Unholy Wars: Media Representations of the First Bali Bombings and Their Aftermath

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the Indonesian tourist island of Bali has been appropriated into the Australian national imaginary. For Australians, Bali has become a neighbourhood playground and psycho-cultural land-bridge to Indonesia and the Asian region. With the emergence of a global ‘war on terror’, Bali has also become a primary battleground, dividing the symbolic claims of the Islamist militants against the Western economic and hedonistic empire. This divide becomes crystallised in the Australian news reporting of the Islamist attacks in Bali of 2002 and 2005. Our research has found a common frame of reference in the reporting of the attacks, most particularly as Australian journalists’ reference to a sense of national history, the ‘9/11 wars’ and Australia's adherence to US foreign policy and cultural hegemony. News reporting tended to subsume the details of ‘Islam’ and Islamic grievance within a more xenophobic rendering of Australian identity and an apocalyptic vision of good and evil.