On Saturday the lives of six people were taken and many more injured at Bondi Junction's Westfield Shopping Centre in a devastating act of violence.
As the families of victims tried to come to terms with their loss and residents of Sydney reeled from the unimaginable tragedy, elsewhere in the country another woman was allegedly murdered.
On the other side of Australia, on Friday night a 38-year-old woman was killed in the regional Western Australian city of Busselton.
Tara Marie Morrison was found dead at a home in Broadwater, WA, sometime between Thursday and Friday last week. Police had attempted the home for a welfare check.
"Just after 8pm on Friday, 12 April 2024 police attended a residence on Bell Drive to conduct a welfare check. During a check of the home, they located the deceased woman," read a police statement.
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A 26-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman have been charged with her murder.
Police allege the man knew the victim but the exact nature of the relationship is unclear.
Homicide detectives want to speak with anyone who saw or has dash-cam vision of a man and a woman holding a toddler and riding an e-scooter from Busselton to Margaret River between 6pm on Thursday and 8pm on Friday.
Tara is the 28th Australian woman to be killed in an act of gendered violence, according to Sherele Moody’s Australian Femicide Watch.
This devastating and growing statistic comes as Police Commissioner Karen Webb confirmed, via an interview with the ABC, that she believes the Bondi Junction attacker was deliberately targeting women.
"It's obvious to me, it's obvious to detectives that seems to be an area of interest that the offender focused on women and avoided the men," she said.
"We don't know what was operating in the mind of the offender and that's why it's important now that detectives spend so much time interviewing those who know him, were around him, close to him."
Both the devastating attacks in Bondi Junction on Saturday and the murder of a Broadwater woman on Friday have added to compounding concerns amongst the community surrounding gendered violence in Australia.
- with AAP.
Feature Image: Getty.