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He was the Bondi “lolly man”, a grandfather who insisted that life was way too short not to eat ice cream every single night.
She was the mother with the “Bond Girl” looks and a penchant for red manicures who spent her retirement delivering Meals on Wheels. Then there was the father who woke at dawn, not for his own work, but to ride his bike alongside his young son on his paper route, showing him that hard things are easier when you don’t do them alone.
Today the Herald has published a special tribute to 15 such people. For the past several weeks, our reporters Kate Aubusson, Eryk Bagshaw, Megan Gorrey, Julie Power, Angus Thomson and Amber Schultz, photographers Wolter Peeters and Louise Kennerley, and video journalist Taylor Dent have sat with the “memory keepers”, the families and friends who are the custodians of these lives.
We wanted them to help us look past the headlines of a tragedy and focus on the people who, until a Sunday two months ago, were simply like us and going about their lives in Sydney.
The public already knows a great deal of detail about what took place at Bondi on December 14. We have seen endless footage, and we know the coming royal commission will soon pick apart that horrendous day in minute-by-minute detail. But at the Herald, we believe it is important not to just remember a person for the way they died.
This project, spanning words, photos, video and audio, is about correcting that balance. You will read about a 10-year-old girl whose diary was filled with drawings of capybaras, a singer who could never resist a microphone, and a retired detective who never liked carrying a gun.
Aubusson, who made contact with many families in the hours after the attack and has driven this project, hopes that when readers hear these names in the coming years, they will think of the people they were before that day: “When they sang, danced, cooked, joked, loved and lived.”
Dent, who videoed interviews with some of the families, said it was heartbreaking to hear them remember their loved ones but inspiring to hear how they’d lived their lives. “Each had a fire to positively affect their community that couldn’t be extinguished and won’t be forgotten.”
While still very much in the grip of grief, the families have supported what we’ve been doing, although some were more comfortable and ready to share their stories than others. Gorrey said that while our impulse is often to avoid the “uncomfortable” conversations of death, it was the families’ courage that allowed us to bear witness to their loss. She hopes the project “reassures them that we as a city will not look away”.
Thomson says the tribute benefits greatly from having taken the time to sit down and speak at length with the families, when they felt they were ready to talk. “These conversations on the phone and in person helped us build a picture of the people they were, and the hole they have left behind.”
Schultz was moved by the families’ ability to speak with “devotion, passion, and clarity” in the wake of such violence. For her, the project is about creating a space where a life could be separated from a massacre. “We all cried,” she told me. “I walked away feeling like I had known them, too.”
In a week when Sydney’s social cohesion has again been tested, the stories of these 15 people act as a reminder of the vibrant, diverse and deeply personal threads that make up the fabric of our community.
Power, who spent hours sitting with the families, was struck that their stories are “a reminder to do more to understand the fullness of people we love and those we meet before it is too late to simply say, ‘tell me more’.”
We rarely publish a piece this long in the news pages of the Herald, but we feel this is an important piece that needed to be done. I’d like to thank the families who gave us their time and trusted us with their stories. I also want to acknowledge the work of the team here at the Herald, led by deputy state editor Michael Ruffles, who oversaw the project from conception to publication.
I encourage you all to read these tributes in full. We owe it to the 15 to remember not just how they left us, but the light they brought while they were here.
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Nick Ralston is the deputy editor and investigations editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. He has previously spent time as news editor, justice editor and world editor.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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