September 11 - Annual 'Where were you?' Thread

[perthblue]

Where were you on this fated day?

I was in year 4 and we gathered around the TV in the library to briefly watch the broadcast. Confused as to what was happening, we moved on quite quickly.

 

[Jobe Watson]

I was 9. Sunny day. Woke up, saw a bit of it on the news. Went to school and everyone was talking about it.

I remember being more annoyed that it dominated TV coverage and I couldn't watch The Simpsons at 6 o'clock on Channel 10 for the next week.

 

[Kurve]

I was asleep on the couch and the phone wouldn't stop ringing, so I shuffled out to answer it and my girlfriend was screaming down the phone "America's under attack turn the TV on!"

Rest of the day, I sat in front of the TV in my pyjamas clutching my blanket.

 

[Rankine2Rachele]

Woke up, turned the TV on (for some inexplicable reason it happened to be on Sunrise, I think), and it was the first thing on my screen.

 

[Silent Alarm]

Putting up the holygrams

 

[NaturalDisaster]

This will sound pretty bad, I was 8/9 at the time but i genuinely do not remember it. I don't remember hearing it at the time, I don't remember anyone talking about and I don't remember what I was doing. Not sure if I live in a bubble wrapped enviornment where everyone desperately tried to hide the news from the kids or its just my memory has blocked it out.

 

[undefined]

On a plane from Melb > Singapore.

 

[Jimmybob]

On the couch trying to watch my cheez tv before school, but couldn’t. What a shitty day

 

[perthblue]

On the couch trying to watch my cheez tv before school, but couldn’t. What a shitty day

Thoughts and prayers

 

[Gough]

Almost got twatted in my own pub for suggesting the Americans weren't completely without blame for this.

 

[Richard Pryor]

I was like five so I don't remember, but weirdly I don't remember ever not knowing about 9/11.

 

[Jobe Watson]

I remember when I was a kid, probably 5 or 6, I got to go into the cockpit mid-flight and meet the pilots. Can't do that anymore. Thanks a lot Osama.

 

[The Dice Man]

Almost got twatted in my own pub for suggesting the Americans weren't completely without blame for this.

My initial comments were similar. Kinda regret that but I was hungover as hell.

 

[Reynolds Number]

At home with family watching Rove when the news was highlighted at the bottom of screen. Family except me then left to go to airport to drop brother off as he was going on a flight to Manila for a baseball trip. I turned TV off to do homework. Then turned TV back on again.

 

[GROTTO]

I remember when I was a kid, probably 5 or 6, I got to go into the cockpit mid-flight and meet the pilots. Can't do that anymore. Thanks a lot Osama.

Same.

A generation will come where they will think it was madness and something they will never even fathom that anyone was allowed to go into the cockpit outside flight crew.

 

[Scotland]

Year 12, at home packing my backpack for an outdoor ed camp.

 

[Jimmybob]

On the couch trying to watch my cheez tv before school, but couldn’t. What a shitty day

But seriously, I went to school and everyone was talking about it on the football oval.

 

[GROTTO]

At home with family watching Rove when the news was highlighted at the bottom of screen. Family except me then left to go to airport to drop brother off as he was going on a flight to Manila for a baseball trip. I turned TV off to do homework. Then turned TV back on again.

Remember watching Sandra Sully that night, a great effort considering what had happened. So professional. She guided me through the night.

 

[TubbsFarquhar]

Woke up the next morning ready to watch Cheez TV before school and being pissed off at mum because I thought she had a crappy action movie on. We discussed it briefly at school and realised what actually happened.

 

[MrsEddieBetts]

Getting ready for school in the morning, year 7. I remember a Palestinian girl was being bullied at lunch time over it.

 

[perthblue]

Getting ready for school in the morning, year 7. I remember a Palestinian girl was being bullied at lunch time over it.

:-(

In the following days, in an attempt to sound informed, I went around telling everyone that the Japanese did it. No idea why. Maybe i had just recently learned about ww2 or something.

 

[Roobs321]

The day before (Tuesday our time) I did ten-pin bowling for Tuesday afternoon school sport, and swimming squad a couple hours earlier that evening. Remember Lifehouse's Hanging by a Moment still being no.1 at the time, and I watched Hawthorn upset the Swans in an elimination final at a friend's place the weekend prior.

I was in Year 7 and usually the first up of a morning (to catch a 7:25am bus to high school). I had a few month ritual around that time of playing Neopets from 5-6am in the morning. Remember checking the ATP men's tennis rankings as well (a routine activity for me) as the US Open had just finished. Hewitt was no.5 from memory going into the tournament, so was interested to see his ranking rise (played tennis Sat mornings in 2001-02).

At 6 I turned on Sunrise (usually switched to Cheez tv at 7 - Cardcaptors at the time before dashing to the bus) and those images were there, and everywhere else. I had little familiarity with World Trade Centre at that point in time (other than the poster of the 70s King Kong film), so my mum was more shocked by the incident as the next awake of a morning. One of my first thoughts was "is Hewitt okay? is he still in NY?" (turned out Ian Thorpe was the one to worry about save a lucky twist of fate). It seemed quite incredible and novel to me in concept, but the coverage at that point was a little dull, the towers had already fallen, the dust cloud had settled, the main live interest at that point was the smaller, precarious WTC3 tower. The footage of people running from the cloud, the buildings falling, the planes crashing, were all incredible (and the footage of Middle Eastern children cheering got some mileage). The 1st and 2nd year anniversaries were covered quite extensively, and by then the Bali bombings and Iraq were occurring.

Went to school as normal. Bit older than some others in this thread so I knew it was a significant event, and a few teachers and fellow students talked about it at school, but it was more hushed than anything. Remember having English class in first period, and my class was left in the library whilst the teachers were working it out. Wasn't really something that was joked about until the Taliban and War in Afghanistan started to dominate news in late 2001.

9/11 is one of those prosphetic memories, similar to a 'founding trauma' in-the-making but more akin to a Vietnam war-esque transformative event narrative. It is a deeply felt memory of a past event through which one did not live first-hand but which has been constructed profoundly by reading books, viewing movies and other media, etc. Our social framework as Australians tells us it was a very big deal, especially as time wears on.

2016 with the chilling live-action documentary 102 Minutes being broadcast on television, and also recently becoming a fan of Aaliyah's final album at the time (who died not long beforehand), was when it finally sunk in for me, when I felt the hit of grief. Took 15 years for me to miss the pre-9/11 world and feel the historical tragedy. I was nearly 13 at the time, so naturally a little nostalgia for a simpler time when you are just about to plunge into the teenager years.

As I've said before on here (and as someone who didn't have television in early childhood), the Port Arthur massacre was the first awful media event which struck a chord with me.

 

[Scotland]

It seems like most people ITT were in primary school.

 

[perthblue]

It seems like most people ITT were in primary school.

I can't help it, I tried to be born a decade earlier but I didn't have the requisite ingredients to become a zygote

 

[TMFKAV]

I was 35. The job I had at the time required me to get up at 2:00am, so I woke up with no idea of what had happened. Wasn't until I wandered outside and fired up my truck, that I heard about it on the ABC Radio.

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