The BEN TULLIPAN Story

“Life is 10 per cent what happens to you, and 90 per cent what you make it.”

This is the mindset of Australian Ben Tullipan, who adds: “If you believe in yourself, you can achieve anything.”

Late in the evening of the 12th October 2002, a then 27-year-old Ben Tullipan was a young businessman importing furniture from Bali, Indonesia, for his homewares shop on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.  Ben had always seen himself as a ‘people person’. He liked to get to know the folk around him and enjoyed chatting to anyone and everyone. His friends knew him as a very positive, happy-go-lucky guy… these aspects of his personality may well have saved his life in the days, weeks, months and years following the Bali Bombings of 2002.

Ben Tullipan walked into the Sari Club in the tourist district of Kuta, to buy a bottle of water moments before a one-tonne car bomb exploded in a parked van nearby (it was the largest of the three bombs that night) – the blasts killing 202 people (including 88 fellow Australians) and injuring 209. Ben says that while he would get a second chance at life; a great many other people did not.