This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. As Sydneysiders from across the city gathered outside Westfield Bondi Junction the morning after it was the scene of a brazen knife attack that left six people dead, everyone said the same thing.

“I’ve always felt very safe here, like 100 per cent safe,” said Ashley, 46, who moved to Australia from the United States about 15 years ago and now lives down the road from the Westfield. “It’s a shock, it doesn’t really happen around here.”

Warning: the following story and images may distress some readers

It was this sense of disbelief that drew a stream of people with tears in their eyes, flowers in their arms and often with children in tow, to the scene to pay their respects on a clear Sunday morning — the least they felt they could do as they tried to process how something like this could happen in their community.

Some knew someone who was in the shopping centre around the time of the attack, others said they had been there just hours or days before, and everyone said they couldn’t believe that something so violent could happen in Australia, let alone in their backyard.

A shopping hub that is ‘the heart and soul of Bondi Junction’

While Bondi Beach is known all over the world, it’s the neighbouring suburb of Bondi Junction — with its high-rise apartment blocks, department stores, and the main train station connecting the eastern beaches to the rest of the city — where Bondi’s residents go to get things done. 

At the centre of it all is the sprawling Westfield, spread over two city blocks with a three-storey glass bridge connecting the two sides of the building. It is an economic and social hub that attracts people from all over Sydney’s east for their weekly grocery shop, to browse clothing stores, or just because it’s somewhere they can go to get out of the house.

“I go into that mall several times a day. It’s just what you do as a local. That’s where you go,” Ashley said. “It’s a very convenient area to live in. You can run in and get whatever you need at any time, and Saturday would have been crazy busy in there.”

That utterly pedestrian peace was shattered at 3:20pm on Saturday when a man wearing an Australian Rugby League jersey and brandishing a large knife entered the packed centre and began attacking people indiscriminately, sending shoppers bolting through the complex and stores into lockdown.

Five women and one man were killed and another 11 were hospitalised with injuries, including a nine-month-old baby whose mother, Ashlee Good, was killed in the attack. The identities of three further victims have been released: Dawn Singleton, 25, the daughter of well-known businessman John Singleton, Faraz Ahmed who was working as a security guard inside the mall, and Jade Young, 47.

The attacker was shot by a lone police officer at the scene. On Sunday, police identified him as Queensland man Joel Cauchi. The 40-year-old was known to Queensland Police.

Maureen Matthews, who has lived in the suburb for 75 years, described the Westfield as the “heart and soul of Bondi Junction”. On Sunday morning, on her way to church, she said that heart “had been smashed”.

Cafe crowds replaced by a crime scene

By 8am on Sunday, the shopping centre had transformed into a mammoth crime scene. As forensic teams worked to remove the bodies of victims that had remained in the building overnight, the body bags visible from the street below through the transparent walkways, piles of flowers began to appear at the entrances blocked off by police tape.

On the pedestrian shopping strip across the road from the Westfield, a pack of journalists and television cameras had replaced the usual Sunday morning cafe crowds. People walked past while pulling out their phones to snap a photo. Others gathered with takeaway coffees to commune with their neighbours.

A grandmother laid a bouquet and burst into tears. She has a new grandchild, she said, and was planning on taking the baby to Westfield on Saturday afternoon before deciding against it.

The number of stories of near misses underscored just how many people pass through the shopping centre on any given day. Buses carrying hordes of people to and from the beach literally pass through the middle of it. And as the tragedy unfolded on Saturday, messages to loved ones pinged across the city: Are you there? Are you OK?

Marina Makhlin, 37, who lives in Bondi Junction with her two young sons and runs a local real estate business, said she was at the shopping centre shortly before the attack. “It hurts because it’s your home, it’s innocent lives, and there’s no motive to really understand why it happened,” she said. While it was difficult to explain what had happened to her sons, she said it was important for them to come and lay some flowers “when you’re a bit lost about what’s going on”.

“It’s not something you’re used to in Australia … you see it happen around the world but it doesn’t happen in our own backyard,” she said. “People are just saddened, shocked, and searching for answers, but I don’t think we’ll ever really know all the answers.”

Others had travelled from further afield, like Mitchell Pennycuick, 30, who recently moved from Brisbane to Randwick, a few suburbs over. He learnt about the attack from a barrage of calls from friends asking whether he was OK. “I wanted to come … this is the first time in my life I’ve known of a mass-casualty event so close to home,” he said. “You never thought you would be someone carrying flowers down for a situation like this, but here we are.”

By late morning, a table was erected and scattered with notepads to collect messages for the victims’ families. A steady stream of people stopped to ask if they could do anything for them. One woman who wrote a message said she felt compelled to travel from her home in Maroubra to be there because she had visited the shopping centre earlier in the week. “It just hit,” she said through tears. “They just went shopping and this happened … it could happen anywhere.”

Motivation remains unclear

Many Sydneysiders will remember where they were on April 13, 2024, just as they remember where they were a decade ago when news broke of the Lindt Cafe siege, which left three people dead, including the perpetrator. “I was working in the city at the time [of the Lindt Cafe siege] and it feels similar,” Ashley said. “That eerily quiet feeling.”

Addressing media outside the shopping centre, NSW Premier Chris Minns, who flew back from a holiday following the attack, described it as a “very sad day in the history of New South Wales”.

“Sydney has suffered a horrifying and violent attack on innocent people who were doing something that everybody does on the weekend, and that is going shopping with their families and friends,” he said.

“I’ve seen some of the images of dads walking their kids out of the shopping centre, shielding their eyes, and you would never think that you would have to go through that in 2024 in a mainstream shopping centre on the first day of school holidays.

“I am devastated that those families and those kids have had to grow up so quickly.”

In the black hole of information about the man responsible, who was later revealed to have arrived in New South Wales a month ago, speculation took off — both on social media and in the whispered conversations on Bondi Junction street corners. The release of the alleged attacker’s identity on Sunday morning raised more questions.

“At this stage, we don’t know a motive,” Police Commissioner Karen Webb said on Sunday. “What we do understand so far is that there is no ideological motivation, we do understand that there is a history of mental health [issues] … but let me assure everyone that we are not looking for anyone else.”

Commissioner Webb said police were looking into whether the attacker targeted women. “That will form an obvious part of the investigation,” she said. “I mean, anyone seeing that footage can see that for themselves.”

While the community was in sorrow, Maureen Matthews said: “We’ll get back together, but with sadness in our hearts”.