The title might refer to terror attacks in the Indonesian capital, but the genesis of Grant Dooley’s memoir, ’Bomb Season in Jakarta’, is another more personal attack that the Williamstown born former diplomat suffered.
“I had a big panic attack in 2019,” said Dooley, who has also been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“One way to deal with it, suggested by the counsellor, was to journalise my experiences because I couldn’t talk about them.”
And journalise Dooley did, a process which not only helped his mental health, but resulted in author being added to diplomat, financier, linguist, sailor and Williamstown Football Club committee member on a long and impressive resume.
However it’s Dooley’s time as a diplomat at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta that forms the basis of the book and from where it gets its name.
Dooley moved to the Indonesian capital in 2004 after his wife, also a diplomat, got posted there.
At the time, Indonesia was in the midst of a wave of terror attacks carried out by Islamic extremists, including the bombing of Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel year earlier and most infamously, the Bali bombings in 2002.
After securing work at the Australian Embassy himself, Dooley was taking a break from language training when the terrorists struck again.
“It was a truck bomb that killed 11 people,” said Dooley of the attack on the Australian Embassy on September 9, 2004.
That it occurred at the same time of year as the previous bombings became a source of black humour for embassy staff.
“They were all in August, September and October so we’d ask each other what we’re doing for bomb season.”
While it became the title of his book, the bombings only formed a small part of the “shit” that Dooley experienced and which resulted in him writing it.
In fact the embassy bombing was just the start.
“We had the bombing, the (Boxing Day) tsunami, the plane crash in Yogyakarta that killed five Australians,” recalled Dooley of the plane full of Australian diplomats and journalists trailing then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, which crashed in March 2007.
Dooley was supposed to be on board but changed his flight the day before. His friend who took his seat was killed.
Then there was a riot out the front of the embassy that he and his colleagues got caught up in and the discovery of a website identifying the best places to assassinate Australian diplomats.
“It was like the frog in boiling water, we thought we were coping and we weren’t,” said Dooley of the cumulative effect of these experiences which finally caught up with him years later.
As well as a coping mechanism, Dooley said he wrote the book to change the perception of Australian diplomats representing the country overseas.
“It’s not all canapes and champagne,” he said of working for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Dooley joined the diplomatic ranks from the Navy, where he worked as a linguist, having joined as a 16 year old fresh out of Williamstown’s Paisley High School.
These days he’s living back in Melbourne working in finance, having left diplomacy more than a decade ago.
He still comes back to Williamstown to watch the Seagulls (his sister Meredith is the president), sail at the Hobsons Bay Yacht Club and visit his elderly mother.
Bomb Season in Jakarta is out now through Affirm Press.
