At 9:41am on Monday, 15 December 2014, Man Haron Monis forced Tori Johnson, the manager of the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place, to call 000 and say that an Islamic State operative had taken hostages armed with a gun and explosives.
Eighteen people were held captive for more than fifteen hours. Twelve escaped in separate incidents. In the early hours of the following morning, Tori Johnson was shot and killed by Monis. Shortly afterwards, police stormed the café.
During the brief exchange of gunfire, Katrina Dawson – a lawyer, a mother, a friend – was fatally wounded by a deflected police bullet. Monis was killed at the scene.
Two innocent Australians were dead by the time the sun rose over Sydney the following day.
During the siege, Monis forced hostages to display a black flag bearing the Shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith) in the café window, prompting widespread belief that the incident was a terrorist act.
Negotiations took place throughout the day, but the situation escalated rapidly in the early hours of 16 December.
At the time, the nation was horrified - genuinely horrified. People stopped. They watched. They mourned. There was a collective sense that something had shifted, that Australia had crossed into territory we never believed we would have to navigate.
That shock now feels like a relic.
A decade later, acts of ideologically driven violence barely hold public attention. Stabbings, attacks, threats, and terror-related incidents flicker across screens, prompt a brief expression of concern, and are quickly replaced by the next headline.
What once provoked national soul-searching is now met with a shrug, a sigh, and a return to the day’s routine.
Here we go again. What’s for dinner?
This is not resilience. It is numbness.
Pink Floyd described it perfectly: comfortably numb. Not because the pain is gone, but because it has become familiar - and familiarity dulls outrage. When violence becomes background noise, society quietly adjusts its expectations downward. Standards slip. Lines blur. The unacceptable becomes merely unfortunate. Familiarity with violence - global and local - dulls the edge, while constrained debate, where plain talk on security, integration, or values risks labels, makes honest soul-searching rarer. Extremism does not vanish; it adapts when outrage fades.
The families of Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson have not grown numb. Nor have the surviving hostages, for whom that day never truly ended. But beyond those directly affected, there is an uncomfortable sense that collective memory has thinned - that the Lindt Café siege has been filed away as something tragic but finished.It wasn’t finished then, and it isn’t finished now.
Ideological fanaticism did not disappear with Monis. It persists - religious, political, and cultural - and in some cases is excused, rationalised, or cautiously tiptoed around. Meanwhile, public debate has grown more constrained, more fearful, and less honest. People sense that speaking plainly about security, values, or social cohesion now carries personal risk.The justice system is increasingly seen as weak where it should be firm, while governments appear expansive where they should be restrained. The result is a corrosive feeling that ordinary citizens are expected to absorb risk, remain silent, and simply “move on.”
That combination - violence without outrage, authority without accountability, and silence without consent - is deeply dangerous.
This reflection is not written to exploit tragedy or reopen wounds. It is written because forgetting is not neutral. Forgetting changes who we are.
A society that once recoiled in horror now absorbs the same kind of violence with weary acceptance. A nation that once asked hard questions now seems content to avert its gaze. And a culture that grows accustomed to extremism should not be surprised when extremism grows bolder.
We honour Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson not by candles and anniversaries alone, but by refusing to accept that this is just the way things are now.
If acts like the Lindt Café siege become little more than historical footnotes - briefly remembered before the next outrage arrives - then the most frightening loss is not safety, but conscience.
Australia remembers Martin Place. The real question is whether we have learned to live with it - or merely learned to accept it.
BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS
