Author(s): J.H. Crone

Poetry

Our Lady of the Fence Post is an imaginative response to news reports of the appearance of a Marian apparition at Coogee, Sydney, in January 2003, on the construction site of a memorial for victims of the Bali bombing. A year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on 9/11 2001 had triggered the 'War on Terror', terrorists bombed Paddy's Irish Pub and the Sari Club on Jalan Legion in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 people. Many of the 88 Australians who died were football players and their families celebrating the end of the football season. Within days of the news report of the Marian apparition huge crowds started visiting the site, dubbed 'Our Lady of the Fence Post' by the press. Our Lady of the Fence Post interrogates the rise of religious fundamentalism and the 'war on terror', from the Bali bombing to Jake Bilardi's ISIS suicide bombing in 2015, as it is experienced by locals in the fictional setting of Sunshine Bay, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.