Out of the Ashes

Healing the scars of the Bali Bombings – An inspirational story of an Australian mother's journey back from hell and the enduring love for her children that gave her the will to wage her own war on terrorism.

On Saturday 12th October 2002, Australian nurses, Therese Fox and Bronwyn Cartwright's idyllic holiday descended into their worst nightmare when they unwittingly found themselves in the midst of a callously orchestrated terrorist attack on two popular Balinese tourist nightspots which claimed the lives of 202 innocent holiday-makers and maimed and injured hundreds more.

Tragically, while Bronwyn, 28, perished in the deadly bomb blast which ripped through Paddy's Irish Bar in the party precinct of Kuta, her good friend Therese, 29, crawled out of the carnage with such horrific burns that doctors believed she would not survive the flight home, and she was left on the tarmac at Denpasar Airport to die.

Fortunately, the single mum's anguished pleas to be reunited with her children prompted a last-minute change of heart and on the urgings of a Balinese nurse, she was airlifted onto the last plane back to Darwin.

Back in Australia she was resuscitated and flown to Sydney's Concord Hospital where burns specialists performed emergency surgery to remove debris and shrapnel from third degree burns covering 90 per cent of her body.

Therese spent the next twelve months defying such odds that hospital staff nicknamed her ‘The Miracle of Bali.'

Now, twenty years after the Al-Qaeda-linked attacks, award-winning journalist and author, Megan Norris, follows the agonising road back to recovery and looks beyond the suffering and life-saving surgeries at the extraordinary courage of an ordinary suburban Aussie mum whose love for her kids has helped heal her scars and given her back her life.