Blue autumn skies have been blazing over Sydney this weekend, but a pall of sorrow hangs over the city.

As clarity grows around the horrific events that took place at Westfield Bondi Junction on Saturday, shock is turning to profound grief: grief for those who have lost their loved ones, grief for those who’ve been physically injured, and for those who witnessed the barbaric scenes which unfolded as Sydneysiders went about their ordinary, everyday business inside a large suburban shopping complex on what seemed like an everyday, ordinary afternoon.

For the scores, if not hundreds of people who witnessed the rampage of the knife-wielding attacker, now identified as Queenslander Joel Cauchi, the psychological scars may well last months, if not years.

Mourners pay tribute to the victims of the Bondi Junction attack.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

The city has not been dealt a collective psychological shock like this since the Lindt Cafe siege of nearly a decade ago, when Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson lost their lives after police stormed the cafe where Islamic State-inspired gunman Man Haron Monis had been holding 18 hostages captive for 17 agonising hours.

By contrast – mercifully – Saturday’s unspeakable barbarism was not a terrorist incident.

Monis had a history of mental illness. However, he was also clearly radicalised, and had an overtly stated political agenda. As the then NSW coroner Michael Barnes later found, “the siege was no less a terrorist incident by reason of the fact that ... Monis had a severe mixed form of personality disorder”.

That Saturday’s murderous rampage was perpetrated by a lone individual seemingly in the grip of a mental health episode will, however, offer no comfort at all to the bereaved.

Yet there will be profound relief inside the state and federal governments and their security agencies that terrorism has effectively been ruled out as a driver of Saturday’s attack.

Then NSW Premier Mike Baird lays flowers at Martin Place after the Lindt Cafe siege in 2014.Credit: Ben Rushton