The first thing you notice when entering the warehouse is the scent. The second is the heat.
At the 400 sq metre space in Sydney, volunteers are working to preserve the 3 tonnes of flowers left at Bondi Pavilion after the worst terror attack on Australian soil. Once the flowers are dried, they will become a permanent artwork in honour of the 15 victims at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
About a dozen volunteers began the painstaking process of preserving the flowers on Christmas Eve.
At the start, temperatures reached over 30C in the warehouse, and the humidity created a hotbox. As the thousands of flowers adorning the walls slowly dried and decayed, the scent was so overpowering that volunteers were unable to walk in without a mask.
Shannon Biederman, the senior curator at the museum, had to get creative: fans and dehumidifiers to counter the heat, construction fences to hang-dry flowers, loaned bricks to press the flowers, and many hands to make light work.
“It’s been exhausting, it’s been hard, but it has been worth it,” Biederman says.
Species are diligently identified and catalogued: zigzag wattles, bougainvilleas, gumnuts and Singapore orchids. Everything is meticulously labelled, colour-coded and boxed.
“I get a lot of messages that people are just so grateful that all of these tributes are not going to be forgotten.”
Now, just a month after the events of 14 December, the masks are off – the smell hangs lighter in the air – and the space is a finely tuned production line.
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Nina Sanadze, a Jewish artist, and her team are trying to repurpose every single part of the flower: petals are ironed or pressed, sunflower pollen is being processed into pigment, even fallen leaves scattered around the warehouse are preciously repurposed.
“Every little petal, people will go look for the right place. It’s just a testimony to the care that people have,” Sanadze says.
Now, up to 50 volunteers show up on a daily basis. Many drive hours to help, some come for an hour, and others stay the whole day.
“I wanted to do something that was meaningful and useful. I couldn’t think of anything more beautiful than keeping the flowers and turning them into something of beauty so we can remember,” says Alana, a volunteer who asked not to use her last name.
By next week, all the flowers will be boxed away. They will reappear in Sanadze’s artwork which will feature at the museum when it reopens to the public in early 2027.
Sanadze does not know what the final commemorative piece will be yet, but she wants to engage with the whole community “at every stage of making this artwork”.
“I do think it means a lot that they are preserved for posterity and that they’re there is hopefully an expression of unity among all Australians,” Biederman says.
The team hope the seeds left over from the drying process will eventually be replanted and regrown.
There is nothing like a garden “to give us hope for the future”, Sanadze says.
