Aircraft fly home the burnt and maimed in wartime scene at Darwin

The casualty ward at the Royal Darwin Hospital in northern Australia resembled a medical clinic in wartime yesterday, as more than 60 of the most severely injured Australians from the Bali bombing were flown in by military cargo plane to be treated for severe burns, shrapnel wounds and multiple fractures.

One man died en route from Denpasar airport in Bali, while another succumbed shortly after being admitted.

Hospital officials said the patients were being processed as fast as possible and sent on to other hospitals to make space for dozens or even hundreds more to come.

"The sheer magnitude of what has actually occurred is going to take some considerable time to sink in for a lot of people, including ourselves at the hospital," the hospital medical superintendent, Dr Len Notaras, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

The official toll of known Australian dead stood at 14 yesterday, with 113 injured. But more than 220 others are still missing – a figure that threatens to turn the nightclub bombing into the single worst peacetime disaster in Australian, as well as Balinese, history.

A convoy of Hercules air force planes began leaving Denpasar on Sunday night for the three-hour journey to Darwin, in the Northern Territory. The first plane was less than half full because the severity of some of the injuries made it impossible to transport the injured in time from the makeshift clinics where they were being treated to the airport.

Most of the surviving patients were expected to transfer to their home cities yesterday – as a favour to their families, and to make room in the 300-bed hospital for new arrivals. Dr Notaras said some people had broken limbs and shrapnel wounds, while others had been impaled on wood and glass.

The military airlifts were part of a concerted effort to bring all surviving Australian nationals home. The walking, and almost walking, wounded – many of them cut, burned and bandaged – came home on specially chartered Qantas flights and promptly collapsed into the arms of loved ones. "Thank God, thank God, I'm alive," said Glen Dubois, who arrived at Sydney airport with a bandaged leg and eye. "Everyone in front of me was dead."

Many people returning to their home towns had to be wheeled off the planes in wheelchairs. Several had heavily bandaged limbs and deep cuts and bruises on their faces and arms. Ambulances were on hand to whisk them to local hospitals.

Many of those ferried to the hospital had their hair burned off in the inferno that destroyed the Sari Club in Bali. One woman, suffering from burns on 70 per cent of her body, was wrapped in sheets.

None of the patients flown in on the third flight of the airlift was able to walk. "In some cases, the shock is so severe there may be amnesia associated with it," Dr Notaras said.

Leanne Creese, a 31-year-old mother from Mooloolaba, Queensland, said she had been only a few steps from mortal danger when the bomb went off just as she was striding up to the door of the Sari Club with six friends. She arrived back in Brisbane with deep cuts and scratches and suspected fractures in her feet.

"Ten of 15 more steps and we would have been in the club," she said. "The impact threw us through the air. I got hit by a car, and when I looked up there was just a cloud of dust and then a billboard came down on my head. It looked like 11 September all over again."

Most of the casualties flown to Darwin were Australians, but the airlift also brought in seriously injured Canadians and Germans whose wounds were too serious to be treated by the Bali hospital at Denpasar.