Australian artist Ben Quilty is resigned to the fact his friend Myuran Sukumaran will be marched into a jungle clearing on an Indonesian island and shot.
The only real question is exactly when the lives of his friend, and fellow Bali Nine heroin smuggler, Andrew Chan, will end.
For weeks, as he shared visit after visit with the death row inmates at Bali's Kerobokan prison, he resisted the urge to say a final goodbye. Just in case it was the last time.
On Thursday, as Quilty left the prison, he knew the moment had come.
"I've sort of been leaving and making a point of not saying goodbye to Myuran," Quilty told Fairfax radio on Friday.
"I knew that is how he wanted the friendship to continue - for me to keep finding hope when it seemed to be lost some weeks ago. But yesterday was definitely a farewell."
The Archibald prize winner has been at the forefront of last-ditch efforts to save the Australians, pleading with Indonesia not to kill two men who embody the nation's success in reforming criminals.
But Jakarta's resolve to put the men in front of a firing squad appears as hard as it's ever been in the decade since the Bali Nine were arrested over a plot to smuggle 8kg of heroin from Bali to Australia.
Authorities are finalising plans to move Sukumaran and Chan to Nusakambangan, a prison island off central Java known as "Indonesia's Alcatraz". There, they'll be given 72 hours notice of their executions.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne on Friday said the Australian government had done "absolutely everything" in its power to save the men.
But he said Indonesia's problems with drug addiction meant the nation took a very tough line on smugglers.
"They're their laws, we don't support them, we don't agree with them. It'll be a great tragedy if those two young men face the death penalty," he told the Nine Network on Friday.
Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek made a heartfelt plea in parliament on Thursday, reflecting on her husband's drug conviction 30 years ago and what it would have cost society if he'd been put to death.
On Friday, she said it was heartbreaking Sukumaran and Chan would be denied the same opportunity to make amends for their crimes as reformed and repentant men.
"The question is: are you just punishing these young men as an act of retribution?" she told Fairfax radio.
"If you take their lives, does it really teach anyone not to do the same crime?"
She said that was clearly not true and the experience in any number of countries, including the United States, proved that.
"What I'm asking for is mercy."
Sukumaran and Chan's Australian lawyer, Julian McMahon, says his efforts on behalf of the pair continue.
On Wednesday lawyers for the pair sent to the Indonesian Administrative Court a challenge to President Joko Widodo's decision to refuse clemency to all 64 drug offenders on death row.
Share
