It was one of Australia’s worst mass shootings, and it’s still vivid for many victims’ families today.

This horrific act was merely the curtain raiser to 10 minutes of red hell. Thanks to a 10-round, Norinco-built, semiautomatic “Chinese Type 56” SKS rifle, and whatever broken thoughts poisoned Wade Frankum’s head at the time, seven more lives met their fatal ends.

Ten minutes of time on the cusp of Sydney’s western suburbs. Ten minutes of chaos that the then-residents of the Strathfield municipality will never forget.

Especially those residents like my mother and two sisters, who just happened to choose 3:30 that afternoon to buy bread not 10m from where Frankum unleashed hellfire on the place.

I remember standing on the balcony of our house on the Burwood-Strathfield border, watching as multiple helicopters buzzed overhead, thinking we were kinda-maybe at war, just before my mother’s cream-coloured Corolla screeched into the safety of our street.

How the members of my family and anyone who survived that day managed to keep things together enough to find an escape, is beyond me. Frankum’s indiscriminate violence left six wounded in addition to the eight murdered, and many residents with a disturbing memory.

The body of gunman Waite Frankum, where he committed suicide on the top floor of the car park at Strathfield Plaza. Picture: Michael PeriniSource:News Corp Australia

My beloved kin remember more than they’d like to share, but a few main events mark their experience of the bloodbath. The screaming. The bodies dropping with ease. My mother blindly bolting up an exit ramp, realising only one daughter was in tow, then re-entering danger to rescue the other, who was frozen and wailing in the middle of the plaza.

Then, the three managing to make it to the Corolla, thinking they were safe, only for the gunfire to grow louder, and for my mother to floor it out of the carpark with her head in her lap and no choice but to hope and pray for the best.

Not far from the Corolla, another car was in turmoil. The wife of a teacher from my school, who was in the middle of her own escape, received an unwanted tap on the window. It was Frankum, who’d stopped shooting with intent. After a quick, low-key verbal exchange, he shot himself in the head.

That exchange is said to have involved Frankum demanding a lift to nearby Enfield, but opting out to the sound of oncoming sirens. I remember hearing he had asked her where she was going and ended things after her answer lay in the opposite direction.

Either way, Frankum apologised to the woman before kneeling down and committing suicide. Any mention of that apology still chills me to this day.

A distraught relative is comforted at the scene. Picture: Channel NineSource:News Corp Australia

Not long after, that teacher’s wife’s numberplate was traced under suspicion of accessorising, and that teacher was wrongfully cuffed on his suburban front lawn.

I was only 10 years old at the time. I don’t think I ever really digested the reality of the event, but with a semi-adult brain that’s cottoned-on to the absurd frailty of things, I honestly cannot express how thankful I am for the moment when that long-gone Corolla screeched into our street.

Gunman Wade Frankum.Source:News Corp Australia

At the time, Frankum received the A Current Affair treatment, where his worn paperback copy of American Psycho and collection of violent movies, heck, even his copy of Crime and Punishment were blamed as fuel for his madness. As our mass-violence-less nation can contest as witnesses to the US shooting-spree crisis, these kinds of details are more often than not used as scapegoats aimed to distract from the core issues.

Not to get too earnest, but we are more than lucky to live in a country where this kind of overt, inhumane barbarism is a thing of the past (touch virtual wood). Say what you will about our political system, but those Howard-era gun laws, however they came to pass, actually mean something. They’ve created a climate where the Frankum method of soulless hate is unacceptable, and where no film, or book, or particularly, mental illness can bare the blame.

We as a nation will not accept it, and it’s one aspect of our Down Under society that inspires genuine hope for the future.

All that being said, let’s remember Roberta Armstrong, Carole Dickinson, Robertson Kan Hock Voon, Joyce Nixon, George Mavris, Rachell Milburn and Patricia Rowe, and their families, their friends, and anyone else touched by this all-but-forgotten small-town tragedy.