Amongst all the noise of the Lockhart inquest, we must not lose sight of what matters.

The details of the Hunt family murders make for harrowing reading.

Last September, five people died too soon. The manner of their deaths, the order of events, all of it seems lifted from our worst nightmares, not something that should happen to people we recognise as “like us”, living in a peaceful slice of the Australian bush.

The arguments around the crime are loud and confusing. Was a popular local family man Geoff Hunt hiding a monstrous, violent side from view? Did his wife Kim’s brain injury – she was forever changed by a 2012 car accident – play a part in the couple’s painful descent from respected farming family, to five macabre statistics in an ever-growing tally of family violence deaths?

The inquest will provide answers that will cut through this noise. A suicide note. Medical reports of a fractured family. The testimony of relatives and friends. A finding that will attempt to silence questions and rumour.

But none of it is a salve. Even when the arguments are settled, and the events that ended these lives are confirmed and recorded for posterity, what will last is a gaping space where five lives existed.

That’s what needs to be remembered. That’s what matters, that a family is lost.

Geoff was 44. Kim was 41.

Fletcher was 10. He loved AFL and jumping motorbikes. At the family’s memorial, he was described as “energy personified.”

He is gone.

Mia was eight. She was described as being caring, and funny and loving music and art. She liked cooking, and sport and school.

She is gone.

Phoebe was just six. Pheobe was bossy. Like many youngest kids, she knew how charm, and would perform for lollies. She also loved sport, and was learning to waterski.

She is gone.

These tiny details of tiny lives don’t do justice to the fact that we will never know who these children would have become. Their people – friends and family, their whole community, will never know what they would have grown up to do, the other lives they would have touched, the families they might have created.

They will never know that because each of these children was put to bed that night – separately, in their own beds – and shot dead.

That is what has been lost. That is what the noise of the inquest and the bickering around it cannot drown out.

Squandered opportunities. The cruel theft of five separate futures, five stories.

That’s what we should remember tonight.