There are places in the world that carry unbearable weight for those left behind. For the family of Zivan Radmanovic, a Melbourne man shot dead in Bali, the Indonesian island is now one of them. His son has returned to that place, and in doing so, has shared a letter so raw and personal that it has stopped many Australians in their tracks.
The letter, shared publicly, speaks directly to a father who never had the chance to say farewell. "We never got to say goodbye," the son wrote, "but I imagine that, as you lay on that bathroom floor fighting for your life, you were thinking of us."
Radmanovic was shot dead in Bali in circumstances that sent shockwaves through the Australian community, both at home and among the tens of thousands of Australians who travel to Indonesia each year. His death was a violent rupture in what, for most visitors, is a place of warmth and escape.
The decision to return to the scene of such trauma is not one most people could make. Grief counsellors and psychologists who work with bereaved families often note that returning to a site of sudden, violent loss can be part of the healing process for some, while being retraumatising for others. For this young man, the journey appears to have been an act of love as much as mourning.
The letter describes a son's grief with a specificity that no public statement could manufacture. It is addressed to a father, not to an audience. That distinction matters. It speaks to a relationship, to shared history, to the particular silence that follows when someone is taken without warning and without the chance for final words.
Australians travelling to Indonesia are advised by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to exercise normal safety precautions, and Bali remains one of the most visited destinations for Australian tourists. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade regularly updates its travel advisories, and consular support is available to Australians in distress overseas. The Radmanovic case is a reminder that those services, and the families who rely on them in the worst moments, deserve ongoing government attention and resources.
For the family, the legal and consular dimensions of what happened will continue to unfold. But the letter the son shared exists outside all of that. It is a private act made public, a son speaking to his father across an absence that will never close.
"You were thinking of us." That line carries an enormous amount. It is not accusation or bitterness. It is an attempt, by a grieving child, to reconstruct the last interior moments of a man he loved, and to find some comfort in the idea that love was the final thing present in that room.
Sudden deaths abroad create a particular kind of grief for Australian families. The distance compounds the trauma. The logistics of repatriation, the foreign legal system, the impossibility of being present in the immediate aftermath: all of it strips families of the rituals that normally help people absorb loss. The Australian Federal Police and consular officials work to support families in these situations, but no institutional response can fill the space left by a father who did not come home.
What this young man has done, in returning and in writing, is assert that his father's life mattered and that his absence is being felt fully, without evasion. That is not a small thing. It is, in its own way, a form of accountability: a refusal to let violent death be processed quietly and forgotten.
Grief this public invites respect. It also invites Australians to think seriously about what support structures exist for families navigating loss overseas, and whether those structures are adequate. The answer, for too many families, is that they are not. That is a policy reality worth facing, even in the middle of someone else's sorrow.