Free Bali 9: The Untold Story by Madonna King, Cindy Wockner

he seemed really genuine. But he only had eyes for one young teenager, Jess, and her friends thought she was pretty lucky. They also thought that Matthew spoilt her rotten.
    ‘I keep thinking of the way he treated his girlfriend and how caring he was towards her,’ one of Jess’s friends says now.
    Matthew would buy Jess presents, sit and talk to her during recess like she was the only person in the world, and he even planned to take her up to the NSW Central Coast to live when they were a bit older. Jess was a year younger than Matthew, and her friends liked him from the start, and looked up to him. In a way, that’s what brought the two school years together.
    Jess’s friends thought Matthew Norman was gregarious, but he wasn’t loud. And he didn’t get embarrassed talking to the girls. Some of the other boys did, and that was a real turn-off. But Matthew was great for a laugh.
    Like most of his mates, Norman didn’t rate school too highly, or take it too seriously, and English, especially, was well down the list. He didn’t read much, but he knew what was going on. Sport, on the otherhand, made turning up each day well worth the effort. He loved sport—any kind—and now, sitting in an Indonesian jail cell, he still misses it madly. So much so that the first sentence he uttered to a group of waiting media late last year was a plea for them to find out the score in rugby union’s Bledisloe Cup.
    At school, Matthew liked recess too—the time when they would all sit around and have a laugh. Whether it was fake fights he staged with his friends, or other Jackass -inspired stunts he and his mates would play, Matthew always looked like he was having a ball. He rarely talked about his home life; no one really asked and he never really offered much. So few, including many of his and Jess’s good friends, knew of the enormous upheaval and drama that had characterised his early years.
    Matthew Norman was born in Westmead in Sydney just after his twin, Cheryl, in September 1986 and life was a minor struggle from the start. Born weeks premature, the twins endured some early scares and a prolonged hospital stay before joining their mother, Robyn Davis, and their father, Michael Norman, in their Quakers Hill home. The couple already had one little girl, and the twins were a welcome addition to their family.
    However, things turned sour for the couple, who had married only a few years earlier, and within a few more years they separated, with Davis and all three children initially moving out of their home. That’swhen things went from bad to worse—and they kept moving in that direction.
    Michael Norman didn’t see his children for huge blocks of time that stretched into years. The bitter and acrimonious separation was coloured by nasty accusations, claims and counter-claims, legal accusations and Family Court involvement, before all three children came to live full time with their father.
    The effect of that period on Michael Norman remains. ‘I ended up with the children, but it cost me a lot of money. About $80 000 I lost,’ he says, along with all respect for a court process that is supposed to determine the best outcome for the children of a broken marriage.
    The impact on the children, being the subject of such a nasty and prolonged fight, must also have been great, and Michael admits that behavioural problems dominated their early time together. ‘They [the children] were sort of immature for their age…because of what they’d been through. They didn’t know how to make decisions for themselves and they didn’t know how to handle things. They used to have tantrums and this sort of thing.’
    Robyn Davis now lives in Port Macquarie on the NSW north coast, and she deflects all public interest in her family. She stays in contact with all her children, and frequently sings Matthew’s praises to those who will listen. She has told people of how Matthew helped her when she was sick a few years back, and undertook