‘I TOLD MUM, I LOVE YOU’
“When Patrick got up [after breakfast] and said, ‘Alright, let’s go,’ I just sort of said, ‘Why? I want to finish my cup of tea,’” explains Adelaide tourist Sophia Hynes-Bishop. “So he left and I thought, ‘I’ll get up and get another Danish and some more fruit.’ I’d come off such a hectic couple of months with work that I just wanted to be in the moment and to enjoy absolutely everything. I was just sitting at the table, I had my legs crossed and I was on my phone and the next thing I knew, I felt this wave of air and a smell, like a party popper times a thousand, and it was just completely quiet, just silence, and then this loud ringing was in my ears, and just people screaming. At that point, you don’t comprehend what has happened, I just knew that it was bad.
“Then I had a huge piece of the ceiling fall on my head and that sort of shocked me into action, so I put my arm up as it just continued falling down. That’s when I crawled under the table. I thought the hotel had collapsed and Patrick’s dead, and I’m going to die, so I need to call my mum. I was under the table and grabbed the cushion from the seat he was sitting on to put over my head. At that point, I had this thing on my arm and I sort of picked it off, it was probably almost 8cm, a chunk of something I later realised was body flesh.
“I messaged mum … and then I called her, I was basically just screaming, ‘There’s been an explosion, I love you, I’m going to die.’ After staff helped her outside, Hynes-Bishop was reunited with her boyfriend Patrick Ritchie and the pair resolved to return home on a midnight flight that night.
“We had to wait for about four, five hours at the airport and the plane was delayed for 45 minutes. When we were on the plane they told us that was because another bomb was found on the road into the airport. I just took some Valium and slept for seven of the 10 hours. I got quite emotional when we landed in Melbourne and again in Adelaide, I don’t know whether it was relief or sadness.
“I think throughout my life, I’ve had one or two key moments where I felt immense gratitude and love and thankfulness for my life, but this was just a complete awakening, it just puts your whole life in perspective and makes you realise what really is important in the world. I can’t even explain the magnitude of how I feel ... I am suffering from survivor’s guilt and all the different things that come with what I’ve experienced but I am alive.
“I’m not really religious but I did go to a beautiful mass and vigil [on April 28] in our main cathedral [St Francis Xavier]. There were leaders of all faiths there. It was so uniting. Afterwards, so many people came up to me – members of the Sri Lankan community in Adelaide – which made me feel like they can put a piece of my grieving puzzle together because they also feel what I’m feeling.”