story11575.xml

story11575.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2005-07-01

It was 9pm in Perth, Western Australia. My cousin and I had just returned from picking her parents up at the airport. They had just flown in from England. We had settled them at the house they were staying at, near ours, and sat down to watch Rove Live on television. 10 minutes into the show, the screen switched to what looked like scenes from a new action movie. Confused, we switched channels, wondering what was going on. Once we realised that these images were on every channel, we listened and realised with horror, that someone had flown planes into the World Trade Center in New York. It took many minutes to realise that this was not a movie, or a prank, that this was real and horrifying.

I ran into my study and got onto Instant Messenger, trying to contact friends in the US. One friend, a news producer, in Michigan at the time, responded to my, "what is going on over there?" He, in shock, replied, "we don't know". No one at that point knew if the entire country was under attack, and people were still talking about more planes hitting other places. I raced to get a photo albumn out. I had pictures of me standing on top of the World Trade Center in 1995. That place no longer existed.

My cousin and I raced over to where her parents were staying, and woke them up. We sat around the television until about 2am Perth time, which would have been 3pm in New York. We couldn't watch any more of the horror. I think we all fell asleep in shock.

I was an elementary school teacher in Perth at the time. When I went to work the next morning, there was a television on in the normally quiet facutly room. Other stunned staff members were huddled around it. It had been 12 hours since the attack and night had fallen on New York City. While we had slept, the full horror of the attacks had been realised.

Talk of the, "planes hitting America" was all that the children wanted to focus on. There were many questions, fear and shock - from children a world away. I took my class onto the oval for PE. A plane, heading into Perth Airport to land, took its normal daily route, coming in to land right over the oval where we were standing. Half of my students dropped to the ground, covered their heads and looked at me with faces conveying absolute fear. It was at that point that I realised the world would never be the same, even for children a world away.