No doubt everyone is aware of the shootings at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday night AEST.
I’ve lived in Bondi for over 35 years. I walk down by the beach 3-4 mornings a week and I’m very familiar with the area where it all took place – the bridge where the shooters were etc. Once a week I go down there to present a community radio show from the Eastside Radio studio at the Bondi Pavilion.
My family are all safe. However my eldest daughter is a teacher at a nearby primary school with mainly Jewish students, and so she has been dealing with not only relatives of some of them being affected by the shooting but also having to answer her Year 2 students’ questions, which she says mainly start with “is it true that…”
I’m just wondering if anyone here has been closely affected by these kind of events?
Coincidentally I’m wearing my Eastside FM subscriber t-shirt today. What show do you present?
Haven’t lived over that way for a long time, but it’s a go-to spot for our overseas visitors. Always a vibrant place with all walks of life on display. It was surreal sitting at home watching it all unfold knowing it was all happening a 40 minute drive away.
Monday was a very subdued day on the train and at work. Have I been personally affected? No, it’s just sad, people were there to celebrate and that was ripped from them. Sydney feels like a very grim place at the moment.
This is me
https://eastsidefm.org/onesizefitsall/
Good show it is too. Off topic – when did the station move from Paddo?
It hasn’t moved, there are now 2 studios, Bondi opened in maybe 2022? Not broadcasting from there today for obvious reasons
Thoughts and prayers, non-ironically. People migrate to escape all the crap in the old country, wherever it is. If they bring it with them and keep the old rows going, they haven’t migrated.
I’ve only been to Bondi once, in 1998, when I walked from my future Best Man’s condo in Coogee bay along the coastal path on a Sunday morning.
We had lunch in a beach-side cafe, and on the radio came a Natalie Imbruglia song, written by my tall chum some 10,500 miles away.
Until a couple of days ago, that was my strongest memory of Bondi.
I hope Bondi, and everyone left, can recover.
Only to despair that I keep having to read such stories.
It was a very long time ago – July 1982 to be precise, and my brush with terrorism was minor. I used to play tennis – with great reluctance and zero ability – with colleagues in Regent’s Park at lunchtime. I was a bit early one day so sat in some deckchairs at the bandstand to enjoy the sunshine, wondering if I could just “forget” to walk on to the game. A colleague spotted me and put an end to that, and 20 mins later I was fresh airing shots as was my trademark.
About 30 mins into the game there was a huge bang, although it was hard to tell where. We paused for a minute and then just carried on. About 10 minutes later a police helicopter appeared overhead and told us to leave the park immediately, just as officers on foot arrived.
The explosion we heard was an IRA bomb going off under the bandstand, killing 7 soldiers and injuring some spectators who’d been sat where I was. It was pre social media so we didn’t know there had already been an attack in Hyde Park about 2 hours before which killed 4 soldiers (I think). At the time I was a bit shaken but more numb than anything else.
There were 4 of us playing that day, and we all had different reactions over time. The tennis resumed later in the summer but didn’t last, and none of us went anywhere near the park pretty much ever again. One told me they started looking for a another job outside of London the next week, but collectively we all adopted the “if it’s got your name on it …” philosophy.
I carried on working in London for another 5 years but it wasn’t long before I found tube travel a bit anxiety making. I’d see a bag on a seat and decide to get off at the next stop and wait for another train. It didn’t help that our office went on to have a couple of bomb scares in the following months and I discovered that my job as fire warden extended to going in and “searching” for …. well, fuck knows what to be honest. Health and safety may have since gone mad (allegedly) but it didn’t even exist back then, searches not even meeting the threshold of perfunctory.
The Good Friday Agreement was a long way off but I stopped working in London and didn’t really think about it any more until a business trip to Belfast where I was told (when I got there) about how totally naive I was being about the risks of visiting, and what really went on day to day. I can’t explain why, but it actually made me feel far more vulnerable than the attack in the park. I was never happier to leave somewhere (and had a great return visit once peace broke out, including a slow drive up the Falls Road).
Roll forward 43 years and one of the UK factories belonging to the company I work for is broken into one night and protestors climb onto the roof – we make parts for a variety of military aircraft, some of which ended up with the Israeli air force which was enough to get us listed as a “weapons manufacturer”. It was the middle of the night and whilst the building was damaged, there was no threat to life, a publicity stunt from beginning to end. An American colleague, a few days later is leading forth about the unacceptability of terrorism and how “endangering” staff wasn’t going to be tolerated, and how she planned to fly out to help help manage the situation.
I found myself getting surprisingly angry and bit back saying many of us Brits, of a certain age, were more than familiar with what actual terrorism looked like, and this wasn’t the same thing. On reflection I was doubtless a bit heavy handed, but it also made me think I wasn’t perhaps quite as over what happened as I thought. Either way, my thoughts are with those who have really suffered.
Christmas 1983 was doing last minute shopping in London. We were in Oxford St and decided we would visit Harrods later would be my first visit.
Around lunchtime a bunch of police vehicles roared down Oxford St, we ducked into a pub for lunch and just when we were walking into it we heard a loud bang. It didn’t surprise us too much as we were expecting some sort of bomb going off that day. We had a few pints and lunch then left the pub to total chaos, the Harrods’ bomb had gone off and there were reports of other bombs all over London.
Managed to finally get into a tube station, some were closed, and exit the area and then heard the grim news. Still haven’t been to Harrods.
I was at the counter in the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, and heard the blast from a couple of miles away. I thought nothing of it, until I attempted to go back to King’s Cross by tube, but had to walk there instead, then got home to find my mum in bits with worry.
The other part of it for me that day was I had completely by accident bumped into a girl that I had fancied at university 200 miles away, we had graduated a few months earlier. We got on really well and had lunch/drinks. I remember she told me she was travelling to India in the New Year. In all the chaos we got separated and I had no address or telephone number. Never saw her again.
I live in Northern Ireland so you might you might expect me to say ‘yes’ but no, not really. The closest was having to traipse out of work circa 1990 a couple of times, maybe more – when I worked for a few months in a city centre office job – whenever there was a ‘bomb scare’. This sort of thing happened all the time back then in NI – if it had happened in London, it would be top of the national TV news; in NI, it often didn’t even make the local TV news. You just shrugged your shoulders and got on with it.
Obviously, that compares in no way to the Bondi situation. It’s only when one lives in a perpetually ‘troubled’ time and place that one becomes ‘used to’ abominations. Notoriously, a UK Home Secretary in the early 70s spoke of aspiring to get NI to ‘an acceptable’ level of violence – one that GB could pretty much ignore.
No, but my son has had a couple of lockdowns for school shooter; Dad missed one of the IRA bombs in London by not very much, and I went to school in Guildford.
Bondi shook me a lot. After 5 years in Australia, I considered it home, and what happened is just so not Australian. It gave me puase to compare that reaction to the one I had about Brown University, which is that it seems like just another day in America.
I saw the 7/7 bomb in Russell Square from about 100 yards away. I didn’t know about the earlier terrorism on the Underground, and just thought “bloody foreign students”. Then there was a massive Ker-Rump, all the paper went into the sky, as did all the birds in the square – and all the folk upstairs on the bus, smeared as particles up the side of BMA House. it went silent, then as one, we reached for our phones. Loved ones contacted or not, then the injured started coming through, some with blood pouring down their faces. I went on to my meeting, avoiding streets with plate glass, but it had been cancelled. as had all trains out of London that day. I visited a pal in Finsbury Park, and got (therapeutically) stoned. I counter-conditioned the post-event stress reaction, so I think it was justified. I loathe folk finding agit-prop excuses for violence and terrorism. It always ends up with people being killed, and some excitable twat finding an excuse to celebrate it.
I was in London on the day of the 7/7 bombings. We had been made aware of ‘travel disruption due to an incident’ announced on the train on the way in. There were sirens everywhere, and I got caught up with police ushering people urgently away from Leicester Square because there were rumours of a second bus bomb. I remember hordes of people walking silently on foot across Waterloo Bridge towards the station to get out of London. It was frightening, surreal and as close to that kind of mindless barbarity as I ever want to get.
Amen to that. I was due to be in London on 7/7 but in the end didn’t need to go. Mrs. T was in rural France with her parents and a baby Twang Jr having mild hysterics until we managed to make flaky mobile contact. A few days later I was in the office in Watford and went to an all religions memorial ceremony at lunch time which was terribly sad and very dignified. Each leader spoke, unified in despair at what had happened. Thankfully no whataboutery ensued. I wonder if that would be possible today.
Hardly a brush with terrorism, as I slept through it all. Only when I was riding my motorbike into work for an early shift the next morning, I was frustrated to find that every possible route to work seemed to be blocked with cones. Eventually, I found a copper at one of the roadblocks and explained that I needed to get to Victoria Station. “No mate, you don’t. We’ve been told to tell traincrew to report to Piccadilly Station.”
The MEN Arena is right above Victoria Station. I’d never even heard of Ariana Grande. So, I was distanced from it, but many of the late shift were all too close to hand. One colleague bringing his last train into Victoria said it looked as if the whole arena had lifted off its foundations.
There is now a permanent memorial to the victims on the concourse, mementoes replenished regularly, so it’s never far from our minds.
My former wife worked in an office block in Melbourne , the same office block attacked in what came to be known as the Queen St massacre.
She was in an upper level at the time. I finally got through to a coworker to check on her, the sadness just dripped from the telephone.
I was a student in Brighton in 1984 & heard the Grand Hotel bomb explode in the middle of the night. I was at Aintree in 1997 (for work) when the IRA rang about an hour before the Grand National was due to commence, to say there was a bomb in one of the grandstands. 60,000 people evacuated, chaos, spectators, jockeys, horses etc in the streets of Liverpool around the racecourse.
When I first came to Sydney in 1998 I lived in Tamarama near Bondi, so know the area well, heartbreaking to see this sort of stuff still happening. Daughter the younger (16) is absolutely mortified.
Mercifully, the closest I’ve been is roughly 48 hours. I was working for an IT consultancy business with offices in London, Bristol and Manchester. I had to go to the Manchester office for a meeting at midday. I disembarked from the train at Piccadilly and set off strolling towards our office.
I’d never been to that office before, I just knew the street address, so I called them up to ask how I’d find our specific building. “Oh, you can’t miss our building” they said, “we’re in the building on our street that’s without any intact windows on the ground floor – they were all blown out by Saturday’s bomb.”
The casually mentioned ‘Saturday’s bomb’ had gone off streets away from the office, but the blast was so strong it had taken out large windows over a huge area, and we’d lost all of ours at ground level. Corporation Street, a block or so away, had been virtually obliterated.
One day in the 90s I was sitting on the concourse at Manchester Piccadilly, waiting for my train home to Lancaster. A woman, wearing a loud leopard-print jacket IIRC, walked past me and left a carrier bag on the next bench along and then through the barrier to her platform without breaking stride. I mentioned to bag to station staff who picked it up and looked inside without seeming too worried by it.
I felt slightly daft, but confident that I had done the right thing. This was, of course, decades before every rail passenger was told, ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right …’ every 5 minutes. That confidence was reinforced the very next day, when there was an IRA firebomb campaign which involved leaving small incendiary devices in shops across Manchester City centre.
Three times when I lived in Israel. A suicide bomber was shot on the security fence of my kibbutz. A katyusha missile landed close enough to blow me arse over tit and a PLO gun boat straffed my accommodation. When you’re 18 a lot of things just go over your head… literally.
Blimey Clive. I lived in Israel for 6 months without any hassle at all other than getting stuck in the West Bank one night when we shouldn’t have been there and spending the night on the floor of the local police station rest room… That could have gone quite badly but didn’t.
Guess it depends where and when … I was right up in the north west corner north of nahariya
I was near Nazareth.
About half past ten?
I was gonna do that exact same joke, on account of it being brilliant and everything, but I checked the lyrics first. Turns out it’s not “half past ten“! Who knew?
I did. It’s “half past dead”, and I didn’t hitch, there we got a bus.
Robertson was a famously poor speller. I lost count the times I told him; shoe or tree times at least, probably as much as gate.
And do you take a load off Annie or Fannie?
Fannie obviously
I always thought it was Granny!
In the Summer of 1971 I got a summer job at the Electricity Board of Northern Ireland HQ which was on the Malone Road at its Junction with Stranmillis Rd in Belfast. I think the office workforce was about 600 and I think it’s safe to say they were overwhelmingly Protestant. I was 17 at the time and had been there about 6 weeks doing menial tasks in the drawing / design office. On 25th August the Fire Alarm went off. We all ignored it as we assumed it was a drill. Eventually a guy from the office next door stuck his head round the door and said “Apparently it’s a bomb scare, we’ve all got to evacuate”. Bomb scares were a fairly new thing but in most cases they were just that, a scare with no actual bomb involved. We starting leaving and I quickly realised that I’d forgotten my pack lunch. I was on the point of turning back when it occurred to me that it would be a pretty sad story I’ve been found blown up in an empty office with a lunch box in my hand.
We walked down a couple of flights until we could see the main lobby where a large group of people were trying to negotiate the 2 revolving doors. Like all such doors they were capable of being folded so as to create 2 non-rotating gaps, thus allowing a much faster throughput. This measure had not been put in place. We went through and I could see that everyone before us had turned left and were walking along the side of the large building. Someone, thank goodness, said let’s get as far away from the building as we can. We set off across the hallowed lawns and got close to the boundary fence from where we could see people still following the building wall. We hadn’t stopped for long before our cheery banter was interrupted by a dull, deep and long sound. Not loud, more of a rumble and throb, enough to make our collective hearts sink. Within what seemed like seconds were heard screams, shouting and sirens, followed remarkably quickly by Police and Ambulances tearing up the drive, across the front of the building and round the other side. In quick succession we saw stretchers coming out, ambulances leaving and more arriving. We were all sent home. I lived about a mile away as the crow flies and my mum, told me the bang had been colossal from our kitchen where she’d been preparing our dinner. She likened it to the Blitz in London. We heard on the news that the bomb had been placed under a Fire Exit staircase, a route normally only used for emergency evacuations. As a result a 23yr old man was killed and 35 people injured, many with wounds from flying glass. We saw an Electricity Board spokesman on the TV saying that all safety measures had been put in place and that entry to the building was controlled at all times. In my short experience there, neither statement was true. The state of the revolving door being a case in point.
This incident was deemed particularly significant as it was the first bombing of a civilian target during The Troubles. It was many decades later that I read on BBC News that the guy who was murdered in this incident had a best mate called Peter Robinson and it was his death that determined Peter Robinson to go into politics.
In about 2010 I attended a practical exam for a H&S certificate, held in the Britannia Hotel on Portland St Manchester. I was one of about 10 attendees. We had to sign in and were given a collective Safety Briefing which included what to do if a fire alarm went off. A few hours later it did. Within probably less than a minute a guy in a Marshall’s vest appeared and told us to drop everything and follow him. We soon arrived at the top of the impressive wide marble staircase and I could see hotel staff in the lobby wearing Red hi-viz, carrying walkie-talkies and guiding people to the assembly point at a car park round the corner. I told the guys I was with that I was speaking from experience and that we should get as far away from the windows as possible, rather than follow the building line. We crossed the 4-lane road and took a wide route round to the assembly appoint. Fairly soon a Marshall arrived and told us we could go back in. The difference between the 2 experiences I have described is quite striking. I wrote to the Hotel Manager and congratulated him and his staff on their exemplary performance. The first experience probably explains why I have little tolerance for the “Elf & Safety gone mad” brigade. As far as I’m concerned they can feck off and stay there.
I worked at a Guildford high street bank for 2 years in the early 80s. It was when I was 16-18 years old and it was a busy place. Customers would sometimes leave bags unattended in the main banking hall area and I was often asked to go out there and remove them. It was just one of those things a junior did and I never questioned it. On one occasion, the older colleague who had sent me out to get one was watching from behind the reinforced glass. He comically covered his head when I picked up the bag. I laughed and then thought “hang on a minute…”. This is where you’d think I’d lay a complaint or something, but I didn’t.
I was at school in Woking and remember the lads coming in from Guildford the morning after.