network’s INXS mini-series on rock-star Michael Hutchence.
Aiding the Australian media scrutiny of the former Gold Coast beautician were the Indonesian newshounds and fixers employed to chase her. While other Australian drug offenders had tumbled into Kerobokan jail since Corby, notably the Bali Nine, none had her cachet. As an Australian consular official muttered, ‘Watch the local media turn paparazzi when Corby is out.’ What sort of freedom would it be? Certainly not free-range.
*
Back in 2008, Corby, animated and exceptionally well groomed, in a crisp white blouse and black pants, had sat on a groundsheet amid palls of acrid smoke, food wrappers and cigarette butts, chatting with Mercedes in the prison visiting yard.
One other prisoner matched her sartorial style that day: the Nigerian death-row inmate I was interviewing a few metres from her.
Pressed together in the stifling heat, inmates and visitors wiped sweat from their faces and carved out niches on the floor. As visiting ended, I picked my way through a sea of bodies to approach Corby. Mercedes, ever the eagle-eyed gatekeeper, jumped up to interject. She scrutinised my business card, listening to my request for an interview and promised to call. As soon as I’d turned my back, she screeched after me like an alley cat, ‘S’cuse me, guard, there’s a journalist in here.’
Media were generally vetted, and if anyone knew the rules, Mercedes did. Rarely did Corby venture into the visiting area, such was her dread of photos and media. I never received a call from her sister.
In June 2008, Corby was admitted to the international wing of Denpasar’s Sanglah Hospital with severe depression. It was reportedly precipitated by the death of her father, Michael Corby, in January, along with the rejection of her final appeal against her twenty-year sentence.
She stayed in her private hospital room nearly three weeks, causing a flurry among reporters when she stepped out to a beauty salon for hair and nail treatments accompanied by an armed guard.
A year later, in May 2009, she returned to hospital again suffering depression. I went there with my friend from The Bali Times, William Furney, to try to catch a glimpse of her on her balcony.
Furney didn’t have much time for Corby, writing scathingly about her in his paper. Schlapper, as he called her, got undeserved red-carpet treatment and he was sceptical she was mentally ill.
On 5 June 2009, a story appeared in The Bali Times headlined: Let’s not Rain on Schlapper’s Charade.
Furney wrote in part: ‘I headed over to the international wing, now accompanied by an Australian journalist who was also on the scene. She had been caught by security, the previous day, wandering around the wing’s gardens seeking signs of persons on balconies seeking rare peeks at the world. My friend and I approached the reception and told a flustered woman a family member was thinking about checking in for a procedure and that we had been sent ahead on a type of reconnaissance mission to check out the digs. What we wanted, we said, was a gawk around the rooms. (This was to give us an idea, and photos, of the accommodation of any celebrity patients). Fully booked, we were told, no room at this inn! Top-of-the-range comes in at IDR2.2 million (A$220) a day, we were told. “It’s about the same price as staying at a good hotel in Bali,” my friend said. Hotel Sanglah? I ventured, casting my mind to a similarly themed facility in Kerobokan.’
Sanglah’s chief psychiatrist, Nyoman Ratep, told me Corby was prescribed strong anti-depressants and psychotherapy. ‘She has hallucinations, deep anxiety and insomnia.’
Another of her Indonesian psychiatrists, Denny Thong, whom I came to know well, told me she ‘seemed not to be living in the real world; maybe that’s best in her situation. Her thoughts are wild and fragmented.’ He said she’d told him, ‘I’m naughty.’ What did that mean? we both pondered. He recommended her transfer to Bangli Mental Hospital, in central Bali, but her family wasn’t keen. ‘The best thing for her mental state would be for her to be set free,’ Thong opined. When he treated Corby at the jail clinic in 2009, she arrived with Renae Lawrence who later dispensed anti-psychotic medication to Corby. ‘She was escorted to the clinic by Renae. They were very close at the time and Renae was very concerned,’ he told me. ‘I asked Renae to give her the medication because Corby was being locked up early for misbehaviour.’
Thong later stood by his 2009 diagnosis, saying Corby was seriously mentally ill and hadn’t feigned her condition, adding he hadn’t been paid for his diagnosis.
In April 2014, Lawrence claimed Corby had one night confessed her guilt over the 2004 drug run that put her behind bars. In a secretly filmed interview aired by Network Ten, Lawrence said Corby admitted it was her fourth trip to Bali as a drug mule. ‘She knew the marijuana was in the bag but that the person who was supposed to be at the airport at that time didn’t show up for work … and that’s how she got caught,’ Lawrence said. She also claimed Corby ‘played crazy’ to reduce her sentence.
I interviewed two of Corby’s former prison wardens – Gusti Ngurah Wiranta and Siswanto (who went by one name) – in December 2013 before her paroled release. Their opinions of her differed widely from each other.
I met Siswanto, who was governor until early 2012, at a Starbucks in Denpasar. Clearly not a Corby fan, he had reported to his corrections superiors in late 2010 that she had feigned mental illness and was disobedient. ‘If she really has mental illness why did she decline to be taken to a mental hospital?’ he asked me. ‘She thought that she is always right and she always wanted to win her stance. She really hated me because I don’t like an inmate who wants to rule prison guards.’
On a media tour organised by Siswanto in January 2010, guards unexpectedly flung open cell doors in the women’s unit, Block W. It was the first time I had seen the dormitory-like cells, which reminded me of my boarding-school days. A cosy atmosphere of stuffed animals on neatly made beds, personal photos, mementos and curios weren’t what I had imagined.
While the local media pack rushed to Corby’s cell, I found Lawrence sitting on her double bed, loquacious of spirit and glassy-eyed. For some time, my photographer Lauren Kelana and I were alone with Lawrence.
This was a crucial time for fellow courier Scott Rush in his final appeal against the death penalty, and Lawrence was expected to help him by testifying in court she had made several drug runs into Bali before her arrest. The confession would highlight inconsistencies in the sentencing of the Bali Nine. Lawrence had received a life sentence reduced to twenty years on appeal, yet Rush, who was a first-time courier, was sentenced to death. She denied reports she would return to court. ‘I never said I would testify. I’m not going to court again. I’ve already been punished … I’m not stupid,’ she told me. She would only provide a statement saying Rush was a courier, as she was.
Lauren continuously snapped pictures but Lawrence, unpeturbed by the camera, maintained a running commentary with me. Even when local fixers finally piled in, taping the interview, it was just me and Lawrence. The fixers, transmitting to their Australian bosses, had my exclusive.
Lawrence also denied she and Rush were close friends. Rather, she was closer to Corby, though that allegiance inevitably changed.
Sharing a ten-bed cell in the overcrowded block with 120 women, Corby, unlike Lawrence, wasn’t happy to entertain the visiting media. Scurrying for cover, she locked herself in the bathroom, from where she threw buckets of water through a window at us. She didn’t emerge that day, nor on any celebratory days when most inmates appeared. While almost every Australian seemed to have an opinion on her, she remained enigmatic and inaccessible despite the intense media coverage.
Corby was carefully managed by her family. Few others knew anything real about her beyond those visitors vetted by the family, her jailers, cellmates and occasional doctors and lawyers. Reported media deals and her deep paranoia of journalists generated an obsession for the Australian public, whipping the media into a frenzy at the mere hint of her name.
Impressions of Corby from good Samaritans – those providing rehabilitation programs and jail insiders – reflected her reclusive behaviour. Sydney expat Paula Gillham regularly visited the jail in a charitable role as part of the Bali International Women’s Association, providing food, mattresses and social services to inmates. She said Corby typically ran and hid when they entered the women’s block. ‘That’s how she responds to most people. She would hide in her room because she was told not to talk to anyone because she has exclusive magazine and TV contracts,’ Gillham told me.
The BIWA past president Melly St Ange countered, ‘What do you expect? She gets trauma, stress. Schapelle doesn’t want to mingle with the crowd. I’m not surprised. Visitors, press, stare at her like she’s in the circus, people calling out, “Schapelle, Schapelle.”’ St Ange often took Australian tourists to the jail. ‘Some want to see Corby, I say, “Don’t bother her, she busy.”’ Corby, who had once aspired to open a beauty salon at the jail, passed time doing handicraft such as jewellery, beading and painting, rarely venturing outside her cell.
The campaigning for Corby’s exoneration, particularly online, was well-drilled and intense: those who challenged her innocence could expect swift and fierce rebuttal. She was even compared to Lindy Chamberlain – eventually exonerated in the case of her daughter Azaria’s death – who wrote to Corby in 2005, commiserating about her guilty verdict and declaring, ‘My heart bleeds for you.’
When Patrick Scott, a New Zealand expat, met Corby in 2007 during a Rotary visit to improve sanitation in Block W, Mercedes – whom Scott didn’t know – phoned to ask if he believed Corby was innocent or guilty. ‘I said, “I don’t know,”’ Scott recalled. ‘It was irrelevant to me.’ But Mercedes seemed satisfied. ‘She may well have rung to see if I had another agenda, if I was going to go to the papers,’ he told me. He was ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the encounter. ‘[Corby] was caring of the other female inmates. She looked well groomed, clean and well dressed. I liked her personality.’ If she was depressed, it wasn’t obvious to him. ‘She was bright, she was very together. I thought she was brave.’
After Corby’s hospitalisations for depression, her family arranged, with the backing of New Idea, for an assessment by psychiatrist Jonathan Phillips. In August 2009 the former president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists warned that Corby’s mental health was very fragile and likely to get worse, and urged that she be transferred as a prisoner to Australia and be hospitalised. The effect was explosive in Australia, with then prime minister Kevin Rudd coming under pressure to somehow arrange her repatriation.
But Kerobokan guards were sceptical, according to Bali psychiatrist Lely Setyawati. ‘I would not say she was insane,’ Lely told me. However, after a consultation sixteen months previously, she said Corby had suffered ‘mixed schizophrenia and affective disorders or bipolar disorder’ and might be unable to cope in the glare of public and media attention outside jail. ‘It will not magically dissolve.’
During parole preparations, I also spoke to Sanglah Hospital psychiatrist Sri Diniari, who diagnosed Corby with mild depression and said she was not psychotic. ‘She has normal behaviour … but she is irritable,’ Diniari told me.
Corby’s sentence reduction triggered a barrage of local condemnation. GRANAT, the National Movement Against Narcotics, tried to overturn the clemency grant, and at least one Indonesian MP accused the Yudhoyono administration of doing a secret deal with Australia. What further raised Indonesian eyebrows was that in obtaining presidential clemency, Corby hadn’t conceded guilt for the crime in her parole application, though the law demands this along with ‘justice collaboration’ – implicating others involved in the crime. This apparent partiality didn’t apply to Corby because the law hadn’t been in place when she was convicted, said Justice Minister Amir Syamsuddin at the time.
The balance of Australian public opinion about Corby’s guilt shifted against her across time, though the overwhelming view was that she had done enough prison time. There are still those who found it galling she’d attained a form of celebrity-through-suffering, and there were rumours that some members of the Corby family had benefited financially from her crime and punishment (rumours which were denied by her family). Paula Gillham told me disdainfully, ‘She and her family give the rest of the Australians here [in Bali] such a bad name. I’m not against her getting out early, but I am against the family benefiting from her crime.’
Succeeding Corby’s prison governor Siswanto was Ngurah Gusti Wiratna, whom I interviewed at his Denpasar restaurant in December 2013. Before he retired the previous month, he approved her application to seek parole.
Wiratna found her initially difficult and introverted. But her attitude and behaviour improved ‘after I opened communications. I advised her to be more patient and pray, she became more communicative and not that exclusive. I was thinking maybe it’s because she hopes for processing of her parole, so she is changed, but we cannot have bad thought like that.’
Wiratna had been appointed to Kerobokan in February 2012, after rioting inmates burnt down a large section of the severely overcrowded prison: built for three hundred inmates, it was then holding more than a thousand. He described Corby as essentially a ‘good person’, careful in her friendships and traumatised by fear of media intrusion.
Dubbed ‘ganja queen’ by the Indonesian media, as the celebrity prisoner walked free on parole, speculation over her guilt or innocence was no less impassioned than when she was arrested.
But as the parole process edged forward, Corby was on tenterhooks, especially during negative jail incidents such as the detection of a drugs party in the women’s block a few months previously in 2013.
‘She [Corby] is afraid to get her hopes up,’ a jail insider told me. ‘She’s nervous. She says, “Until I walk out of here I don’t believe it will happen.”’
A soap opera from the start, her journey was also an extraordinary political saga that strained bilateral relations between Australia and Indonesia. Parole left Corby anchored to the island of her arrest for three years, free to roam in a Truman Show-like setting. Local media snapped her swimming, running, larking with boyfriend Ben Panangian (a former inmate she’d met in jail), eating and attending monthly parole check-ups. When she gained weight, it was assumed she was pregnant. But she wasn’t – and she blamed the weight gain on the heckling media. How could she exercise outdoors in private?
On 27 May 2017, she was deported, again drawing frenzied media packs – in which I was knocked to the ground but suffered only shock. The public appetite is not what it was but she has a large social media following. She lives with her mother Rosleigh Rose on the Gold Coast, regularly posting Instagram updates of herself. At the time of writing, the then 42-year-old had no job and was giving a series of Australian media interviews to promote her updated autobiography first published in 2006.
Most importantly, her departure from Indonesia eased pressure on bilateral relations.
17
POSTER BOY
‘Some people get human rights, some people die. It depends on how much money you have, right.’
— Scott Rush, Bali Nine courier
Amid the roar and kerfuffle of the Schapelle Corby media circus, Scott Rush, a despondent figure, was one of the forgotten Australian inmates in Bali. Suspended in the shadows of the convicted trafficker’s spotlight, he was particularly alone. Isolated in Karangasem jail, in remote east Bali at his request, he was at the end of his tether after enduring a prison hell for almost a decade. He frequently spoke to me about death as his only way out.
Since 2006, I had interviewed most of the Bali Nine gang. Rush I’d spoken with countless times, sometimes by phone but usually at Kerobokan jail. He had quietly slipped away from the prison amid the Corby commotion before her release on parole. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I was going, no one knew, not even the rest of the Bali Nine,’ he said with a vague smile.
It was my first visit to the bucolic jail. Three hours from the southern hub, it appeared from the outside more serene retreat than dystopian penitentiary. Leaning in to the thick iron bars separating us in the visiting area, Rush eagerly consumed details of Corby’s release. He seemed to harbour no malice, rather surprise over the furore she’d sparked regarding an alleged A$2 million tell-all TV interview – and to hear she was ensconced in a luxury villa. Eyes bulging, he craved minutiae of a sumptuousness he may never know. He wasn’t jealous, though he conceded that plenty of Australian inmates would be. ‘Good on her,’ he said. ‘She’s lost ten years of her life – she should be compensated. We should all get compensation when we get out.’
