Corby will find it hard to avoid the spotlight
DENPASAR Locked up in a fetid, rat-infested jail cell in Bali, Schapelle Corby would fantasise about feeling angry about the price of petrol or bananas in Australia.
‘‘I want daily life responsibility, normal life problems,’’ Corby says in My Story, her 2006 memoir co-written with Kathryn Bonella.
Now 39, Corby has spent the last three years on parole in Bali after serving almost 10 years of her original 20-year jail sentence inside the resort island’s notorious Kerobokan prison.
She pictured herself on a ‘‘cosy couch’’, watching a pub-size flat screen TV, or cooking in her kitchen. There would be a big bedroom – which ‘‘with any luck’’ would turn into a parents’ retreat – a vegetable garden, an in-ground swimming pool, and a granny flat for her dad.
But Corby, who was arrested at Bali’s international airport with 4.2 kilograms of cannabis in her boogie board bag in 2004, wrote that the mere thought of getting on a plane made her hands tremble and her eyes fill with tears. ‘‘I’ve got such an acute fear of flying that I’m pretty sure that when I do finally go home, I’ll be sailing back.’’
Fast-forward 11 years, and there will be no granny flat for Corby’s father, Michael, who died of cancer two years after My Story was published.
And Corby won’t be sailing back. But the woman dubbed either the Ganja Queen or ‘‘Our Schapelle’’, depending on whether you read the Indonesian or Australian media, will finally be coming home on May 27.
Celebrity agent Max Markson believes public demand for Corby stories is undimmed. She will be photographed and filmed leaving Bali – and arriving in Australia – but that will not diminish the appetite for a tearful tell-all.
‘‘After that, there will be all the milestones,’’ Markson says. ‘‘Her first Christmas home, her first birthday, her first holiday: people will be interested.’’
If Corby was not limited by proceeds of crimes laws, Markson estimates that she would earn ‘‘hundreds of thousands’’ through media and sponsorship deals.
Corby has lived quietly since her release from jail, abiding by her parole conditions. She’s been largely left alone, apart from paparazzi shots of her – more voluptuous than in her prison days – running along the beach.
But as the days tick down to her deportation, Corby is once again a prisoner. This time it’s in her own home, as the media swarms around the modest villa down a Kuta lane that she lives in with her brother Michael and boyfriend Ben Panangian.
When the Gold Coast beauty student was arrested in 2004, polls showed Australians overwhelmingly believed her to be innocent, a victim of corrupt baggage holders who planted the cannabis. Her guilty verdict, broadcast live on channels Nine and Seven, averaged 766,000 viewers in the five major state capitals alone – three times the normal daytime audience.
Tourists began to have their suitcases cling-wrapped at airports. There were ‘‘Free Schapelle’’ T-shirts and bumper FAIRFAX stickers. Australians called for a boycott of Bali, and for Indonesia to hand back tsunami aid money.
‘‘This was one of the first really big cases where an Australian woman was facing serious punishment over major drugs charges,’’ says Tim Lindsey, director of the Centre for REUTERS FAIRFAX Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at Melbourne University.
‘‘It was of particular interest because it transformed the image of Bali from the standard idyllic holiday location. It played into really dark, deep racist expressions of white Australians abroad.’’ He recalls talkback show host Malcolm T Elliott comparing the trial judges to monkeys.
‘‘It was like a national emergency . . . I thought it was a complete overreaction,’’ recalls Matthew Moore, then Fairfax Media’s Indonesia correspondent. At the time, the Australian government was under siege for ‘‘not doing enough’’ to help Corby.
The name Schapelle didn’t exist before Corby’s mother, Rosleigh Rose, made it up while giving birth. ‘‘She heard a French woman in the next bed saying, ‘Schapelle, Schapelle’. Between contractions, Mum thought ‘Mmmm, that’s a nice name’,’’ Corby recounts in My Story. But by 2005, ‘‘schappelled’’ was a verb, meaning, according to the Urban Dictionary, ‘‘to be screwed over – brutally’’.
Fiona Connolly, editor of Woman’s Day magazine, says Corby remains fascinating to her readers more than a decade later. This week’s edition features an interview with Corby’s fiercely protective sister, Mercedes. The article claims Corby has made a new life for herself and is ‘‘heartbroken’’ at the idea of leaving Bali, her boyfriend, and her dogs Luna and May.
‘‘I was the first person to put Schapelle on a magazine cover,’’ Connolly says. ‘‘ My publisher said, ‘Are you joking me?’. But that issue sold its socks off. She’s a profitable cover star.’’
How to make sense of the Corby phenomenon?
‘‘To be really blunt about it – this sounds very sexist – a pretty girl, a highly emotional family, who really played it up to the media,’’ says Ross Taylor from the Perth-based Indonesia Institute.
Corby was undoubtedly telegenic, with her haunted blue eyes behind the prison bars beseeching Australia to help her.
By 2014, only 19 per cent of Australians thought Corby was innocent, according to a poll by UMR Research. These include a band of zealous online activists, who believe the Australian government covered up Corby’s innocence to protect Australia’s relationship with Indonesia.
The woman in the eye of the storm remains an enigma. One of the conditions of her parole is not to speak to the media. She also has an acute phobia of photographers and cameras.
‘‘We don’t talk about what will happen when Schapelle is finally home,’’ Mercedes Corby told Woman’s Day.
Schapelle Corby repeated often in My Story that she yearned for a child: ‘‘It is life’s most precious gift and I don’t want to miss my chance.’’
‘‘I’m not sure about me when I do go home,’’ she wrote back in 2006. ‘‘Will I still be me, Schapelle, with a little side-effect of trauma from the Kerobokan experience that will subside within a few months of normalness, or me, Schapelle, scared, non-trusting, tearful, institutionalised?" Fairfax