Searching for ‘Our Schapelle’
Tara Kenny on the woman behind the headlines
When I tell people that I’m writing about convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby, who spent nine years in Bali’s Kerobokan prison after getting caught at customs with 4.2 kilos of marijuana in her boogie board bag off a flight from Brisbane via Sydney in 2004, they mostly laugh and say something to the tune of, ‘So crazy. But she definitely did it, right?’ At the beginning of her trial, the majority of Australians believed ‘Our Schapelle’ to be a naïve innocent who became the unwitting victim of stealthy criminals and a corrupt, foreign legal system. The image of a shell-shocked, defenceless white woman with piercing blue eyes and raven hair was broadcast into homes around the country; the perfect vessel to hold our collective fears of the scary world beyond our borders.
But, as time went on, the media dredged up dirt on the Corby’s––the father’s youthful weed-related run in with the cops, a blended family of kids with different dads, sporadic employment, a brother in and out of jail–– and in the face of complexity, public sympathy waned. At worst, Schapelle was a shady femme fatale layabout who dared risk it all for a quick buck in a country where drug offences are punishable by death. At best, she and her family of Bali-loving watersports enthusiasts with a propensity for getting into verbal and sometimes physical altercations with the media were guilty of eliciting deep cultural cringe. A 2007 segment from then liberal culture temperature gauge The Chaser’s War on Everything depicted Schapelle’s sister Mercedes and her friend-turned-nemesis Jodie Power (at the time battling it out through competing Today Tonight and A Current Affair narratives) as two bedraggled looking Barbies or ‘cheap, dim-witted dolls’. Summing up the general public’s vitriol, host Chas Licciardello deemed the dolls ‘both annoying bogans’, before ripping off their heads.
After rabidly consuming a seemingly boundless glut of cultural detritus claiming to set the record straight once and for all on the did-she-or-didn’t-she mystery of Schapelle’s drug bust—airport novels with glossy photo inserts, conspiratorial documentaries, shitty telemovies, and countless exposes in newspapers, tabloids, and current affairs programs—I am no closer to the truth. Like former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who sent thoughts and prayers during Schapelle’s imprisonment, ‘I feel for her. I feel for her family. I feel for anyone—guilty or innocent—in a situation like that.’ It shouldn’t matter, given our obsession with the Corbys is widely remembered as a national disgrace that hoovered up finite public attention that should have been directed toward more important and lofty considerations. Yet I remain transfixed, poring over Schapelle’s paper trail in a fugue state, searching—not for clues of her guilt or innocence—but for something that will bring me closer to the woman behind the headlines, to use the parlance of the women’s magazines that have filled countless breathless pages in her name.
Schapelle was only twenty-seven when she was arrested, but with her high-pitched, girlish voice, propensity for pale pink, and habit of signing her jailhouse letters with a big love heart and a reminder to ‘Be positive :)’, gave the effect of being even younger. In her autobiography, My Story, written from a grimy Kerobokan cell, Schapelle confesses her girlhood dreams of fame and fortune: ‘I imagined a glamorous and exciting world of pretty dresses and parties, of being feted and adored and pampered like a princess.’ While the cruel world had other plans, Schapelle wouldn’t be a household name if she was not, in the words of Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty, ‘a very attractive lady’, and the unfortunate circumstances of her fame did not preclude her from a level of vanity. The beauty school dropout made the most of her humble prison bathroom to maintain the rigorous grooming regime chronicled in her book: ‘I still pluck my eyebrows, I put conditioning treatments in my hair and dye it as soon as the grey roots come through. Most mornings I apply Natural Glow bronzing powder and waterproof mascara—for all the tears—and am constantly applying cherry lip gloss… I occasionally wear jewellery or spray on a little Gucci perfume to lift my spirits.’
While Schapelle’s beauty created a halo effect, embodying the figure of the siren is always a double-edged sword. In the aptly titled HBO documentary Ganja Queen (2007), Schapelle laughs incredulously while reading hate mail: ‘Word around Australia is they call you the Brisbane beauty. I call you a common whore and a slut. They say you’re good at head jobs around the jail.’ It was not just crazed penpals who were suspicious of Schapelle’s feminine wiles. In Sins of the Father, investigative journalist Eamon Duff presents the theory that Schapelle’s father Mick Corby was a seasoned drug runner who used his dutiful daughter as a mule. While the book earned Duff a Ned Kelly award for true crime writing, Duff’s publisher Allen & Unwin was forced to pay the Corbys and their lawyers nearly one million dollars in a settlement deal after they sued for defamation. However, Duff’s reporting and the scandal surrounding the book are overshadowed by the author’s conviction that Schapelle––who he describes as ‘striking’, ‘glamorous’ and ‘like her mother…a shameless flirt’––planned to rely on her good looks to pull off the perfect crime. Imagining Schapelle’s descent into Bali and her apparent attempt to weaponise her breasts to exploit customs workers, Duff writes:
As we all know, pretty girls can get away with a lot at airports; on this particular day, Schapelle was dressed to impress and showing plenty of cleavage… All that was left to do was to grab her boogie board, let the customs officers check her huge black suitcase and, if necessary, flash a flirtatious smile if she was asked to open the boogie board bag.
While I do not know what pretty girls are always getting away with at airports, I can say with certainty that Schapelle’s idealised image lent itself to bad faith speculation, including unsubstantiated claims that she moonlighted as a sex worker in Japan, was pregnant by a ‘foreign lover’ in jail, and was hamming up the damsel in distress act for sympathy. Alongside her criminal conviction, Schapelle endured the tabloid’s metaphorical guillotine.
The media’s Frankenstein’s-monster-like-creation came to life in 2017, when Schapelle returned to Australian shores a free woman, and began participating in the creation of her own image in peculiar and utterly unexpected ways. On New Year’s Day 2018, just months after touching down in Brisbane, she stunned the nation with the summer bop ‘Palm Trees’. In the song’s clip, posted to Instagram, a heavily-autotuned Schapelle croons ‘I’m in Queensland and it is sunny. I have the palm trees behind me (behind me, behind me)’, as a photoreel shows her toasting to her freedom with Mercedes, frolicking among rolling pastures, and making amends with her boogie board at the beach. The next year, her turn to the theatrical continued, this time with a role as a sexy psychiatrist in the music video for her younger brother James Kisina’s rap track, ‘Who you know’. As James claims to ‘run shit in the hood, you can call me 50’, Schapelle raises her famous eyebrows suspiciously and appraises him through thick, nerdy glasses. In the background, a boogie board leans inexplicably against the wall of her makeshift office. After having her image stolen, scrutinised and paraded as an object of public ridicule for over a decade, Schapelle was finally giving the media the middle finger they well and truly deserved. Given people were going to judge her for being a silly little bogan no matter what she did, she was reclaiming her long-exploited persona to get in on the joke with some trolling of her own.
Schapelle’s fame has always been a reality TV-like spectacle, from the opinion polls that tracked the public’s shifting confidence in her innocence, to the live-streaming of her sentencing on national telly, and her own observation that her cell block ‘would have made a compelling Big Brother house, guaranteed to keep the audience riveted.’ Given her diminished job prospects as a convicted drug trafficker, it was perhaps inevitable that Schapelle would eventually make her way to the small screen. Having surely endured enough public suffering for one lifetime, it was surprising that she chose to make her debut on the first season of SAS Australia, a show that puts various dubious celebrities through the paces of intensive military training ‘designed to break the most elite soldier’. Of course, Schapelle is the golden goose of her cohort, which includes Shane Warne’s son, who lacks his dad’s charisma and claims to have tried just ten foods in his life; Arabella Del Busso, an ex-NRL wag and conwoman who allegedly has nine fake aliases; Roxy Jacenko, a PR maven who boasts that she’s never experienced a failure; and Merrick Watts, a comedian armed with an arsenal of flat jokes.
‘If you’re over fifteen years old and you say you’ve never heard the name Schapelle Corby: bullshit,’ deadpans Schapelle by way of introduction on the show, before explaining that she has come to SAS Australia to ‘find out who she is under all the years of suppression’ and right the misconception that she is just ‘an attention seeking girl… out for money and celebrity’. Under the tutelage of host Ant Middleton, a militaristic Gordon Ramsey-type who boasts that he has ‘saved lives and taken lives’ and takes great pleasure in yelling expletives at the stricken recruits, Schapelle gets a nosebleed while diving backwards out of a helicopter into open water and takes on former Bachelorette Ali Oetjen in a boxing match. The first episode ends with Schapelle hooded and led into a grim shed that bears a striking resemblance to the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where Ant plays a recording of her sentencing and questions her about the deterioration of her mental health in prison. ‘Mid-2008 I started losing my mind,’ recalls Schapelle. ‘Hallucinating. I couldn’t eat. I don’t eat meat anymore because my hallucinations were so vivid that I thought I was eating my dad’s human flesh.’
After she voluntarily withdrew from the show during a running challenge, the Daily Mail ran an article claiming to set the record straight about, ‘What convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby was REALLY like on SAS Australia when the cameras stopped rolling… and fans may be surprised’. The salacious truth is exposed: according to Jackson Warne, Schapelle was ‘so awesome’ and encouraging on the course and he thoroughly enjoyed getting to know her (and enjoying his first slurp of tomato soup in her presence).
Not long after, Schapelle was back on the box as a wildcard contestant on Dancing with the Stars: All Stars. Wearing a flowing red gown, she danced a perfectly graceful Viennese waltz, culminating with her dance partner lifting her up and twirling her dramatically in his arms. While host Darryl Sommers made much of how puffed out she was after the dance and judge Todd McKenney admitted he ‘thought she was going to be crap’, Schapelle endeared herself to the audience by confessing that she was crying so much before the performance that she had to have her makeup redone (waterproof mascara not withstanding).
While I personally respect Schapelle’s willingness to give us all more than we deserve and risk continued humiliation in front of national audiences on reality TV, her post-prison turn to arts and crafts feels more likely to propel her healing journey. In May 2021, Schapelle began sharing her passion for crafting handmade epoxy resin clocks, an endeavour that she explains began as a hobby but ‘now occupies most of my thoughts.’ Her most popular clock face depicts a blue ocean hitting a sandy shore, complete with real seashells that she personally collects ‘on the low tide of a Full Moon’. On Instagram, where Schapelle sells her shell-studded timepieces directly to cultural connoisseurs hoping to secure a priceless piece of Australian history, the bespoke clockmaker looks purposeful and serene as she takes audiences behind the scenes of her creative process.
As I watch Schapelle’s gloved hands carefully affix seashells to a clock face, I am reminded that while time does not heal all wounds, it inevitably brings change. In one lifetime, it is possible to be heralded the modern-day Joan of Arc, then swiftly reviled for what your capacity to hold our attention reveals about our own vulturous impulses, only to rise from the ashes to find unlikely salvation as an artisanal clockmaker. During her nine-year prison term, Schapelle tried not to think about the passage of time; as a free woman, she spends her hard-won hours crafting objects that literally mark the minutes. While naysayers will call the clocks a hideous waste of time, I direct them to my favourite Schapelle-authored meme: an image of the artist in a floral, summer dress, nonchalantly clutching two paperbacks in one hand, her other hand clasping a locked gate, overlaid with a searing message, ‘The world is going to judge you no matter what you do, so live your life the way you want to’. Tick tock.
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Works cited
✷ Schapelle Corby and Kathryn Bonella, My Story, (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2006).
✷ Eamon Duff, Sins of the Father, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011).
Tara Kenny is a culture writer and The Monthly's television critic. She writes about the way women use and are used by the media. Her work has appeared in Interview, The Guardian, Dazed, i-D, Paper, The Saturday Paper, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and numerous zines and independent publications.