When Ingrid LeFebour woke up on a concrete slab, covered in a sheet in the morgue on the remote Indonesian island of Nias in 1976, she had no idea how she got there.
Nor did anyone else know her fate – some believed she had died in bizarre circumstances.
LeFebour’s disappearance features prominently in the film Point of Change, which chronicles the “discovery” of Nias by Australian surfers in the 1970s and the often dubious consequences for the local community.
So when Point of Change had its first screening in Fremantle last month, there was one person no one expected to be among the audience – LeFebour herself.
“It was a bit bizarre, actually, when I found out,” LeFebour says. “All of a sudden there’s people calling me; it was a bit overwhelming. After the screening, people came up to me and everybody wanted pictures with me, and they told me, ‘you’re a legend’, but that was all news to me.”
The extraordinary story began nearly 50 years ago, when LeFebour travelled to Nias from Perth as an 18-year-old backpacker with her boyfriend at the time, Stuart, in search of a newly discovered surf spot called Lagundri Bay. It had first been surfed a year earlier by Australians Kevin Lovett and John Geisel, and in 1976 Lovett returned with his girlfriend and her siblings. They were camped out at the wave when LeFebour and Stuart joined them.
“I met [Stuart] in Perth and he told me about some friends of his who had discovered this island and that he was trying to go over there to meet them,” LeFebour says. “I thought, ‘That sounds like an adventure. Can I come along?’ We left together and travelled around Thailand and Indonesia.”
Stuart clashed with the other surfers in Nias and left soon after but LeFebour stayed on at Lagundri. Soon, malaria hit the camp. When it became clear that serious medical treatment was needed, Lovett’s group abandoned the camp to return to Bali but LeFebour didn’t go with them. The last the others saw of her she was being carried on a stretcher atop a truck leaving the village.
When Lovett returned to Nias in the 1990s, locals told him of rumours that LeFebour had died at the hands of headhunters and suggested her head may have been buried in the foundations of a nearby bridge.
Years later, in the early 2000s, the Point of Change director, Rebecca Coley, was in Nias when she first heard the story of a woman who had gone missing when surfers were camped there in the 1970s. The film chronicles the radical changes at Lagundri as a result of the influx of surfers, one of many Indonesian locations that exploded in popularity among Australians and other outsiders across the decade.
While working on the film, Coley saw footage of LeFebour from the time she disappeared, prompting her to look further into the story. “The first person who told me about the Ingrid story was Safarma, an elder who was … living on the point at the time,” Coley says. “He told me the whole story about these guys that were hanging around the tourists … and they were talking about how they wanted to collect heads because they were doing a building project. Safama and a couple of the others were convinced that she’d been taken by these guys.”
Coley had tried without success to locate LeFebour since 2016, believing the worst may have happened. “I contacted missing persons, immigration and also did obvious things like Googling and searching Facebook numerous times,” Coley says. Without knowing a last name, neither Coley nor Lovett was able to track her down.
It wasn’t until friends of LeFebour heard an appeal for information on the radio in Perth that she realised others wanted to find her, and she was able to give her version of events.
“I was sick in the tent [in Nias], I wasn’t eating and that’s why I was so weak that I had to be carried to the village on a stretcher,” LeFebour says. “I was delirious at the time. I don’t remember getting to the village. I was in and out of consciousness.”
With a fever so high it was assumed she wouldn’t survive the night, LeFebour was placed in the morgue at a nearby clinic, where she awoke weak and disoriented but very much alive. She wrapped the sheet meant to cover her corpse around her body and toppled off the slab to search for help.
“I didn’t know where I was, what had happened or where the rest of them were,” LeFebour says. “There were these French-type doors, very flimsy, so I pushed them open and crawled out. Somebody came along and I think I gave them the shock of their lives.”
Recalling the events now, LeFebour pieces together that she had traded a gold mesh cigarette box that a friend had given her before the trip to buy a spot on the ferry to Medan, the nearest city on the island of Sumatra. “I remember when they put me on the ferry, I was lying down,” she says. “I couldn’t even sit up and it was a very rough crossing.”
Still too weak to eat solid food or walk, LeFebour slowly began her recovery. Eventually she returned to Perth, where she experienced recurring bouts of malaria for months until she was treated at Royal Perth Hospital and fully recovered.
The seriousness of what had happened didn’t deter LeFebour from future travels. She went on to hitchhike solo around Australia and continue her intrepid life.
For LeFebour, what happened at Nias was just part of the journey.
“This got me thinking about a lot of my adventures,” she says. “I mean, you just move on with your life.”
Coley says she had always hoped LeFebour would turn up at the screening in WA.
“I couldn’t believe it when it actually happened and she had her own amazing version of events. It really seems like a miracle that she made it home alive.”
