Australians reacted with fury yesterday to the 20-year prison sentence handed down to Queensland beauty therapist Schapelle Corby by a court in Bali.
Phone-in radio programmes were inundated by angry callers, travel agents vowed to stop selling holidays to Bali and many demanded a boycott of the Indonesian national airline, Garuda.
Some Australians called on the government to suspend its A$1 billion ($5.9 billion) aid package to Jakarta, and expressed regret that they had contributed money to the Indonesian victims of the December 26 tsunami.
'The decision is absolutely unfair,' one man told a talkback radio show, while a female caller said: 'She was not given a fair trial.'
Another man called the sentence 'disgusting ... they have no respect for Australians'.
Corby's ordeal, and the Bali court's perceived bias, revealed a seam of racism among some Australians. One radio host earlier referred to the judges as 'monkeys', who were 'straight out of the trees'.
'Give them a banana and away they go,' Malcolm Elliott told his 2GB radio audience in Sydney this month.