When “Uncle Ray-Ray” returns to Banda Aceh

When Ray Martin returned to Banda Aceh province in western Indonesia it was under much different circumstances to his first visit in 2004 when the region had been devastated by the 2004 tsunami.

Hosting A Current Affair at the time, he was one of several Australian broadcasters bringing the tragedy into living rooms. At the time Nine, Seven and 10 networks combined together for a joint telethon, helping to raise $235m.

Two decades later on he returns to the region to see first hand the recovery in a new documentary, Tsunami: 20 Years On. What he discovers is gob-smacking transformation.

“It’s the resilience of human beings. It’s extraordinary. If you had been asleep for 20 years and you went to Banda Aceh, you wouldn’t realise that this had been an area where, like, 10 atomic bombs had gone off and devastated it beyond belief,” he tells TV Tonight.

“Yet here it is now functioning. Families go to lunch, women drive by on motorbikes with their heads scarves on and wave and smile at you as you take their photographs. You think, ‘Wow, is this where the greatest natural tragedy in recent history happened?’ Yes it is.”

Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand were amongst nations hardest hit when 230,000 people were killed and 1.7m were displaced from their homes.

Australia’s closest neighbour was so hard hit, the federal government donated $1b to help rebuild. According to Martin, they’ve done just that.

“They’ve built the highways, roads, schools and electricity system. I don’t know if it was because of the Islamic side, but it wasn’t boastful, it wasn’t garish, it wasn’t loud. What they’ve done is fairly respectful, almost like they’re aware that they lost a generation here 20 years ago,” he explains.

“It’s not the glass and glitter that you get in Jakarta or so much of the Middle East and Asia. Whether that’s all part of Islamic culture ….or whether it is out of respect for what was left there…

“People go by in small cars rather than flash cars. People go by and motorbikes or scooters. I was just impressed in 20 years that mother nature in an equatorial place like that, things grow quickly. Trees and bushes and flowers and gardens grow quicker than I expected they would. I should have known. But if you’d have been asleep for 20 years, you wouldn’t have realised that this was the site of the worst natural disaster in modern history.”

It was a much different scene two decades ago when the Nine crew were sent to Banda Aceh, not knowing what they would face upon arrival.

There was no infrastructure, dead bodies were rotting, floating, disease was a risk, next to no English was spoken and the tragedy was inescapable.

“I’ve done war zones, natural disasters, volcanoes, civil wars and droughts and floods, especially in Bangladesh or India, where floods can kill 20,000 people. I’m too young to have been at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, but to read the scientists talk about this impact of Mother Nature 10 times at Hiroshima is hard to believe and hard to fathom,” he recalls.

“When we were going up there with we had about 18 people there, from Nine, ABC and Seven had the same sort of numbers. We were staying in a half-finished house, sleeping on the floor on mats. That family we interviewed were trying to feed us. I’d said to the crew going up, ‘Look, this is probably the worst thing we’ll ever see in our lives, worse than a war and we’ve got to look after each other,’ which is what we did.

“We just told black jokes in terrible situations you wouldn’t want to repeat later, just to keep our sanity, because you’re surrounded by 300 bodies in body bags in a football field… clearly babies and children as well as adults.”

Martin recalls speaking to a trauma-shocked father, riding a bike endlessly with his two small boys, in search of his wife and daughter.

“It’s easy to film devastation on a landscape, but how do you film devastation in people’s hearts and souls?  I thought he was a good example of that. Clearly he was extremely traumatised, he was in this strange state. When you want to see what the real impact is, it’s not in buildings and boats that are devastated, but in people that are devastated.”

Amazingly, in the new documentary he re-meets the same man, now with two grown sons. What happened next he did not expect.

“There’s this woman there, and I thought it had to be his second wife, and a daughter from probably a previous marriage. Then suddenly, half way through the interview, the penny dropped. I thought, ‘Hang on, this is the wife. How did this happen?'” he asks.

“Three and a half million Australians watched it that night … this poor man has lost his wife and daughter. Four hours later they were reunited. They just they came into the village, and they’d been holed up somewhere else and weren’t able to get across because the bridges had been knocked down. But they turned up and I didn’t know that.

“When we walked out of there, it really did make me tear up, because I thought, ‘This is just the stuff of romantic novels. In the real world this doesn’t happen.’

“As an old journalist you dream of those but they don’t happen.”

The documentary by JAM TV also features Alison Thompson, the Australian humanitarian who dedicated a year to rebuilding a tsunami-devastated community in Sri Lanka; Dr. Alyssa Scurrah, who returns to some of Indonesia’s most remote and devastated islands; World Vision CEO Daniel Wordsworth reflecting on Australia’s generosity and former PM John Howard on Australia’s historic government response.

For Martin, referred to by some locals as “Uncle Ray Ray” one of his strongest memories is the resilience of Indonesians.

“The thing I remember most of all was people smiling at us and wanting to shake hands, and in a couple of cases, simply just crying on my shoulder. People who’d lost their whole family… fishermen who saw strangers and spoke no English, but they just needed to do it. Beyond the crying on the shoulder to sharing their rice with us, they’re extraordinary people,” he observes.

“I can’t help but think, in Gaza and the Ukraine, they’ll probably do the same thing in 20 years time. They’ll rebuild areas, they’ll go to the cemetery and pay homage to family members they’ve lost. But life goes on… we’re extremely extraordinary animals, but in that case they were the best of the best.”

Tsunami: 20 Years On 7pm Sunday on Nine