On April 8, 2005, 19-year-old labourer Scott Rush left Australia for the first time to visit Bali.
The troubled teenager from Brisbane, who had already racked up a string of criminal convictions, had always dreamt of a holiday on Indonesia’s party island, but was broke.
An opportunity presented itself in a local bar when he was offered to go on an all-expenses-paid trip with his school friend Czugaj, then 18, by Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-born Australian, who claimed he had loads of cash but no one to go with.
The offer, which Rush and Czugaj later insisted in court was not made clear until they got to Bali, came with strings attached: they would help smuggle heroin back to Sydney. They would be paid A$10,000 each on delivery, and their families would be killed if they refused.
Rush was arrested at the airport in Denpasar when trying to catch a flight back to Sydney with 1.3kg of the class-A drug strapped to his thighs and back.
Eight other Australians — including Czugaj — were arrested that day as part of a foiled plot to smuggle 8.3kg of heroin into Australia with an estimated street value of about A$4 million.
From left: Scott Rush, Martin Stephens and Renae Lawrence in a district court’s cell awaiting their trial to deliver their final defence plea in Denpasar, Bali, on February 1, 2006
FIRDIA LISNAWATI/AP
Together they would become known as the “Bali Nine”, which has become a byword for Indonesia’s zero-tolerance approach to drugs, and a cautionary tale for the hordes of school-leavers and graduates who flock to the island each year.
The two alleged ringleaders, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in 2015, sparking outcry in Australia, condemnation around the world and a diplomatic crisis between Canberra and Jakarta.
Nguyen, the man who recruited Rush and his friend in the Brisbane bar, died of stomach cancer at the age of just 34 in 2018, while the only woman in the crew, Renae Lawrence, was released the same year and deported to Australia, having served 13 years of a reduced 20-year sentence.
Matthew Norman, one of the Bali Nine still in prison, photographed in 2017
AAP IMAGE/RONI BINTANG/ALAMY
Almost 20 years after being jailed for life, Rush and the other four members of the group who languish in Indonesian jail cells finally look set to follow her back to Australian soil. Aside from Czugaj, the other members are Matthew Norman, Martin Stephens and Si Yi Chen.
Their fate could be determined this week, when Australia’s home affairs minister Tony Burke flies to Jakarta in the hope of finalising a deal with the Indonesian government to transfer them to Australia.
“They are hoping and praying, as I am, that a deal can be done between our prime minister and the Indonesian president,” said Tim Harris, the Bishop of Townsville in Queensland, who was the local Catholic priest in Brisbane when Scott travelled to Bali, and has kept in regular contact with the family.
Christine and Lee Rush speak to their son Scott, 19, after he was arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling in 2005
DIMAS ARDIAN/GETTY IMAGES
The couple leaving court after seeing their son get a life sentence in 2006
FAIRFAX MEDIA/GETTY
Parents Christine and Lee, to whom he spoke last week, have been on tenterhooks since it emerged last month that Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, may be inclined to show more mercy than his predecessor, Joko Widodo.
According to Indonesian ministers, he intends to grant a request from Australia’s Labour prime minister Anthony Albanese — made on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit in Peru in mid-November — to repatriate the Bali Nine members.
Indonesia’s justice minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra told a press conference on Thursday that the aim was to transfer them to jails in Australia before the end of the year, adding that the Indonesian government would respect any decision by the Australian government to release them almost immediately.
“If Australia wants to give remission or pardon, it is entirely up to the Australian government, we will respect it,” he said.
Prabowo Subianto meets Anthony Albanese during a visit to Australia in August
AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS/ALAMY
In return the Australian government would be expected to consider requests to repatriate Indonesians held in its jails.
Bishop Harris said he believed Rush had suffered more than enough. “We have never condoned what Scott or the other members of the Bali Nine did,” he said. “Scott got caught up with the wrong people, full stop.
“He was young and made a terrible, terrible mistake.”
But not everyone is quite so forgiving.
The Bali Nine (Clockwise from top left): Myuran Sukumaran, Martin Stephens, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Scott Rush, Renae Lawrence, Andrew Chan, Matthew Norman, Si-Yi Chen and Michael Czugaj
Western Australian senator Michaelia Cash, the opposition coalition’s shadow attorney-general, has questioned whether the Labour government should be repatriating convicted heroin traffickers.
Those with more sympathy to the plight of the Bali Nine have highlighted the controversial role played by the Australian Federal Police, which put them at risk of being executed in the first place by tipping off their Indonesian counterparts about the drugs plot rather than arresting them in Australia.
One of the biggest twists of the Bali Nine saga was that Scott Rush’s father, Lee, unwittingly played a major part in landing his own son in an Indonesian prison.
On learning of his son’s travel plans, Lee immediately suspected he was being recruited as a drug runner, largely because he had no money. He alerted police through his barrister, hoping they would intercept him and others in Australia before they travelled to Indonesia.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were killed by firing squad in 2015
FIRDIA LISNAWATI/AP
The barrister who relayed Lee Rush’s concerns to police would later accuse the force of having “blood on its hands”.
The Australian Federal Police has maintained it bears no responsibility for the execution of Chan and Sukumaran, explaining that it was aware of the drugs plot before being tipped off by Scott’s father, but did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone before they left Australia.
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