Photographs of both men before the fateful night at Denpasar airport show happy Australian youths.

Norman was an 18-year-old from a loving family with two sisters in western Sydney’s Quaker’s Hill who had ditched school at 16 to earn “fast cash”.

He wasn’t unusual in that he “wanted to cut corners in life” and avoid doing his HSC.

Probably the most reckless thing he did before agreeing to be Andrew Chan’s drug mule was an alleged high speed police chase with Renae Lawrence.

Norman and Lawrence, both staffers with Chan at the Eurest catering company, both climbed into an allegedly stolen car at Enfield on March 26, 2005 and drove through Sydney to Peats Ridge.

Ten days later, both were on a flight to Bali which would change their destiny.

Scott Rush was less innocent than Norman by the time he flew to Denpasar.

Growing up with two brothers in the western Brisbane suburb of Chelmer, he attended private Catholic boys’ school St Laurence’s College from which he was expelled in Year 10 for drug possession.

Rush had begun smoking cannabis aged 15, and had used prescription drugs and tried ecstasy.

Five months before his Bali arrest, in December 2004, Rush pleaded guilty at Inala Magistrates Court to 16 offences, including drug possession, fraud, theft and drink-driving.

He was recruited in Brisbane, and offered a free holiday in Bali and a mobile phone.

Rush’s Bali “holiday” photos show a young man relaxing in a pool and playing with a chained monkey in a street.

The vacation part of the heroin plot lasted 11 days, with Norman and Rush and their co-conspirators unknowingly under the surveillance of Indonesian police,

Rush’s father Lee had alerted Australian Federal Police about what his son was up to, not realising the AFP would place the nine Australians into the hands of Indonesia.

Realisation did not take long to dawn on the Bali Nine.

Pictures of Norman Rush after their arrest show a thousand yard stare, the dumb horror of the future slipping away etched on their handsome young faces.

Last week, Matthew Norman generously passed on his best wishes to Renae Lawrence as she prepared to return to Australia.

But he and Rush could not but feel they are being left behind to serve life sentences and die in jail.

With their 20s having vanished in a squalid cell, they are now carving into their 30s behind bars and decades stretching ahead.

Norman, now aged 32, is one of only two Bali Nine conspirators left in their original prison, Kerobokan.

He has farewelled the others in troubling and grisly circumstances.

In late 2013, respected prison “tamping” or inmate leader Renae Lawrence fell off her perch.

Accused of a prison guard murder plot, she was sent to a holding cell and then off to East Bali’s tiny Bangli prison where she remained until this week.

Norman had shared a cell in Kerobokan with Tan Duc Than Nguyen and Andrew Chan.

In 2014, Nguyen and Bali Nine cohort Martin Stephens were accused of violating prison rules and transferred to a prison 400km away in Malang, East Java.

It was there, in May this year, that Nguyen died from cancer at the age of 34.

In March 2015 in dramatic circumstances, Andrew Chan and his fellow ringleader Myuran Sukumaran were removed under heavy armed guard from Kerobokan.

Taken by police Barracuda vehicle, they were flown to Cilicap in southern Java and then transferred to Nusakambangan Island, where a firing squad executed them on April 29.

The carrying out of the death sentence, which Norman himself had been condemned to, reportedly had a profound effect on Norman.

Around the time Martin Stephens and Nguyen disappeared from Kerobokan, Scott Rush also vanished.

Rush had struggled with incarceration and easy access to prison drugs.

In 2012, after an allegedly botched attempt to convert to Islam, he underwent a Muslim circumcision.

A psychiatrist would later categorise Rush’s actions as “death row phenomenon”.

The doctor said Rush was “confused” and “thought disordered”.

Rush was filmed by a visiting TV crew, clearly drug affected at Kerobokan.

“He is an anxious, lonely and terrified young man. He is trying to find understanding in a world that no longer makes sense,” the unnamed psychiatrist told Fairfax News.

In his years in Indonesia, Rush has been engaged twice, to an American girlfriend, Karen Hermiz, and in 2014 to London banker, Nikki Butler.

He spent five years on death row in Bali, after being given a life sentence in February 2006, which was overturned eight months later by a Bali High Court appeal to a death sentence.

It wasn’t until a 2011 judicial review of Rush’s death penalty, that the then 25-year-old could enjoy the comparative comfort of facing life in prison.

In 2014, Rush was transferred, at his request, to Karangsem, a small prison in East Bali, reportedly to reduce the temptation to avail himself of the drugs flowing through Kerobokan.

Fairfax News reported that Rush had a Balinese “foster family” living near Karangsem which cared for him.

Back at Kerobokan, Matthew Norman screen prints T-shirts in the prison art shop and teaches English to other inmates.

His sole fellow Bali Nine inmate, Si Yi Chen, makes silver jewellery and teaches silversmithing.

Their only hope of not whiling away the rest of their lives in Indonesian prisons, is the government’s clemency to grant a sentence reduction.

That would give the five remaining Bali Nine inmates a sense of purpose that they, as Renae Lawrence did, could whittle away their sentences with remission rewarded for good behaviour.

Norman, 32, wished Lawrence luck.

“What’s going on with Renae, that’s her story. She was sentenced by the courts to 20 years and she has run her course,” Fairfax reported.

“She has got her (sentence) remissions, she has done what she needs to do to get out,” he said.

“I wish her all the best of luck.

“For me, I’m still here with a life sentence and I’m still doing all that I can to better myself. I still have hope that my sentence will come down.”

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