Victims of tragedy are so often chosen at random; by circumstances that couldn't have been predicted, even in a nightmare. It is what shock is made of.
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And so it was on Bourke Street, Melbourne, on a sunny summer afternoon.
Shock would roll like a wave across Melbourne and the state and the nation on January 20, 2017.
The swift fury of it.
Six blameless lives would be gone, including those of a three-month-old baby boy and a 10-year-old girl. Bodies were broken, some for life, among the 36 reported injured. And the emotional wounds of those who had witnessed the moments of roaring savagery might never be enumerated.
Who could have imagined that a car, a Holden sedan, favourite of Australian families for half a century, would be used as a deadly weapon on a pedestrian mall opened to the cheers of crowds 34 years previously by Prince Charles and Princess Diana?
"Busier than Bourke Street," Victorians had said for more than a century.
The Bourke Street Mall was supposed to return the central part of the old clogged street to shoppers, separating them from cars and turning the length of the block between Elizabeth and Swanson streets into a broad footpath with a tram line running through the centre.
Melburnians, it happened, had spent hot summer weeks before that hideous January day last year stewing about the changing nature of another city footpath.
A gathering of rough sleepers had turned a section of Flinders St into a jumbled village of the homeless.
The world had come to Melbourne for the tennis, the Australian Open.
For many, the sight of bedrolls and tattered clothing and food scraps and reclining bodies in the centre of Marvellous Melbourne, right alongside the city's biggest railway station, was too much. The mood turned edgy as mayor, councillors, social workers, police and angry letter writers wrangled over what to do.
But at 1.30pm on January 20 the state of Flinders St footpath was rendered less than a footnote to the city's disquiet.
A maroon Holden Commodore was seen wheeling crazily around the roadway outside the Flinders Street station before it hurtled down Swanson St and screeched left ??? into the Bourke Street Mall, supposed to be a sanctuary for pedestrians.
Down the southern side of the mall, on the footpath, the vehicle accelerated amid sudden screams, wild panic and the thud of bodies.
"What if?" those left behind by tragedy ask, torturing themselves.
"What if" she had postponed her shopping by an hour? "What if" he had chosen to walk on the other side of the mall? "What if", the baby had been taken home early, and "what if" somehow, police had grabbed the perpetrator before the attack could occur?
Here was the beginning of anguish without end, questions without answer, that would torment many victims, families, friends and those who had imagined lunchtime a week before Australia Day would be safe and easy around the city's grandest department stores and loveliest arcades.
A year on, with Melbourne reminded only last month that concrete blocks and planter boxes can't save the innocent from a determined attack by car, those with a sense of history might ponder another "what if".
In the early 1960s, Melbourne fussed about what it might build to compete with Sydney's astonishing opera house, then rising above its harbour.
One of Australia's more visionary architects, Robin Boyd, and his partner Frederick Romberg, drew up an audacious design.
The idea, commissioned and backed by the RACV, was to transform the bowl of Bourke Street - that busy central part that dips between the hills of Queens and Russell streets - into a pedestrian mall so splendid it would be the envy of cities everywhere.
All vehicular traffic would be banished from sight. There would be seven storeys.
The top levels, treed and glorious, open to the sky and linked by escalators, would be reserved exclusively for pedestrians.
Cars would have no possible entrance to this mall: they would travel along their own street beneath. Beneath that would be parking. Further underground, trams and buses would whizz back and forth.
For a brief period of unplugged optimism, Boyd's vision gained favour and was studied as a possible blueprint for Melbourne's wider streetscapes.
It never happened, of course. Too expensive, too difficult and not quite, well, Melbourne.
Instead, Melburnians have cloaked a forest of concrete blocks in gaily decorated slips to try to deal with the ugliness that came to their streets on January 20, 2017, and the council plants flowers in reinforced steel in the mall.
"What if?"
