This Morning at Bondi
A walk on the beach
Blue grey water, hazy air. This morning at Bondi is deeply subdued. People hardly seem to speak, and when they do it is mostly in a whisper.
The streets have a strange mood. By the time you get down to the beach there is the feeling of being in an open-air church, a ritual forming between people’s silences and soft gatherings of two, three or four people.
An event was underway here last night to celebrate the start of Hanukkah, the Jewish eight-day “festival of lights”.
It was promoted as a family occasion at Bondi, with a petting zoo and other attractions to sweeten the occasion. Around 1,000 people had arrived to enjoy it.
On a hot Sunday afternoon, Sydney’s iconic beach was crowded with many others also cooling off or walking the promenade, soaking up the horizon as much as the waves.
Police received reports of shots going off at 6:47pm Sydney time. Many at first thought it was fireworks, another part of the celebration. Then the panic set in.
So far we know 15 innocent people were shot dead; the eldest an 87-year-old man, the youngest a 10-year-old girl.
Over 40 were injured, many seriously, including two police officers.
There’s been a call-out this Monday morning for O-negative blood donors in particular, with O-positive also useful. The Australian Red Cross website for Lifeblood has collapsed under the response from the public, but your patience and help are still appreciated. It takes around 100 blood donors to save one life at risk.
Today Bondi Beach is ringed by police tape, closing off half the foreshore. A security presence is everywhere.
The sounds of a police vehicle running its siren to pass through the streets makes everyone tighten their breathing. A helicopter moves above. The siren is quickly switched off. Sorry.
Small crowds gather inside and outside local cafes – or at bus stops heading to work. There is a stunned energy to everyone, an ordinariness that is itself out-of-the-ordinary, as if people are not quite in their bodies while they go about their Monday start to the week.
Trauma is like an echo, it may lessen over time and across people less close to the immediate events, but it somehow carries itself through many lives and affects us in mysterious and hidden ways.
On the beach dead birds lay scattered along the tide line. Nature appears to be talking to us. The world is not in balance. But it remains connected anyway.
What is wrong with us? Why is everything going wrong?
The two gunmen have been identified as a father-and-son team: Sajid Akram, 50, shot dead by police; Naveed Akram, 24, in hospital in a critical condition.
Remarkable scenes have emerged of the father being disarmed by Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old man who owns a fruit shop in Sutherland. Ahmed was hit by bullets in the arm and shoulder. He is in hospital in a stable condition. Unsurprisingly, his bravery is being acclaimed. Of course. We want to know and say that not all people are monsters. We want to be clear that we know exactly who is who here.
Amid the panic and chaos of thousands of people fleeing the beach, many other acts of bravery occurred too… a female surfer pulling kids on boards out into deeper water and safety; young men stopping their car so that girls running away could leap in before “they floored it” and got out of there; life-savers and others from the Bondi community returning to the beach with first-aid kits, attending to the injured and the dying. People gathering up all the belongings that were left behind and placing them on the promenade. Police and over a 100 paramedics responding.
Others come the next day with similar intentions. On this Monday morning a lone gentleman stands at one end of the beach and plays the bagpipes, lamenting and noble, to send off the spirits still here.
Journalists go about their business, as do police patrolling the promenade and the suburb. People pick their way along the foreshore, looking at the dead birds, then out to sea and back to their community. Most walk on, trudging the sand.
This desire to be present and pay your respects is very powerful.
It’s a worldless yearning, paradoxically enough, to speak some form of truth and say we stand together, not apart.
You sense this will happen today and for weeks to come.
And that the words will be very hard to find because we have been cut off from saying them for so long.
But say them we must.
Even when others try to possess every word and phrase and turn it into something else, bad faith interpretations that vandalise the struggle to communicate.
Anti-semitism is real. We have lost sight of its dangers as aspirations for tolerance become a Trojan horse for parasitic and destructive ideologies.
The ostensibly good and ideal is being used to advance the cancerous in our culture. The Far Left is as bad as the Far Right. The worst are full of passionate intensity, blind to their own journey, so righteous they make themselves divine over all around them. Extremism is everywhere. We need to recalibrate, rebalance, reform.
The wind blows in this morning from the sea. The sun rises here on the beach, but it feels suddenly dirty and hot. Silence and beauty give way to a moment of depression. It’s not going to be easy. And yet people are here with their flowers and hushed voices, offering up a moment of music and nothing but the quiet truth of walking together. It’s not easy, but you can feel that it is strong.
M
