‘Very kindly, very cute’: Bali locals mourn the two children murdered by their Australian father

Warning: This story contains graphic content

Denpasar: At the Blue Dolphin Playskool in Kuta that Archie and Laura attended, staff remember the children as happy and kind. They are grieving for the six-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister, murdered by their Australian father, Damien John Shaw, this week.

“We knew of what happened on Monday. The teachers cried,” one employee told this masthead.

The children had been at the school for half their lives. Occasionally, their mother would bring biscuits and drinks for the people who worked there.

The parents would take turns dropping off the kids, the worker said.

Locals are struggling to understand the shocking crime in the family’s rented bungalow in Bali’s popular Legian neighbourhood. Police believe Shaw took his own life soon after killing his children.

Shaw has emerged as an anxious and unpredictable figure in a family under pressure.

The 56-year-old retired oil and gas worker from Western Australia liked to take his kids to a pub not far from their home.

Archie and Laura would splash in the pool – they didn’t have one at home – and Shaw would sit boozeless at the bar watching sports on the TV and speaking with the chain-smoking barflies.

But the Australian had been particularly stressed lately, according to a fellow expat at the bar who knew Shaw, though not particularly well. No one, actually, in his off-strip neighbourhood of tight Bali laneways seemed to know him deeply, except a handful of Australians in the same bungalow complex who were reluctant to talk.

Precisely what had been disturbing him lately was unclear, the man at the bar said, but it appeared to involve a foundering relationship with the children’s Indonesian mother.

She was in Jakarta on Sunday and was alerted to something deeply wrong when she heard one of the children crying during an otherwise routine phone call to Legian. When the line went dead, she tried to call back. When no one answered, she pulled up security camera footage of the home on her phone, catching some of her daughter’s final moments, police said.

Shaw killed Archie first, investigators believe, then Laura.

When a construction worker next door later smashed off the locked front keyhole, he saw Laura and Archie’s bodies in one of the bedrooms. Just out of view from the worker at the doorway, Shaw, by his own hand, was dead, too.

The children’s mother told investigators Shaw suffered from severe and untreated anxiety – even helping with homework could make him panic.

A spokesman for Bali’s provincial government, Putu Senapati, said he should have been taken for a mental health check.

“The government cannot put a watch on everybody 24/7,” he said. “If someone with a mental illness relapses, it could be dangerous. So I think the lesson learnt is that we have to have the trait of social sensitivity, all of us, not only the people of Bali but outsiders too, both Indonesians and foreigners.”

Bali police, satisfied that Shaw was the perpetrator, are moving on without further examination.

So the expat grapevine is filling the gaps; part gossip, part giving the inexplicable a kind of structure with theories, “I heards” and rumours. The only element the police corroborated was problems with the relationship.

“[Shaw] and his wife wanted to divorce in 2022, but then [he] changed his attitude for the better, so the wife did not want a divorce,” Gede Adi Saputra Jaya, spokesman for the Denpasar police, told this masthead.

“Then, about a month ago, [his] emotions began to get out of control so that the wife again said she wanted a divorce … [Shaw] threatened to commit suicide.”

Monash University professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, an international expert in violence against women and children, said situations where parents killed their children rarely occurred in a vacuum.

“Research in Australia and overseas identifies relationship separation or threatened separation as an important period of heightened risk in some cases, particularly where it intersects with controlling behaviour, threats, escalating violence, jealousy, deteriorating wellbeing or suicidal behaviour,” she said.

Fitz-Gibbon said research showed “lethal family violence” perpetrators did not all follow the same trajectory, and efforts to prevent future tragedies must involve better recognition of the combinations of behaviours and circumstances that signalled escalating risk.

“Two young children have been killed. That is horrific,” she said.

“Archie and Laura must be kept at the centre of how we understand and respond to these deaths. Their deaths are yet another reminder of the urgent need to improve how we identify and respond to children experiencing violence and abuse.”

Unlike investigators, some in the neighbourhood believed they were already divorced, or at least separated.

Shaw and the children were regularly seen on his motorbike after school pick-ups. One of his Indonesian neighbours, who watched Archie and Laura play chasey in the courtyard only the night before their murder, said the kids were “very kindly, very cute”.

Shaw could be temperamental, according to another Indonesian local. Constantly “grumpy”, he complained and blamed everyone and everything, he said.

The acquaintance at the bar said he was reserved and unusual. “People would say one day he’d look like he wanted to kill you and the next he was friendly,” he said.

Back in Western Australia, records reveal how Shaw built a property portfolio across Perth and the state’s south-west that helped fund his overseas retirement.

Shaw grew up in Perth’s southern suburbs, close to the Swan River and the beach, attending Palmyra Primary and later Melville High School.

Property records show he began investing as a teenager. He made a $1.6 million profit last March from a home he bought in Palmyra more than 20 years ago for just $200,000. Shaw also owned a property in the surfing hotspot of Gnarabup, near Margaret River, and made more than $700,000 when he sold it five years ago.

In 2004, he made almost $200,000 when he sold another home to a relative. Records list the pair as joint owners of a Melville home and nearby Bicton property, which RP Data estimated were worth $1.5 million and $2 million, respectively.

And in February, Shaw bought a commercial property further south in Bibra Lake for $539,000.

An Australian expat living in Bali who attended the same Kuta gym as Shaw told this masthead they would often talk in the sauna, including about investing. He said Shaw would “speak his mind” and would pull up other gym members who didn’t shower before using the sauna or ice bath.

He said Shaw also spoke about his “lady” and told him they slept in separate bedrooms.

Since the deaths, people who knew Shaw have tried to understand his actions.

One friend said Shaw had spoken about feeling low and suicidal just weeks earlier, while another said friends had tried to get him to seek psychological help, but he refused.

One friend said he wished Shaw an “eternity in hell”.

With Holly Thompson

Lifeline 13 11 14
Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800

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