I feel trapped. There isn’t a single time I attend where I don’t check my proximity to the exits, or imagine what I’d do if there was a fire, or worse, a shooter. The sense of being enclosed is unnatural, I can’t tell what time of day it is, I lose my sense of direction. It’s designed to be disorienting. It feels otherworldly. And never in a good way. They are designed to make you stay longer. They are by design, disorienting.
It makes people super vulnerable. Like a rat in a maze. A bug in a jar.
But it’s just shopping.
The worst is you’ll spend too much. It’s not a place anyone would have expected to die.
The setting is banal. It’s not a dark street. It’s not 1am. It’s 4.20pm.
Aren’t we safe in a public setting at 4.20pm?
But this weekend, for people in Bondi Junction, the unthinkable happened. They were chased and stabbed by a man with a knife while they were shopping in one of Australia’s fanciest Westfields.
It would have been challenging to get away. There’s a kind of daze you go into in those places which would have made registering what was happening slower.
I heard on the news that two women died outside Cotton On. I don’t know why, but that statement just seemed so strange and sad. I think of how young the staff are. I imagine their terror. I imagine two girls leaving Cotton On happy with their new t shirts, one still wondering if she should go back and get the grey one and then they’re stabbed and they die in a pool of blood. It’s a horror film. Except it’s real. It happened.
I can’t stop thinking about the baby. The sweet darling baby in the pram. How can anyone stab a baby? How can anyone stab anyone – but a baby? I think about all the families. The people who are now sitting with the unbearable grief of trying to work out what happened. Wondering ‘what if’. If one thing had been different and their loved one wouldn’t have been in the path of a very disturbed man. If they’d gone with them. If they’d gone to Chatswood. Or maybe just to Bondi for a swim.
I feel for the murderer’s family too. The shock that your son or brother could have caused such horror must be emotionally unfathomable. The red flags are so evident when there is an end point. Why don’t we see them before it’s too late?
The killings were gendered. Of the six people who were killed, five were women. Were the murders part of a misogynistic mission? Shopping centres tend to be populated by women. We are definitely more heavily represented in numbers on the ground. And first day of school holidays there are always lots of younger women. It’s somewhere 13-year-olds are allowed to go with friends with their birthday money. Because it’s safe.
So did Cauchi, the assailant, go there specifically to target women? I guess the police investigations will address this. I can’t see how this doesn’t add to the list of spaces where women die. We are not safe on the streets at night, not safe going for a mid-morning jog, not safe in our homes, and now not safe in public places at four in the afternoon. We live in a world where we can die at the shops. Where exactly are we safe?
Something is very very broken.
It has never been more important to understand what peace and non-violence actually mean.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
