I’ve spent the past decade living just a couple of beaches around from the famous Bondi beach. I will never leave.
Throughout the east of Sydney, the beaches offer an enviable lifestyle: a laidback tolerant society, a melting pot of nationalities, of young people, families and older residents, of surfers, backpackers, artists, tradies and more recently, the wealthy from the tech boom.
No one cares if you’re in your cossies at the shops. A walk down the street can be slow because people stop and chat or greet each other’s dogs.
Bondi beach is the heart of that community, and while not everyone can afford to live there, it is a kind of physical manifestation of what Australia aspires to be.
Unlike other countries, the beach is free. It is treasured and shared – with greater Sydney and with visitors from around the globe – in a spirit of camaraderie.
It’s hard to describe just how physically beautiful Bondi beach is. More intangible is how the beach acts as a drawcard – that’s why it is often portrayed as the essence of Australia in movies, books and popular culture.
The kilometre-long golden crescent of sand and the promenade can fit thousands of people. Its rolling grass verges have welcomed families for picnics over generations. From sunrise to late at night, Bondi beach is almost always busy, with people swimming, running, walking and doing yoga or just visiting to take a photo. Locals and visitors alike relax, connect with nature, and spend time with friends.
It’s also home to a large Jewish community, a place where post-second world war migrants chose to settle and open cafes and businesses. It tells the story of our successful experiment in multiculturalism and inclusion.
That is why the mass shooting on Sunday, when a father and son allegedly killed at least 15 people during a community Hanukah event – has left Sydney in such a state of shock. It is why it will be so hard to heal.
Americans have had to grapple with gun violence and mass shootings since their nation’s founding. This is largely alien to Australians – even if we are still to reconcile the darker chapters of colonisation.
I spent three years as the Sydney Morning Herald’s Washington correspondent, and I never really got over attending mass shootings or dealing with how Americans had normalised these terrible events.
Instead, I learned never to assume a stranger would share my horror of guns or my disbelief at the US’s inability to regulate them.
I developed protocols for what to do if confronted by a person with a gun, based on the hostile environment training the Herald provided before my posting.
I grimly talked to my kids about their code red and code blue training at school. (Code blue is when the threat is outside the school and lessons can continue. Code red is when the shooter is inside the building.)
When American friends asked me whether I wanted to stay – and this was in the Obama years – I hastily said “no.” Instead, I was imagining being back in Sydney and visiting Bondi beach.
I wanted to be in Australia, where I felt there was a shared bedrock of values.
It will take a long time for Sydneysiders and Australians to recover from this terror attack. We understand that something incredibly precious has been threatened.
Many Jewish Australians have feared something like this could happen here.
But for large numbers of Australians, that blithe feeling of safety that we mostly enjoy in Sydney – the feeling of never having to think about being shot – has been shaken.
For me, it will be the incomprehension I feel that these two alleged gunmen didn’t value what I cherish most in our society.
People feel passionate about events in the Middle East, but I believed until Sunday we had a society that encouraged respectful debate and peaceful protest, and shunned bloodshed and violence.
Of course there have been tensions, and Bondi beach is not immune. Posters of the 230 Israeli hostages held in Gaza along the promenade were defaced in 2023; and this year a “paddle out” in support of Palestine erupted into a slanging match and punches being thrown between rival protest groups.
Sunday’s event was unimaginable in its evil. In its wake, the NSW premier, Chris Minns, and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, both called for calm and cohesion. They have their work cut out to restore trust – not just of Sydney’s Jewish community, but of the entire country.
There are other lessons to be learned. Having toyed with a recreational hunting bill which would have liberalised shooting in state forests of NSW and possibly introduced a right to hunt, Minns has backtracked sharply.
He is now talking about audits of gun licences and restricting the ownership of hunting weapons, like the ones the alleged assailants used, particularly in cities. He is even talking about recalling parliament. Restricting guns to those who need them on farms and for their work is important if we are to avoid going down the US path.
But the real issue is how we rebuild our shared vision of what makes Australia a special place to live.
Anne Davies is Guardian Australia’s NSW state correspondent
