The thirty-five were not statistics, and the day is best remembered through them. They were tourists and locals, the young and the old. Kate Scott was twenty-one. Anthony Nightingale was forty-four, and his last recorded words, as he understood what was happening, were a cry of "No, not here." Visitors had come from Malaysia and New Zealand; a New Zealand winemaker, Jason Winter, had been pitching in to help the busy cafe staff. Whole families were torn apart, parents and children both. The youngest to die were Alannah and Madeline Mikac, killed with their mother Nanette as they tried to flee. Twenty-three more people were wounded and lived, carrying that day with them. Australia would spend years studying not only how to respond to such an event, but how to care for the survivors, the first responders, and the small community of social workers left to hold a shattered town together.

The terrible part is that someone had said it aloud, years before. In 1987, after a series of mass shootings across Sydney, Melbourne and the Northern Territory, the Premier of New South Wales, Barrie Unsworth, walked out of a national gun summit and warned that it would take a massacre in Tasmania before Australia found the will to reform its firearms laws. He was pointing to the state's long resistance to change. Nine years later his grim prediction came true in the worst imaginable way. Across the country, gun ownership had been a patchwork of state rules, with semi-automatic rifles and shotguns far too easy to obtain. The man responsible at Port Arthur held a licence for neither a car nor a gun, yet had armed himself with two semi-automatic rifles. The loophole the warning had named was still wide open on the morning of 28 April 1996.

What Australia did next became a model studied around the world. Just six weeks earlier, the Scottish town of Dunblane had lost sixteen children and a teacher in its own school massacre, and the two grieving communities, Port Arthur and Dunblane, formed a lasting kinship across the world. In Australia, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard, moved with unusual speed and political courage. Within two weeks of the massacre, his government and every state and territory agreed to the National Firearms Agreement, banning most semi-automatic and pump-action weapons, requiring uniform licensing, a registry, and a waiting period for sales. A national buyback followed, and some 643,000 firearms were handed in and destroyed, funded by a temporary levy. Howard pushed it through over real opposition, including from his own side of politics, and the reform has endured as the defining response to the tragedy: a country deciding, almost overnight, that this would not be allowed to happen again.

Port Arthur did not become a monument to horror. The community refused to let it. The Broad Arrow Cafe, where so many died, was deliberately left as a ruin and made the centre of a memorial garden, dedicated in April 2000 as a place for quiet reflection rather than spectacle. Out of the loss of the Mikac family came the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, launched in 1997 by Walter Mikac and others to support child victims of violence and to fight bullying, work it still carries on today. The composer Peter Sculthorpe wrote a piece in memoriam for those who died and for those who live with the memory of it, first performed in Hobart that same winter. The convict ruins beyond the garden have stood for nearly two centuries; the memorial among them is much younger, and far more raw. Visitors come now to walk both, and to remember thirty-five people who came here for an ordinary day and never went home.