PERHAPS the most startling aspect of yesterday’s hostage crisis in the centre of Sydney was the realisation of just how quickly our world can change.
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At 9.40am yesterday, Sydney was easing into the last full working week ahead of the Christmas break.
By 9.50am, the city was dealing with the first signs of a terrorist attack in, of all places, a coffee shop.
The sight of heavily armed police on the streets of Australia’s biggest city was one we never hope to see, yet we all knew this day was coming.
And the scenario seemed to be playing out exactly as police suspected – a lone operative carrying out a solo, seemingly random, attack.
“Lone wolf” attacks such as these are planned beyond the reach of the country’s sophisticated anti-terror agencies, and possibly without discussion with any other person.
And a cafe on a Monday morning is about as soft a target as you could want – there were certainly no heavily armed security guards at that door.
But in just a few short moments a single, armed zealot managed to shake the confidence of an entire nation.
We have been appalled by terror attacks in New York, London and Bali, but have still felt a sense of safety due to what used to be known as the “tyranny of distance”.
Now we face the tyranny of proximity as all of us have walked the street outside that unassuming cafe, and many of us have stepped inside.
Yesterday, all of Bathurst – indeed, all of NSW and much of Australia – was thinking how easily it could have been them inside that cafe at precisely the wrong moment.
Because while the world changed a little for all of us yesterday, it will never be the same again for those poor few who were stuck inside.