Forgotten Bombs: The Other Bali Bombings

January 4, 2026·59 min·5 clips

Joe heard the loudest bang of his life, then found himself face down in the sand, thinking his legs were on fire.

Bali had already been marked by horror. The 2002 attacks killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, but within three years tourism had mostly returned. That return matters. A group of Newcastle teenagers wanted to travel together, and many of their parents came too rather than send them alone. More than 40 made the trip. On October 1, many went to Jimbaran Bay for dinner on the beach. Then three more bombs went off. Joe Frost was one of the teenagers there, and he later made a podcast called Forgotten Bombs, Bali 2005. His account starts in confusion. He remembers moving along the sand with Dean, trying to work out where everyone had gone after the blast. The map in his head got brutally simple. South led nowhere, north seemed possible, and the car park held a tense crowd shouting in a language he did not understand. He felt exposed. He and Dean knew they stood out and needed to get away from whatever might happen next. The beach did not feel safe. Walking back through the tables, Joe says it felt like a minefield, even though he now knows that was not the danger. The host does not smooth that out. She lets the panic stay messy, shaped by shock, fear, and missing information. The conversation also moves beyond Joe's own story. He looks at how the attack happened, why it happened, who the perpetrators were, and how people could be pulled into the organisation. That is what lingers. The episode treats Bali 2005 as its own tragedy, not just the smaller echo of 2002.

As heard by us

A raw return to the 2005 Bali bombings, grounded in Joe Frost's beachside account and the questions that followed.

Australian True Crime returns to Bali in 2005, after tourism had largely resumed from the 2002 bombings, and narrows in on a Newcastle group that had come for a holiday together.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for the human cost behind Bali's holiday heartbreak.

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