Autumn in Sydney is the best time of year, so it’s no surprise that Ashlee Good had an idyllic Saturday.
As she walked in the sunshine with daughter Harriet in her arms, she realized she was wearing exactly the same outfit she wore nine months earlier, when she was still heavily pregnant. She took a photo and uploaded it to Instagram, alongside the photo she took last July, shortly before she went into labor. “9 months in versus 9 months out,” she captioned the cheerful snaps.
And then, because it really was a beautiful day, with the surf crashing over the road at Bondi Beach and the smell of grilled sausages wafting from the children’s play areas and the brightness of the light making all of us who live here think this is the best is. Out of the world, Ashlee also uploaded an adorable video of adorable Harriet sitting in her car seat nibbling on a piece of bread. As the sun’s rays danced on the little girl’s face, The Temptations’ song My Girl played in the background.
In the years to come, these images – proud moments captured by a loving mother – will mean more than Ashlee could ever imagine. Just hours later, mother and daughter were stabbed in the horrific attack at Westfield shopping center in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. With blood pouring from her wounds, the stricken mother’s last act was to reach into the pram to pick up Harriet, who had been stabbed in the stomach, and push her into the arms of two men. In shock, and as her life faded away, all that mattered to the 38-year-old osteopath was that her beloved only child was safe.
Ashlee Good, the 38-year-old who died trying to protect her daughter Harriet
As baby Harriet fights for her life after surgery, with her father, Dan Flanagan, at her bedside, what’s chilling about the stabbing that left six people dead and several others in critical condition is that it happened in the most ordinary and recognizable circumstances. institutions.
We all shop. We send our teenage children to work Saturday jobs at Sephora or McDonald’s or to make tea in the hair salons of these huge shopping centers. We give our young people their first taste of independence by letting them roam around with their friends.
Or, as I did that same afternoon at another Westfield, with the stabbing taking place on the other side of the harbour, we part ways and agree to meet half an hour later. “I love the nail polish,” I said to my daughter, leaving her to get a manicure while I took a shirt back to TK Maxx. It’s inconceivable that in those simplest, most prosaic moments I could have waved at her forever.
The stories that emerged on Saturday are difficult to process because it is a tragedy that could have happened to any of us. The dead were not in a war zone. They did not attend an American school where random killings are the sad result of weak gun laws. They weren’t in a skyscraper or at a concert where cowardly murderers know they can do the most damage. Rather, they were set in a shopping mall, amid scenes so ordinary they could take place anywhere in the world. A father takes his children to buy gifts for their mother’s birthday. A mother sending her 11-year-old son back to Woolworths to get a supermarket item she forgot. Teenagers celebrate the first day of the autumn school holidays by trying on Selena Gomez’s new range of blushers.
And then within that ease, that normality, comes a scuffle, a movement from the corner of an eye that does not fit with the rhythms and routines of shopping. Some see a man with a knife. They start running. Others freeze. A customer will later say that she felt a sharp pain in her back. Only later will she discover that it came from a knife. And then there is the panic. Is there one attacker? What if there is more? And what if there is a bomb? Just six years ago, this city was hit by the horrific siege at the Lindt Cafe, where an Islamic State-inspired gunman, believed to be carrying a bomb, held eighteen hostages for seventeen hours. Two lost their lives.
Police are continuing to investigate the scene of the mass stabbing at Sydney’s Bondi Junction that left six people dead and several others in a critical condition.
On Saturday, most encountered stores where staff rushed to slide down aluminum roller doors to keep people inside safe. Some hid in bathrooms or stairwells. And because there are multiple levels on this flagship Westfield, some took out their phones to capture the pandemonium unfolding on the floor below. It is those videos, of the man with a knife rushing towards shoppers and being confronted on an escalator by a hero with a bollard, that make us understand the danger like never before. Social media faces a lot of criticism, but it also tells the story of the world we find ourselves in in real time.
It also conveyed to us the astonishing courage of a senior female police officer. Inspector Amy Scott was working alone that afternoon when she heard reports of a man with a knife. Footage shows her sprinting through the mall, followed by a bystander who had grabbed a chair as a potential weapon. When she came up behind the attacker, later identified as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi, she yelled at him to put the knife down. He didn’t. That’s why she shot him in the chest.
Westfield Bondi Junction covers 1,412,860 square meters. It has 331 shops spread over seven floors. There are gyms and cinemas and 3304 parking spaces underneath. It’s a village within a village, offering Chanel to the rich and sushi bars to the barefoot surfers from the iconic beach just over a mile away. My oldest daughter lives nearby and was shopping there the day before. Her friends were downtown on Saturday. They heard the gun shoot and hid in a store.
Dawn Singleton was two years ahead of my daughter at the same high school. She is the daughter of one of Australia’s most famous businessmen, John Singleton. On Saturday, 25-year-old Dawn went shopping at Westfield for makeup for her upcoming wedding to childhood sweetheart Ashley Wildey. Ashley is a New South Wales police officer who had already completed his shift before the attack, but was recalled as police rushed to deal with the developing crisis.
He arrived at Westfield Bondi Junction unaware that Dawn, who had only bought her wedding dress last week, was inside. As a source told the Daily Telegraph: ‘He had arrived in Westfield when officers realized his fiancée was among the victims.’ He was taken from the scene to be comforted by family and friends. Because the mall was still a crime scene 24 hours later, neither he nor Dawn’s parents had been able to formally identify the body by Sunday afternoon.
Among the other victims was architect and mother-of-two Jade Young, who was remembered yesterday at the Bronte Surf Club, where she was a much-loved member. Also killed were 30-year-old security guard Faraz Tahir, a Pakistani refugee who came to Australia a year ago, and 55-year-old local woman Pikria Darchia.
While 3,000 cars were still parked beneath the mall on Sunday morning, the pressing question was: why? Initial fears that the attacker was Jewish or Muslim were quickly allayed. Joel Cauchi was a man with mental illness. He had never been arrested or charged with a criminal offence, but was ‘street checked’ by officers on the Gold Coast in December. Police believe he suffered from schizophrenia and used drugs including methamphetamine and psychedelics.
People, including first responders, left flowers in front of the scene of the crime in memory of those who died
Somehow, combined with the setting, it makes the attack even more pointless. How do you protect yourself when tragedy can strike anywhere, anytime? Is it safe to buy winter socks? A new television? Diapers for your baby? And what do you do if something does happen? Today I discussed with my daughters where best to hide, whether to run, whether to help and what trauma you might experience when witnessing events like Saturday’s.
But along with this terrible barbarity came the best of humanity. Much praise went to ‘Bollard Man’, Ukrainian Silas Despreaux, who fended off the attacker with a bollard, preventing him from entering a playground where dozens of young children were playing. Silas, who moved to Sydney from Ukraine three years ago, works as a trader. “He’s fine, he’s just shaken,” a friend said. “He says he’s not a hero, just an ordinary boy.”
And then there’s the father who appeared to have grabbed eye masks from a store so he could place them over his young children’s eyes to protect them from the carnage as they left the mall. If horror appears in the most unlikely places, so does common sense. Psychological scars can be deep.
We are grateful that the King and Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales have sent messages. Camaraderie, community, commonwealth – they matter, as Ashlee Good’s family so eloquently expressed in the hours after her death. Little Harriet, with her strawberry blonde hair and big eyes, was doing well after a lengthy operation, they said. And while they were reeling from the terrible loss of “a beautiful mother, daughter, partner, friend, an extraordinary human being,” they also wanted to thank the two men who held and cared for Harriet when Ashlee couldn’t. The little girl will grow up without her mother, but as Ashlee’s adoring photos prove, there was a great love for her.