Bondi Junction stabbings: Let Sydney feel anger and grieve today, then we can talk about mental health

Opinion: We should have a conversation about mental health, but please lets not have that talk today. Not while we’re filled with rage and sadness, with flags at half mast, and lives still in the balance.

I’ll have a conversation about mental health, and support, and letting people slip through the cracks some other time.

But not now. Please, not today.

Not today, as a city wakes and tries to move from shock to the next stage of grief.

Not today, as floral tributes outside a shopping centre where horror unfolded on Saturday at the hands of a mass killer grows by the minute.

Not today, with flags at half mast, and lives still in the balance.

Flower tributes continue to grow at Bondi Junction on Monday morning. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Some of us can’t find the energy, headspace, detachment, grace or understanding. I will. But not today.

Today I need to be angry. I just don’t have the capacity for anything but desperate, visceral rage.

A teddy bear left at with poignant messages among the tributes. Picture: Rohan Kelly

I don’t need to be told to see the other side and show empathy and understanding of an unmedicated mental illness.

Not right now.

Not when a bloke on a schizophrenia-fuelled stabbing rampage saw a baby in a pram and leaned in to stab her.

Then turned to her mother to deliver the wounds that would ultimately kill her.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (centre) walks with New South Wales Premier Chris Minns (centre right) and other officials as they prepare to leave flowers outside the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping mall. Picture: AFP

And then moved on in search of the next victim as the mortally wounded mum, life force pouring from her, thrust her bleeding baby girl into the arms of strangers, begging them to save her.

The bitter, gut-punching irony — when another stranger had just administered the wounds that would kill her. And five others.

Because that’s what I see every time I close my eyes.

I don’t see the images of a mass killer, surrounded by a fast-growing pool of his own blood as the brave cop who just shot him does CPR.

I don’t see even more blood — as well as handbags and shopping bags — surrounding the bodies of two shoppers near a store entrance, whose greatest crime, it may soon emerge, was being female.

I don’t see a mentally ill mass murderer, blade in hand, running, swerving, slashing, changing direction, avoiding some people, lurching towards others as he looks for the next victim.

What I see is a nine-month-old blood-soaked baby. Attacked in her pram.

And right now, that’s what I can’t get past.

So don’t talk to me about failed mental health services, and people slipping through the cracks and how 99 per cent of people with a mental illness never harm a fly, because right now it’s not sinking in. I know all that, deep down. I always have.

But today I can’t appreciate it. I can’t hear it or see it.

It’s drowned out by the terrified screams of innocent shoppers.

It’s blinded by visions of bodies and blood.

Don’t tell me how life must have been for him as schizophrenia played havoc with his mind.

Not when the baby he stabbed in her pram won’t know the mother who died still protecting her.

Not when all I can think about is how life will be for her.

Not now. Not today.