What happened in Bali has become September 11th for many Australians. Padraig Collins reports from Sydney on a country that has no history of terrorism
Australis'a loss of innocence was a theme constantly returned to yesterday - by politicians, talk-back radio shows and people going about their everyday life as best they could.
How else does a country with no history of terrorism deal with the fact that so many of its compatriots were brutally murdered at the weekend? Do not think that something that happens in another country is only peripherally connected to Australia by the fact that Australians died.
The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper summed up the mood with its banner front-page headline "Terrorism strikes home". Terror did not come to the mainland; it caught Australia at play in Bali.
At this stage, when no organisation has yet claimed responsibility, there is not much we can be sure of.
However, we know three things for certain: this was an act of terrorism; whoever perpetrated it was targeting Westerners; and they knew full well that the majority of those Westerners would be Australian.
During a condolence motion in the Australian parliament yesterday afternoon, the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, acknowledged that Bali was a preferred tourist destination for young Australians.
"So many of the young people in that club that night were members of Australian rules football teams, rugby league teams, rugby union teams," he said.
He later announced that next Sunday would be a National Day of Mourning. "I want people to reflect on the loss of life. I want people to reflect on the loss of innocence," he said.
The opposition leader, Mr Simon Crean of the Australian Labour Party, echoed Mr Howard's words when he told parliament that many of the victims were young people in the prime of their lives.
"The result was not just a loss of life, it was a loss of innocence and it was also, as the Prime Minister has remarked, very much a loss of mateship," Mr Crean said.
Around 400,000 Australians go to Bali each year. That amounts to 8 per cent of all outbound traffic from Australia.
They go because it is close, only three hours from Darwin and Perth, six from Sydney and Melbourne; because the Australian dollar goes far there; because the people are welcoming; and because it was considered a safe and fun destination for families and young people.
With up to 20,000 Australians in Bali at the time of the bomb, there are very few people who do not have at least some connection with someone caught up in the atrocity.
Friends of a friend of mine are there on honeymoon at the moment. They had planned to go to the Sari night-club on Saturday night, but changed their minds because they were too tired. A little decision may have saved their lives.
Five members of the Coogee Beach Dolphins rugby league team died in the bomb. A sixth member is missing. They had arrived on the island only that afternoon.
I was in Coogee on Saturday afternoon with my family. I used to live there 10 years ago and last visited it almost four years ago. I felt very contemplative about how much my life has changed in the decade since I lived there.
We went into a bar on the beach. I saw the same bar on TV last night. It is where the families and friends of the Dolphins players gathered to console each other. It is where they always go after matches.
One Sydneysider I spoke to yesterday said: "Bali is the most unlikely place that you could ever imagine anything like that ever happening. You never hear anything bad about Bali. Well, you didn't used to anyway.
"Quite a lot of Australians also go to Thailand, but there has always been the seedy side to Bangkok. Everyone who went to Bali always seemed to have a great time.
"There seems to be no way to look at this without thinking that Australians were deliberately targeted, like Americans were on September 11th," she said.
Comparisons with September 11th are also something being mentioned a lot in the past couple of days. "This is our September 11th in a way," said Dr Len Notaras of the Royal Darwin Hospital, where many of those flown out of Bali are being treated.
Three members of a New South Wales rugby club remain unaccounted for after being in the Bali night-club.
Mr Alex McKinnon, president of the Forbes Rugby Club of New South Wales, three of whose players are still missing after the bomb, also compared what happened to September 11th. He said that 25 members of the club were in the beachside precinct on Saturday "just in time to be blown up".
While the final death toll is not yet known, and many bodies are likely never to be identified, so burned are they, it seems certain that this will turn out to be Australia's worst "peacetime" tragedy.
Ninety-four people died in a mining explosion 100 years ago. The Gundagai floods 150 years ago left 89 dead. Thirty-five were killed in the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
Maybe a more appropriate comparison is with Gallipoli on August 7th-9th, 1915, when 2,200 Australians died in the battle for Lone Pine.
Whether what happened on Saturday night can be considered peacetime or not, Bali, often known as "the Island of the Gods", is forever tarnished in the eyes of most Australians now.
The gods were smiling on neither the victims of the bombing nor the native Balinese then.