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SBS acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia.
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For SBS examines, this is Lera Shvets. I'm at Bondi Beach now and it's safe and it feels nice. The weather is good. This is Sonya. She was attending the Bondii Hanukkah by the Sea event in December 2025, but left minutes before the terrorist attack. If you open your phone and start reading, and it doesn't help anyone if I as a person start to ruminate about what's happening.
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Grief is complex. It plays out differently for different people and in different cultures. Experts say digital and social media are making things even more complicated. SBS Examines went to Bondi to talk to passersby about grief and whether social media helps them or makes it worse. Marcus is a Bondi local.
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I think initially and long term it makes it worse because
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Because it morphs into something that it isn't, and it takes on a life of its own in many various different directions. It becomes a circus.
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Ahmed Al Ahmed has been called the Bondii hero. A video of him wrestling a gun from one of the shooters went viral in the wake of the terror attack. At SBS's special broadcast from Bondi Pavilion, he told SBS examines social media helped to share his story.
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My situation, if there are no media, how our Australian people and our world everywhere, all the human beings know about my situation and about what's going on, what's happening, and this
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is Faith visiting from Queensland. I think
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that depends, yeah, and where you're at with your grief. Sometimes it can help you move through it and other times it can go deep that you're still feeling it.
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Grief and hope are actually interrelated really deeply, and I think that's something we kind of forget when we see media because once we do scroll on one horrific event, then the algorithm sends us other and it gets completely a contextualised, it lacks nuance.
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Larissa Hjorth is a professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She said social media often platforms soundbites, not leaving space for thoughtful conversations. She'd like to see.
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More focus on grief literacy. Grief
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literacy is really about normalising the conversations like we're doing here, you know, like it's really normal for us to have conversations about grief, to talk about our different experiences, to build that vocabulary.
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Honestly, I think culturally when it comes to grief, we really suck. I think that when it comes to death and people dying, we actually don't face it.
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Nick is a Bondi local. He shared with SBS Examines that he recently lost several members of his family.
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He said in Australia conversations about grief are stigmatised, and that makes it harder for people to grieve, especially men. For the
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men, when we're grieving, it's a lot harder. I know when I've been upset and I've reached out to people genuinely and I'm like I'm really hurting a lot of the time I get pushed away or told I'll just get on with it. So I think as a culture we're really struggling and I think that has a big, big thing on men's mental health.
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Where dominant belief systems push grief to the margins, people often feel rushed or misunderstood. I mean, you just need to look at our current fair work policy that gives a bereaved person 2 days' leave after the death of a family member. To normalise grief, we need to treat it as a normal.
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Human response to loss, not as something embarrassing or something that is best kept private.
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Christopher Hall is a psychologist and the CEO of Grief Australia, a government funded national grief and bereavement service. He says there's no one cultural gold standard for grieving.
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But he thinks mainstream Australian culture could learn from multicultural communities. Many
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Western societies tend to marginalise loss because Western societies tend to privilege happiness, productivity, and they privilege the idea of letting go and moving on. You know, even the idea of Australia as the lucky country can itself marginalise the experiences of loss and suffering, particularly the collective losses carried by Aboriginal Australians.
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I think community coming together and you know staying connected to the land and you know our natural environment keeps us grounded and there are you know ceremonial aspects also that help you move through grief.
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Love is a proud Aboriginal woman and a Bondi resident of over 30 years. When we asked Love what wider Australian society could learn about grief from Aboriginal.
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cultures she mentioned inclusivity.
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Most, you know, First Nations communities welcome other people, and I think that that's crucial that we must keep our lines of communication open and sharing the sharing of our traditions, and I think that that makes us stronger.
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Two friends, Rabaah and Hamish, were going for a swim when we approached them. Raba, originally from the Maldives.
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has been living in Sydney for several years. As
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Maldivians, when we grieve, we like to be together, so we never want to leave the person who's grieving alone. We would spend time with them, always make sure they're well taken care of, remind them that they're part of the community.
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Hamish represents several cultures, but he told us when it comes to grieving, he relies on Jewish traditions.
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My dad's side, he's Jewish. Judaism is a collectivistic culture. We like to, you know, be with people.
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Being together as part of a community and then grieving
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together. Christopher Hall from Grief Australia agrees connection and tradition can be helpful after
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loss. One of the biggest problems that grieving people have is that of isolation. So when a culture has clearer rituals and stronger permissions to gather, to remember, to speak openly about the dead, then people can feel less alone. Grief needs time, language, ritual, community. It needs permission.
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And I think many multicultural committees hold that wisdom very well.
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If we all walked into a room and understood that everybody in that room has grieved and maybe is grieving, but everybody's doing it differently, if we just took that fundamental kind of understanding and then we just dropped the tempo from feeling disenfranchised and feeling that people aren't listening to turning it to listening, we would have much more productive, cohesive
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discussions. That's Professor Hjorth
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again, she says grief can be a uniting force, something that brings us together. We asked people in Bondi what they thought.
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Absolutely, because that emotion unites us, the Bondi shooting, when it happened, I think the Australian public was united and shared a wider consensus. This is a terrible tragedy regardless of who it was. It can and it does because we're.
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Culturally we know a variety of different people that when we have grief they come in and they learn and embrace it.
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I don't know if it can unite, but definitely it can create compassion to different communities because at the end of the day we are all humans and we should find the thing that unites us rather than things that makes us different.
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This podcast was produced and presented by Lera Shvets with additional production by Dennis Fang. For more stories, visit SBS.com.au/SBSexamines.
