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Lawrence. Father’s Day was forgotten, his birthday ignored and Christmases never acknowledged, as her new life revolved around her older and wiser lover. But when that relationship fractured and broke, she reappeared in her father’s life, and now, from her cell ina Bali jail, sends cards addressed to ‘My dearest Daddy’, tears welling in her piercing blue eyes when told he might be unable to make it for her first court appearance.
    As far back as memories go, Renae Lawrence searched for a sense of belonging, but when she found it she often thrust it aside in an instant. She had to do things 100 per cent or not at all. Life was black and white; shades of grey were nonexistent. Her highs were dizzy, her lows dismal. School could be such fun, friends filling her home with the contagious giggles of teenage girls, but in the same week she could—and once did—take a handful of muscle relaxant pills her father used for his crook neck, and swallow some of them. That incident, while she was still at school, would be copied again in her young life: when she broke up with her lover, and again when life got too hard living in an Indonesian police holding cell, she would find a way to try to take her life. But the next day, or the day after, the cheeky smile would reappear and Renae would be back on track.
    The young woman who was unable to live by half measures had never travelled north of Scotts Head in NSW before adulthood. But in the six months between October 2004 and April 2005, she travelled overseas three times, Bali always the destination. She had known her co-worker Andrew Chan for less than a year before her first flight. But that didn’t stop her returning to Australia with him, chunks of heroin strapped firmly to her thighs. After that, he seemedto have a hold on her, the fat envelope containing $10 000 handed to her only hours after that first trip cementing their one-sided relationship.
    Two months later and in the lead-up to Christmas, she was back in Kuta again, but this time she returned empty-handed. Then, in April 2005, came her last trip; she teamed up with another of her co-workers, Martin Stephens. She had only met him a couple of months earlier, but, like everything else in her life, Renae didn’t need to be acquainted with someone for years before making a judgment on them. She either liked them or despised them—no middle ground there, either.
    The young woman who had grown up in a small western suburb of Newcastle, attending the local high school and living in the area until she boarded her flight direct from Sydney to Denpasar, would soon become international news. Again it was all or nothing: Renae Lawrence, who grew up yearning to be a police officer, would end up belonging in the annals of history as a drug smuggler.
    Each year in Australia, more than 50 000 divorces are granted, with about half of them involving children. Renae’s mother and father joined the queue of parents whose relationships crack and then break early; according to Bob Lawrence, it was around the time their little girl became a toddler. It wasn’t a benevolent parting, the way Bob explains it, and the relationship between Renae’s parents remains splintered. Renae was too young to understand her parents’ fraught relationship, and wentto live with her mother, her father counting down the days to every second weekend, when she would come to stay. But that changed, too, when he broke his neck a couple of years later. Bob Lawrence found he couldn’t care for his little charge and, without anyone to help, he gave up the precious weekends they had shared.
    Almost a year passed without any regular contact between father and daughter. But once Bob had recuperated from the operation on his neck, the little girl began visiting again, every second weekend. And her visits comfortably replaced the weekend fishing and shooting trips he had liked so much.
    ‘One day I smacked her on the back of the hand because she broke the stereo