Thousands in Australian day of mourning for Bali victims
Thousands in Australian day of mourning for Bali victims
David Millikin, Agence France-Presse, Sydney, Australia
Australians gathered in heartbreak on Sunday on a national day of mourning for more than 100 of their friends, relatives and compatriots killed in last week's bombing in Bali, a tragedy being lived here as Australia's Sept. 11.
Tens of thousands packed churches, sports fields, parks and private homes across the nation, praying, crying and voicing fears that their country -- long seen as too care-free and far removed to attract hate -- would never be the same again.
A minute's silence at noon united the nation.
Cricketers halted play, supermarket checkout lines fell silent and dozens of surfers formed a floating circle off the east coast in a moment of remembrance for the victims in Bali, a surfing mecca.
"Our pain is beyond comprehension," said the family of Angela Golotta, 19, the only Australian victim to be positively identified so far.
"The sheer futility of this senseless act of terrorism in the name of religion makes no sense," they said in a statement from their home in Adelaide.
"On October 12, that cruel act of flagrant disregard for innocent and joyful lives has created within us an overwhelming sense of pain, of rage and of a sorrow which does not abate," the governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir, told some 30,000 mourners gathered in the day's biggest event in a Sydney park.
To the mournful drone of an Aboriginal didgeridoo, relatives and friends of victims filed past a small remembrance pond in the park, dropping orchid petals into the water in memory of their lost ones.
After a week of grieving and heartbreak as distraught families hunted for missing loved ones or grappled with the loss of those confirmed dead, many emotions turned on Sunday to anger and fear of a world suddenly become vulnerable.
"It's just about on our doorstep, what's going on?" asked one emotional young woman, Carolyn, as she attended a memorial in the Sydney suburb of Coogee for six members of a local rugby team killed in the bombing.
"You really don't know if you walk out the front door on a morning whether you're going to return."
Prime Minister John Howard sent the same worrying message, warning his people that the Oct. 12 bombing may not be the last attack on the country.
"I don't want to sound alarmist but we are living in a different world," Howard said on television before attending a church memorial service in Canberra. "I can't give a guarantee it won't happen here."
He expressed his government's determination to hunt down the bombers, believed to be Islamic militants linked to the al-Qaeda network which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
But Howard and other leaders called on their fellow Australians to resist the temptation to lash out unjustly over the horror inflicted on them.
"There must be no attacks on mosques or Muslims," Father John Dupuche told a packed service at Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral.
And Howard appealed to his nation to "preserve the open, tolerant, harmonious, outward-looking generous Australian society for which Australia is so widely respected."
The Bali bombing targeted a nightclub packed with surfers, sports teams and holidaymakers and killed over 180 people, 103 of them believed to be Australian.
The bombing -- Australia's worst peacetime tragedy -- sparked anguished debate about whether the country was being punished for the government's staunch support of U.S. President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
Bush and his Secretary of State Colin Powell both sent messages to the Australian people on Sunday urging them not to let the Bali tragedy undermine their resolve.
Some of the most heartwrenching moments came in communities like Coogee, where thousands turned out at the local sports ground to remember the six lost members of the Dolphins rugby team.
Thousands more attended a candlelight ceremony on a sporting ground in Perth for that city's victims, who included seven members from one football team.