Australians reacted with horrified disbelief yesterday as news of the bombing in Bali sunk in. Pádraig Collins reports from Sydney.
Prime Minister John Howard was visibly shaken when he told a press conference that, "The indiscriminate, brutal and despicable way in which lives have been taken away ... by an act of barbarity will, I know, deeply shock all Australians." Bali is to Australians what Majorca is to Irish people in the sheer numbers who favour it as a holiday destination.
Around 400,000 Australians visit the Indonesian island each year. This time of year is particularly popular, and approximately 20,000 are there now.
Many Australian sports teams, both amateur and professional, are in Bali at the moment, celebrating the end of the Australian Rules and rugby seasons.
At least 10 sports players are missing. Seven members of the Kingsley Football club of Western Australia and three members of the Forbes Rugby Union Club, from New South Wales, are missing after both teams were at the Sari Club on Saturday night.
Members of professional Australian Rules teams from Melbourne, some of whose colleagues are in Ireland for the International Rules series at the moment, were also in the nightclub at the time of the explosion.
Sydney resident Ms Nicky Johnson, who was in Bali on holiday a few months ago, told The Irish Times last night of her shock at the bombing. "I'm pretty shaken up by what's happened, Bali is a very peaceful place," she said.
"I've been there three times and I never felt that there was any animosity towards Australians. The Balinese are very friendly, open people. This is a tragedy for them because I don't think they have any concept of terrorism in other parts of the world.
"Communication is very limited there. It is hard enough to make a phone call from one end of the island to the other, never mind get news from outside the island," she said.
Ms Johnson, like many others who have visited the island, knows the Kuta Beach area well. "I've been to that nightclub, the Sari. It's very popular with Westerners - Australians, New Zealanders, Germans. Two friends of mine are on their honeymoon there at the moment. I was at their wedding two weeks ago.
"We were very worried about them because we knew that that was the kind of place they could have been in, but we got a message that they were fine. They were going to go to the Sari last night but they were too tired and didn't," she said.
Ms Johnson is wary of returning to Bali. "It would make me think twice about going there again. I think this will have a major impact on the tourist numbers going there. It could destroy tourism there."
"The people are mostly Hindu and they believe that tourism is their lifeline, that tourism is goodwill and fortune sent to them by the gods," said Ms Johnson.
She believes that the bomb was deliberately aimed at Australian tourists. "I think, with our proximity to Indonesia, that Australia was being sent a message. It was not aimed at Americans because you do not see a lot of Americans there.
"It will take the Balinese people a long time to recover from this and it will take their tourist industry a long time to recover from it," she said.
Another Sydney resident, Ms Cathy O'Callaghan, has been to both Bali and mainland Indonesia. "The culture is quite different. This comes down to religion and also money. Jakarta, for instance, is much poorer that Bali.
"I don't want to be clichéd, but the Balinese people are lovely. I got the impression that the economy is really dependent on tourism though. This will hit the industry hard.
"I think that people will be afraid to go there for a while now. It would put me off going there for a couple of years anyway," she said.
The Dutch annexed the northern part of Bali in 1882.
In 1906, they attacked the capital, Denpasar, massacred around 3,600 Balinese and captured the whole island.
During the second World War, Bali was occupied by the Japanese. After the war, a battle was fought between Dutch troops and Indonesian revolutionary forces, resulting in the island becoming part of the Republic of Indonesia in 1950.
Today it is the only remaining stronghold of Hinduism in the Indonesian archipelago.