story9359.xml

story9359.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-06-30

I'm from Tasmania, Australia. On September 11, I had been in the USA for about two months, and was staying with my friend in California, after having visited other friends on the East coast. In fact I'd flown out of Boston a few weeks earlier.

I have severe tinnitus and insomnia, andhad just managed to get to sleep at about 6.30 am when my friend knocked on the door and then moe or less burst in, babbling about planes hitting the WTC and the Pentagon, and one tower collapsing and how he was sorry to wake me up, but this was the biggest news story since Pearl Harbour. My head was screaming like a banshee, but I staggered downstairs in a daze and watched the telecast coming live from New York. Some 15 minutes later we watched the second tower come down, live. I have to say that is the most compelling image I think I have ever seen on television, including the first moon walk.

Like millions of people I suppose, we spent the rest of the day in fron of the TV watching updates. Finally Brad decided he couldn't stand it any more, and we went out to get something to eat. I suppose it was an indication of how upset he was that I think it was his decision to go to Taco Bell. Normally I'd have to drag him kicking and screaming in there, as he loathed the food. I remember it was pretty busy, but also very quiet, and nobody was talking about the attacks. After having been saturated with it for 10 hours on TV, this seemed almost surreal. There had been a similar sort of event, on a much smaller scale of course, in home community of Hobart, Tasmania in 1996 when a gunman went on a rampage and killed 35 people. After that strangers would come up to you in the street and start talking about it, and it would all be very emotional. But after 9-11 it seemed more like nobody knew how to react; as if we were all almost scared to bring it up. Instead US flags started appearing in catr windows, in the windows of peiople's houses; people would be selling US t-shirts in the carparks of supermarkets. The local copy shop, rather tastlessly I thought, was selling laminated copies of the front cover of the newspaper from September 12.

I stayed with BVrad for another 3 weeks before flying back to Australia, where I was amazed to find people seemed perhaps more openly obsessed with 9-11 than they had been in the USA. There was a very great deal of solidarity and sympathy for America back in Australia at the time.

I remember the eerie emptyness of LAX on October 1st when I flew out.

I suppose that my emotions as a visitor must have been different to most Americans - though I had been to the USA so many times that I thought of it as a second home. My emotions at the time... it's difficult to explain. I think the sheer scale of the thing was ovewhelming and rather numbing. I didn't feel terribly frightened or angry or emotional most of the time at all. However, sometimes some 'little' thing would hit me, like buying Newsweek and seeing the photos of people jumping out of the burning towers, and suddenly it would hit me in the guts really hard. I guess watching one person jump from a building brings it home much harder than watching a building collapse from two miles away.

I suppose if I had a dominant sensation in those weeks it was that something had changed. What I don't think many of us realised at the time, was just how long-reaching and fundamental that change would be.