The golden light of a Sydney summer afternoon at Bondi Beach has long symbolised a specific, hard-won Australian joy. For comedian and writer Alice Fraser, it represented a lifetime of safety and community. That perception was violently fractured three weeks ago, when a deadly attack at the nearby Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre left six people dead, including the assailant.
A Lifelong Sanctuary Shattered in an Instant
Fraser, who grew up in and around the iconic eastern suburbs beach, describes Bondi as the postcard of Australia. It manifested, for her, the nation's egalitarianism, its cultural mixing pot, and its simple, sun-drenched peace. The attack on April 13th, 2024, irrevocably changed that. She recounts the mundane decision that likely saved her life that Sunday evening: opting for a quiet night at her father's house instead of taking a British friend for fish and chips at Bondi, fearing the crowds on a beautiful day.
"Then we heard a chopper and then another, and then my phone started buzzing," she writes, marking the moment the horror pierced her world. The subsequent flood of information – the rising casualty numbers, the confirmation of the rabbi's death, the fear for friends and neighbours – transformed her spiritual home into a place of trauma.
The 'Reasonable Man' and the Unreasonable Horror
Fraser invokes a poignant legal concept from her studies: the idea of "the reasonable man". In Australian law, this abstract figure is defined as "the man on the bus to Bondi". The phrase once made her smile, wondering who on her regular bus route embodied this ideal. Now, in the aftermath, she confesses, "I guess I’m not the reasonable man."
She finds herself unable to engage with the immediate geopolitical contextualising of the tragedy on social media. While acknowledging the complex global tensions referenced – from immigration and Israel to broader cultural wars – she asserts a simpler, starker truth. "It’s actually just people," she states. "It’s people who went to a place where people were, unprotected and joyful, and the people who came used guns to force bits of metal into the people who were there so that the parts inside their bodies would stop working and they’d die. The rest is set dressing."
Layered Memories Against a Backdrop of Fear
The essay is a powerful tapestry of personal history woven against the new backdrop of fear. Fraser recalls childhood swims beyond the breakers, her twin aunts swimming laps at the Icebergs pool, and her grandmother's choice of Australia as a haven after surviving the Holocaust. Her own motherhood is rooted there, connected through a WhatsApp group named "Bondi Beach Mums".
This deep personal history makes the present alienation so profound. She describes now taking the bus through Bondi with her children, her hand staying put in her daughter's, unable to alight. "I can’t bear to be on the bus to Bondi with my children and look around me with untrusting eyes, to feel the air changed and warped by horror," she explains. The doors close, and the bus drives on, the familiar landmarks blurring through tears.
While friends and community leaders have rallied, creating memorials and asserting resilience, Fraser articulates a raw, personal grief. She hits a limit of understanding, rejecting the reframing of the murder of "Jews at the beach" into a geopolitical proxy war. For her, the central, awful fact remains: a profound violation of a place built as a "monument to safe people in the sun, in peace, together." The challenge now is to see if that monument, and the feeling of safety it fostered, can ever be fully restored.
