JENI O’DOWD: The sickening phone call I received from my daughter at Bondi Beach as the shooting unfolded

I was at home, happily watching TV and drinking wine, when I got a text from my daughter asking me to buy her a bikini before it sold out.

Another teenage urgency. I was about to respond when another message appeared: “Mum, there’s been a shooting at Bondi, but don’t worry, we are safe x.”

I thought, what a terrible joke. What a dark, stupid joke. She must be testing whether I had read her message. I was about to tell her how unfunny it was when my phone rang.

My friend. The mother of one of the girls my daughters were with. Her voice was shaking. “There’s been a shooting. The girls are OK. They’re safe. A woman told them to run.”

Nothing was on the news yet. Nothing made sense. This was Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on a Sunday evening.

This was Australia. This was never expected to happen.

Later, I found out that after the first shots were fired, a woman yelled at the girls to run. She pulled them inside her house and told them to stay put. An American woman and her husband, strangers, who did precisely what you hope someone would do if your child needed help.

That kind, beautiful stranger later rang me to say the girls were OK. I don’t think she understood what that phone call did to me. Or maybe she did. Parents usually do.

As the news caught up, I saw the footage. Two men dressed in black. Semi-automatic weapons. That awful casualness of people carrying weapons like they’re props in a film.

They weren’t firing warning shots; they were reloading three or four times. Twelve shots in one video alone before it cut off. This wasn’t a moment of madness. This was planned. This was equipped. This was execution.

And my daughters and their friends had been under the bridge they were shooting from just minutes before the first shots rang out.

Minutes. That’s the difference between a normal night and a parent’s worst nightmare.

Earlier that day, I’d been watching the coverage of the US Brown University shooting: two students dead, nine wounded, a gunman at large. I’d felt that familiar mixture of horror and gratitude. “Thank God we don’t live in America,” I’d thought.

But here we are. Twelve people dead at Bondi Beach. A Hanukkah celebration, which is now a massacre.

The man whose house sheltered my girls drove them home. Later, I took them to McDonald’s because they were starving and I needed to do something normal.

On the drive back, one of them had seen the television screen at McDonald’s. “Mum,” she said quietly, “at least 10 are dead.”

Ten people. Ten families destroyed. On a Sunday evening at the beach.

Earlier in the day, I’d been writing about how Anthony Albanese was failing as Prime Minister for not ordering an investigation into the expenses scandal. Now I don’t care. A week and a bit before Christmas, and all I want is for innocent people to be safe.

How does this happen? How does violence from conflicts thousands of kilometres away manifest in gunfire on our beaches?

It’s all about anti-Semitism and how two men with guns thought murdering Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah would solve anything.

But the sickening truth is violence doesn’t solve anything. It only creates more grief, more trauma, more children who will grow up remembering the day they ran from gunshots at the beach.

My girls are safe. But other families received different phone calls. I keep thinking about the couple who sheltered them. About the split-second decisions that saved lives. About how she saw danger and ran toward my children instead of away from them.

About how she knew what to do because perhaps, coming from America, she’d thought about this scenario before.

We’re not supposed to have to think about these things in Australia. We’re not supposed to calculate exit routes at the beach. We’re not supposed to text our children asking if a shooting is real or just a bad joke.

But here we are. At least 12 people are dead at Bondi, and more are injured. All I can do is hold my daughters close, thank two strangers I’ll never be able to thank enough, and grieve for the families who weren’t as lucky as mine.

Eleven days before Christmas. Twelve families will have empty chairs at their tables. And the rest of us will try to understand how paradise became a crime scene.