From bloodshed to blooms: inside the making of Bondi’s living memorial

In a warehouse on the outskirts of Sydney, grief has been put to work.

When the first truckloads arrived, the air was thick with the sweet, cloying scent of flowers wilting under the late-summer heat. Bouquets had been stacked in dense, damp piles — tributes left at Bondi Beach after Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in nearly three decades on December 14, 2025. The flowers were beautiful, but perishable. Within days, they would rot.

Now the warehouse feels different. Windows are cracked open. Industrial fans hum. Long tables stretch wall to wall, covered not in chaos but in careful order. Petals lie flattened between sheets of tissue paper. Leaves are arranged by shade. Seeds rest in labelled trays. Grief has been reorganised into discipline.

Volunteers at work — one petal, one seed, one flower at a time. 
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Nina Sanadze

This is where Melbourne-based Jewish artist and Artistic Director at Goldstone Gallery, Nina Sanadze, 49, is building a living memorial to the victims of the Bondi Beach massacre — one petal, one seed, one flower at a time. Known for working with materials salvaged from sites of trauma, Sanadze says she has long collected newspaper clippings documenting synagogue vandalism, arson attacks and threats. She imagines embedding those clippings alongside the preserved Bondi flowers, creating parchment-like walls where history and grief collapse into one another. “This isn’t a one-off,” she says. “It’s part of something larger.”

The Bondi memorial will be unveiled at the Sydney Jewish Museum when it opens to public following a major redevelopment in 2027.

More than three tonnes of bouquets were left along Bondi beach after the shooting on December 14, 2025 . 
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Nina Sanadze

Refusing erasure

Spontaneous memorials are fragile by nature. They bloom quickly — flowers, candles, handwritten notes — and then, just as swiftly, they are dismantled. The tributes are disposed of discreetly. The public ritual ends. 

Sanadze could not bear the thought of that happening at Bondi. More than three tonnes of bouquets — sunflowers, roses, orchids, wattles, bougainvillea — had been left along the shoreline. Each arrangement was a private gesture of grief: from parents, friends, strangers, schoolchildren. Many contained handwritten messages, photos, ribbons, small tokens of love.

Where authorities saw a logistical problem, Sanadze saw art. Working alongside curator Shannon Biederman and the team at the Sydney Jewish Museum, she proposed an alternative: collect everything. Preserve it. Transform it. Allow the memorial to evolve rather than disappear.

“Nothing is thrown away,” she insists. “Not even the seeds.”  Even weeks after the site was formally closed, fresh bouquets continued to appear at Bondi. Sanadze returned repeatedly to retrieve them. 

Seeds saved, pollen extracted

Over 100 volunteers are busy with preservation work for the Bondi beach floral memorial.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Nina Sanadze

The operation was vast. Trucks ferried the flowers from the beach to the warehouse in large black plastic bags — bags that, Sanadze admits, “looked disturbingly like body bags”. Inside the warehouse, over 100 volunteers are busy with preservation work. Some are artists. Others retirees, students and professionals taking time off work. Many come from Sydney’s Jewish community, still reeling from the attack that took place during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, attended by around 1,000 people. Two gunmen killed 15 people, including three women and a child. A trial against the sole surviving assailant has just begun.

The process of preserving the floral tributes is meticulous. Petals are gently removed, pressed and ironed flat between tissue paper to halt decay. Pollen is extracted and processed into pigment for future paintings. Leaves that fall to the floor are gathered and boxed with the same reverence as intact blossoms. Seeds are dried, catalogued and saved for replanting.

The process of preserving the floral tributes is meticulous.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Nina Sanadze

Professional florists are brought in to identify species. Everything is labelled and archived: colour, type, condition, origin, if known. The floor is lined with trays of gumnuts, zigzag wattles, Singapore orchids. Some flowers retain their brilliance when dried; others darken to brittle browns, their forms collapsing into fragile silhouettes.

Sanadze refuses to curate only the beautiful ones. “It’s all part of the story,” she says. “The fading ones too.”

Volunteers in vigil

“We’re not talking about the attack,” Sanadze says. “We’re talking about flowers. Sometimes people cry. Sometimes they just need a hug.” For many volunteers, the repetitive labour is grounding. Sorting grief by colour, texture and species becomes a form of meditation.

“I wanted to do something useful,” says Alana Gomez, one of the volunteers. “I couldn’t think of anything more beautiful than keeping the flowers and turning them into something that helps us remember.”

Sanadze speaks openly about the visceral anger she felt in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Like many, she was overwhelmed — by sorrow, by outrage, by a sense of rupture. Working with flowers changed that. “I can’t afford to fall apart,” she says. “This work keeps me moving. This is way beyond an art project.” 

Nina Sanadze (centre) with volunteers working on the Bondi beach memorial project.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Nina Sanadze

Imagining 2027

The preservation phase is nearing completion. Soon, thousands upon thousands of pressed petals, dried leaves and catalogued seeds will be boxed and stored until the Sydney Jewish Museum reopens next year.

What the final memorial will look like remains a mystery though. “I envision multiple rooms where the work unfolds slowly, where visitors move through layers of material and meaning,” says Sanadze. Paintings made from pigments extracted from petals. Installations incorporating the handwritten messages left by mourners. An indoor garden grown from salvaged seeds, alive and breathing within the museum walls. Even the decomposed plant matter will not be wasted. It will be composted and reused to create tiles, flooring and seating for the museum itself — grief literally embedded into the architecture. 

When the museum doors reopen, visitors will not encounter a single monument but a constellation — rooms that ask them to move slowly, to look closely, to notice the texture of a petal, the curve of a dried leaf, the fragile resilience of a seed.

People gather at the Sydney Jewish Museum to pay their respects a day after the Bondi Beach massacre, December 2025.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

A garden as testimony

Sanadze believes flowers communicate in a way politics cannot. “Flowers go beyond words,” she says. “They remind us — quietly, insistently — that this is not OK.” In the warehouse, species are still being identified and colour-coded. Trays of seeds wait patiently for regrowth. “There’s nothing like a garden,” Sanadze says, “to give us hope for the future.”

Visitors will see that every flower left at Bondi mattered. That every gesture of mourning was honoured. That what could have been swept away was instead transformed. In this warehouse, care, not violence, has had the final word.

The writer is a senior journalist and editor exploring the intersections of art, culture, gastronomy and travel in South Asia and beyond.