We came to the lake like tens of thousands of Canberrans with mixed emotions.
We came for the spectacle, the carnival, the wow-ee of a building collapsing before us. We were in a unit on the 16th floor of Capital Tower.
In our group several had been born at the hospital. We had experienced hope and fear there. We thought about our lives and those of people close to us. Motor-cycle accidents; births; disease and death. We thought about chance.
These profound thoughts were bizarrely mixed with the childish delight in seeing the big bang. We jostled for best position on the balcony; we set up cameras and looked through binoculars. We commented on the massing crowd far below. We had some pre-dinner drinks and nibblies.
I recalled a university friend who was in Canberra Hospital for 18 weeks with a broken femur. On sunny days he was wheeled outside on that splendid peninsula and we sneaked him in some beer and dope. He needed it.
I thought about 26 years ago as a nervous first-time father.
I thought about the endless calls to the hospital as a cadet journalist, and writing the oxymoronic formula: “” . . . two men were in a satisfactory condition in hospital.”
Then “Bang”. The fireworks went off. The coundown. Then nothing.
While we were waiting, two of us with media connections rang in to find out if anyone knew what the delay was.
Half an hour later came the implosion and the enormous pall of smoke.
“”Wow-ee. That was amazing.”
“”I think I got some great photos.”
“”Did you see the way the tower toppled?”
“”Yeah, but look at Sylvia Curley House. It doesn’t seem to have collapsed properly.”
“”Let’s have lunch.”
And then a call came to the other person with media connections.
“”Someone has been killed.”
It was jaw-dropping and eye-widening. I rang and confirmed it.
I was sickened. So were the others. I felt guilty about the death and about engaging in the carnival that caused it. At that stage we did not know how old the dead person was, whether male or female. But the death was not external to us. We could not be indifferent to it in the way we could to other people we also did not know who died yesterday in Canberra.
The many thousands of Canberrans who watched the demolition yesterday were proximate to the death. And the learning of it will be embedded in our memory for a long time because it happened precisely at the time nearly all of us, if not all of us, were thinking about life, birth and death, hope and fear, joy and despair, and chance and causation, as we pondered the demolition of the building that staged them.
Internet:
crispin.hull@canberratimes.com.au