Queensland has many dates etched in its collective heart.
December 19, 2014 may provide one of the deepest cuts yet.
"Multiple casualties. Children involved." Four words which struck deep into the soul of every police officer, emergency service worker and reporter, parent or not.
Inside 34 Murray Street in the suburb of Manoora, about four kilometres from the Cairns centre, lay nine broken bodies, eight of whom had played in the wide street with their neighbours and cousins on the wide road in front of their home, where palm trees sway.
The youngest was 18 months. The oldest, 15. One of the eight children, seven of whom were siblings, was due to celebrate her 14th birthday on Sunday. All were just six sleeps from Christmas. Each of the eight was silenced by violence.
Their 34-year-old mother, with stab wounds to her neck and torso, was the only one to be taken alive from the home. Family and friends lined the street in the muggy 31 degree heat, held well back from the home by police tape, grieving, finding support where they could, but no answers.
It will be days until police can provide those.
In a week of worldwide tragedy, Cairns was a heartbreak too much.
But it was not the first time sorrowful eyes had turned towards the sunshine state.
8 March, 1973.
The Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley, was firebombed.
In what was then the nation's worse mass-murder, 15 people did not make it out.
January 16, 1974.
Barbara McCulkin and her daughters, Leanne and Vicki, just 11 and 13 disappeared from their inner-Brisbane home and were never seen again.
Police have only just laid charges over their murders.
April 21, 2003.
Neelma Singh, 24, and her younger siblings, 18-year-old Kunal and little Sidhi, 12, were found murdered, their bodies placed in a spa bath in their parents' home in Bridgeman downs.
It would take nine years and the state's longest running criminal trial for Neelma's ex-boyfriend, Max Sica, to be found guilty of their murders. Police still remember the scene. Their mother can never forget.
August 24, 2011.
Eleven people from two families died, as fire tore through their Slacks Creek home. There was no maliciousness to be found here, no evil. Just a horrendous tragedy that had no discernible cause.
Six children, aged eight to 18, were killed.
The community still mourns.
December 26, 2011.
Likewise, celebrity chef Matt Golinski loses his "beautiful butterflies" - his wife and three daughters - in a house fire on the Sunshine Coast. Starlia was 10 and her twin sisters were just two years olders.
December 19, 2014.
Eight murdered children.
No answers will ever be enough.
