The scanner in the newsroom crackled into life.
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It was Sunday, April 28, 1996.
It had been an otherwise uneventful Sunday in the newsroom on the North-West Coast of Tasmania. Being a Sunday, there was only a few people around the newsroom and a few of them were still feeling the effects of the night before.
Yet what started to come through the newsroom scanner that day would change everything. Literally. Initial details were sketchy but the newsroom leaders soon gathered enough to realise something of major proportions was happening in the south of the state.
The news of that day would shock the world and the island state of Tasmania to its core. On that day a lone gunman by the name of Martin Bryant undertook the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history, largely around the tourism precinct of Port Arthur on the State's south east.
By the time he had finished his deadly spree and was finally captured the following morning, 35 people were dead and another 23 were injured.
Among the victims were six-year-old Alannah and three-year-old Madeline Mikac, who Bryant walked up to and shot dead having killed their mother Nanette by shooting her in the temple.
It was a truly dark, sad and bizarre day to be working in a Tasmanian newsroom. It was truly dark and sad time to be a Tasmanian. No-one thought a thing like that could possibly happen in Tasmania.
Just as we all thought something like what happening in Christchurch couldn't happen in that peaceful New Zealand city.
The wounds of Port Arthur took a long time to heal. In some ways, they will never heal.
Before that day, Port Arthur had simply been a tourist attraction - the site of one of the country's earliest prison colonies.
It now houses a monument and memorial garden for the victims of that horrible tragedy.
If anything came of the Tasmanian tragedy it was the sweeping national gun law reforms, which John Howard championed despite vehement opposition from the gun lobby.
Thankfully, it appears that will also happen in New Zealand.
