‘Disappointed’: Plans for Sari Club lot, where Australians were murdered, charge forward in secret

What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Greetings.

It is said that Australia’s consul-general in Bali is delighted at the local government’s rapidly moving plans to fix the long-derelict site of the old Sari Club, a place of mass murder and mourning.

Not quite so enthusiastic are the survivors of the 2002 Bali bombing and the families of those killed.

Badung Regency, which encompasses Kuta, has kept them in the dark about a “peace museum” – a change of language on “peace park”.

The idea for a long time has been to turn the site where scores of Australians died into something appropriate. Not a memorial as such, for that already exists, but a place of tranquillity and quiet reflection, hence the decades-long push for a peace park.

But what exactly is the council doing?

That’s unclear.

“We were at a presentation of an elaborate development proposal when they [Badung Regency] first bought the site, but they have gone away from that to a smaller design that we haven’t seen,” Keith Pearce, from the Australia-based Bali Memorial Association, says.

“If they stick with the concept they shared with us, there will be a peace park component, as well as a museum to tell the story of the monument [inaugurated in 2004] across the road.”

The full designs have not been made public, but the regency said in a statement that the museum would house documents, dioramas and an auditorium. The front would have a courtyard and a “garden”. A library would be at the back.

This masthead understands the original architect, who only last year was primed to get going on the peace park project, has withdrawn his services.

“I am quite disappointed that none of us were ever contacted about the changes,” says Thiolina Marpaung, a survivor of the 2002 attacks that killed 202 people, 88 Australians among them.

“We don’t know why the proposal made in 2023 with the current bupati [regency head] of Badung was abandoned.

“At the time, we sat and talked, and it was agreed that the Badung government would pay for the land, and the Australian government would build it and later grant it to the Badung government.”

The Australian government is no longer being asked to contribute a cent. It would not say why.

Thiolina, the head of an Indonesian victims and families group, says she has still not seen the new plans.

Australian governments have previously had millions of dollars on the table for the purchase of the land and construction of … something. Progress, however, has been stymied by the owners’ price tag and their desire to be compensated for all the years they’ve refrained from building something else.

Everything looked rosy when the regency broke the impasse and bought the land late in 2024 for $6 million, far less than the owners’ previous demands. There was even talk of construction beginning in 2025.

Australian consul-general in Bali, Jo Stevens, met with the local government on January 8 to discuss the project, and, according to the regency’s press release, she “expressed her delight and welcomed the peace museum’s development plan”.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade media team said Stevens did welcome the plans to develop the Sari Club site into “an appropriate place of reflection and remembrance”.

Dallas Finn, one of the earliest proponents of developing the Sari lot into a serene setting, says he has been told the plans for the museum make no provision for a park. If true, it will be a “deeply disappointing outcome”, he says.

“I hope the bupati of Badung Regency government has factored in a place for families to come back and reflect and to pay their respects,” he says.

One of the concerns is whether the local government will have enough money to do the job properly, especially after forking out millions for the land. An upcoming Treasury meeting in Denpasar is expected to reveal the budget.

For now, the site remains neglected and dirty, though in better condition than the same time last year. At least there’s a fence there now to keep out the drunks.

The Badung Regency was contacted for comment.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.