Born in 2002

If you were born in 2002, the Bali bombings on October 12th were Australia's September 11 — a trauma that was, in some ways, more personally devastating because Bali was a place where ordinary Australians went on holiday. 202 people were killed in the bombings at the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar in Kuta, 88 of them Australian. The shock was total: the television footage of the burning streets, the desperate phone calls, the names read out on the news one by one — the Australians who had gone for a cheap, easy tropical holiday and had not come home.

The grief was national and specific. John Howard flew to Bali. The country's relationship with its region — with Islam, with terrorism — was permanently changed.

The year before, September 11 had been a distant horror; this was in a place where every family seemed to know someone. The aftermath — the funerals, the inquiries, the politics of the response — ran through the summer and beyond. In the way that countries do, daily life continued around the grief: the cricket, the football, the beach, the barbie.

But Bali had embedded itself in the national consciousness in a way that nothing had since the fall of Singapore, sixty years before.