It’s Saturday evening in the small coastal town of Ulladulla, about 200km south of Sydney, and outside a large two-storey building on the edge of town, bordered by Bunnings on one side and bush on the other, the rapid-fire tempos and electric guitar riffs of pop-punk are pulsating out into an otherwise quiet night. Trees in the parking lot are catching flickers of purple from a strobe light coming through the glass balcony on the second floor.
Inside, in a vast auditorium, Australian punk band Bodyjar is playing before a crowd that skews male, late 30s, with a strong surfer aesthetic – fans who would have been teenage groms when Bodyjar was at its zenith from the mid-90s to mid-2000s.
Mid set, the lead singer stops and peers into the crowd. “Where’s Gayle? Has anyone seen Gayle?” he says. “Gayle, if you’re out there, this song’s for you.”
Gayle Dunn is the woman responsible for the existence of this building, named the Dunn Lewis Centre, in memory of her son, Craig Dunn, 18, and his friend Danny Lewis, 19, who were killed along with 200 others in the Islamist terrorist bombing attacks on the nightclub district of Kuta, Bali, on 12 October 2002.
Back then, there was nothing here but bush. Now, there’s the auditorium, a gymnastics facility, climbing wall, tenpin bowling alley, art gallery, cafe and multiple meeting rooms. Thousands of people – mostly from the local community – have cycled through its doors: teenagers disengaged from school doing alternative education and training programs; bowlers with a disability; artists, volunteers and school groups. In an area used to scraping by with not many services, it’s positively grand.
The Bodyjar gig is kicking off 12 days of consecutive events at the Dunn Lewis Centre, leading up to 12 October – the 20th anniversary of the Bali bombings.
Dunn invited them to play because they were “the boys’” – as she refers to Craig and Danny – favourite band. Many in the crowd were mates of the boys and some are here with their children: young ones on shoulders, ear-protecting headphones on, and teenagers slamming into their first ever mosh pit.
The song is One in a Million, released just a few months before the boys left for Bali. When it’s finished, Dunn – who is 63, with long blond hair streaked with silver and tied back in a ponytail, and wearing a plain black jumper, jeans and a pair of runners – appears at the side of the stage. There’s been a surf competition during the day and she gives the winner his prize, nods towards the crowd, then quickly darts off stage and disappears again.
Dunn mostly raised Craig and his two siblings as a single mum. She’d left school at 15 and did piecework, sewing in factories in Sydney, before moving to Ulladulla and marrying a fisherman: going to sea, gutting sea urchins and sewing fishing nets. She stopped going out in the boat regularly when the kids were young, though still put them to sleep in the car sometimes on the edge of a lagoon so she could catch prawns to sell – coins going into a jar for Christmas presents – and when they were at school she sewed upholstery.
Craig, the eldest, always had his friends around. Every summer Dunn would take a tribe of kids camping by a river for six weeks. “Rules were: pyjamas were never allowed to get wet,” she says. “Bedding and tents had to be done before dark and everyone had chores. Other than that, there weren’t many more rules and we always sat by the fire at night. It was good fun.”
While they “never had any money”, Dunn often picked up second-hand boats, water-skis, canoes, and snow and camping gear – fixing them up and making do. “We went to the snow every year without fail. We had everything we wanted. Even though it never cost us anything, we still had it all.”
The trip to Bali was the first time Craig went overseas and his first holiday without his family. Dunn helped him open a bank account, organise a passport and booked him in for his vaccinations. Craig, Danny and a third friend (who survived) planned a 17-day surfing trip. The night they entered the Sari Club, when the car bomb exploded outside, was day one.
Afterwards, the boys’ mates back home organised a fundraiser – a dance party – and turned up at Dunn’s house with a cheque for $10,000. But she didn’t want the money. “To me, it did nothing,” she says. “I asked them what they wanted, and they said, ‘a memorial but not of stone’. So that’s how it started.”
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The first summer after Craig died, Dunn went camping with friends and started working on the vision of a place for people to get services, for young people to hang out. “We just wrote pages and pages of scribble,” she says. She organised a town meeting, gathered a coalition of supporters, set up a foundation to raise money, paid for a lease on a patch of crown land and by the first anniversary was turning the first sod on the site of the Dunn Lewis Centre.
Construction stalled when earthworks chewed up the first round of money and for three or four years “we just had a few things poking out of the ground”, Dunn says. She chased government grants and private donors. The first stage of the building opened in 2010; the second in 2020.
Dunn oversaw construction – sourcing contractors, getting quotes and project managing the build. “I was the ‘pain in the arse’ on the build,” she jokes. “I’m not a person that does strategic plans. They’re not my thing. People come in and they use all these big long words. I go, ‘just talk to me in English. It either is or it isn’t’.” Someone set up a spreadsheet for her on the computer – the budget for the second stage alone was $4m – but she preferred to work in longhand, putting the entire budget in a notebook. (Her trick: “I always took the naughts off.”)
To get the project funded, Dunn had to network: with politicians, business people even celebrities. “It was never my thing, never my choice,” she says, “but you did it. I’d drive to Sydney or Canberra, go to these functions. It was always quite uncomfortable because I always went by myself. I’ve learned a lot along the way because filters, they’re not my thing.”
She recalls being at a corporate breakfast and introducing herself to the then federal treasurer, Joe Hockey, by saying, “I’m Gayle. I’m from Dunn Lewis. And I want to know whether you can give me some money.” While the look on people’s faces taught her she “wasn’t supposed to say that”, she thought: “Well that was the only reason I was there. I wasn’t there to like him, I wanted him to give us money.”
“I’ve never met a woman like her,” says Jo Gash, who was Dunn’s federal MP at the time of the bombings. Gash attended the first town hall meeting for the Dunn Lewis Centre and was a steadfast supporter of the project. “She worked across all political divides. She never lost sight of what she wanted to do. She never wanted glory or kudos. I remember I had to really convince her to come to the Parliament House for the Bali bombings ceremony and she didn’t even want to do that. She didn’t want to be out in public. She’d just wanted to work towards what she wanted to do.”
Untold numbers of young people have had their life trajectories altered inside the Dunn Lewis Centre. Blake Graham, now in his late 20s, was one of the first through the doors when it opened in 2010. He was 16, out of school and unemployed. “I was kind of a person in a shell. I didn’t talk to anybody,” he says.
After he did a Tafe course that was run through the centre, Dunn gave him a job as a technician at the bowling alley, eventually coaxing him into working “front of house”. Today, married with children, he has a career as a technology support officer at the Department of Education. “If I didn’t have that stepping stone from Gayle that allowed me to open up, I honestly don’t know where I’d be now,” Graham says.
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Grief is not something that disappears and Dunn is not expecting the upcoming anniversary of Craig’s death to be any easier or harder than the past 20 years. “About the same,” she says. “It doesn’t go away. But I’ll be busy. Keep busy and it’s OK. As you get older, I think different things trigger you to what it did when you were younger. But I never put myself in that position usually, where something’s going to trigger me.”
Over the years, she’s learned how to quietly slip away from certain events and conversations. She draws solace from the fact she has “no regrets” about Craig’s childhood and her choice to prioritise time with her kids above all else.
Other than the company of friends and camping – “camping does wonders for people” – Dunn never sought out any formal mental health support to deal with the loss of her son. “Maybe I should have,” she says. “But if I did that, I might not have done this” – by which she means building the Dunn Lewis Centre.
When it was closed during the Covid lockdowns, Dunn – who, along with her daughter Karlee, manages the centre – still went in every day. Karlee and her young children came too. Over lockdown Dunn set up tents for her grandkids inside and a spit to cook meat out the back, and played at camping. Inside the centre, Dunn says, she “feels like the boys are around all the time”.
I ask Dunn if she ever sits back and thinks, “Wow, I’ve actually been a part of creating something pretty amazing for this community”.
“Yeah, no,” she answers. “It’s not finished.”
“But it’s pretty amazing,” I say.
“Well, we’re not finished yet. The car park still has to be extended and we need a green room for bands to play.”
