( CNN ) -- On September 11 , 2001 , the city of Melbourne , Australia evacuated its World Trade Center . This is a modest building on the banks of the Yarra River , a short distance from the city 's central business district , a little over 10,000 miles from New York . It used to have a casino . Before that , it briefly hosted an exhibition of waxworks from Madam Tussaud 's . If you ran a line from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan through the center of the Earth , you would exit the planet not so far from here . Indeed , Australia is , simply , a long way from everywhere . A flight to Sydney takes 15 hours from Los Angeles , 21 hours from London , 14 hours from Johannesburg , and 10 hours from Tokyo . There is no stopping off in Australia on the way to somewhere else , unless you 're headed to Antarctica . This isolation is at the heart of Australia 's identity : It is the reason the country has an aboriginal population that existed undisturbed for 40,000 years , and some of the world 's strangest and most inimitable flora and fauna . It is why the country was chosen to be a penal colony by the British in 1788 . It is a place you go to be removed from the world . And yet on Monday , the world 's eyes focused on Sydney , as a man with a gun took hostages in what he claimed was an attack on Australia by the Islamic State . A self-described cleric with a history of antagonism toward Australian military involvement in Afghanistan , reports suggest he was probably a dangerously deluded loner rather than a member of an organized terrorist group . But by the time the siege ended , two hostages were still dead . This was n't Australia 's first brush with terrorism . As I said , on 9/11 , terrorists were attacking World Trade Centers , so Melbourne evacuated hers . And this did n't seem silly at the time -- that day made all horrors plausible . No precaution was too extreme when only the day before it had been inconceivable that terrorists might take thousands of lives in New York and across the United States . So for a while , Australia forgot it was n't part of the world . `` We are all Americans , '' Australians said on 9/11 -- September 12 , actually , on antipodean time , since Australia is so far away , it is usually a different day altogether . And we meant it : We were deeply shocked to see acts of foreign terrorism , always previously associated with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places , happening somewhere `` Over There , '' become suddenly intimate and recognizable . Over time , however , as the War on Terror became the War on Iraq , and the American flags waved on TV , it became clear that although 9/11 affected the Western world , at its most pointed and personal , it was an American story . Australia , as usual , was watching from afar . We sent troops to Afghanistan and to Iraq , maintaining solidarity with our American cousins , but ultimately , we saw that the U.S. was `` Over There , '' too . In 2002 , 88 Australians were killed by a radical Islamist group bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali , a popular holiday destination . Bali is a mere 6 hours from Sydney , and only 2Â½ from Darwin , the closest Australian city . It was a traumatic event , but again , it was n't quite here . More recently , there were police terror sweeps in Australian cities , with arrests made and , apparently , plots foiled . The federal government warned us that groups had developed with the motivation and ability to carry out local attacks . You live a charmed life in Australia . The streets are safe , the weather is terrific , the people are friendly . The ocean keeps everything out . Or , at least , slows it down . We complain when a car costs $ 30,000 or a TV show wo n't hit our screens right away , but it 's the distance that has allowed Australia to stay Australia in the face of relentless globalization . It 's given us more than a decade in which to rethink our ideas on society and our way of life , and the trade-offs between freedom and security we 're willing to make , without having to do so in the immediate aftermath of a national tragedy . If this hostage taker in Sydney had claimed to be acting for some other cause -- disgruntlement at the tax code , or the high price of cars -- we would n't call it terrorism . We would call it what it is : a lunatic with a gun . But that would overlook the deeper trend , which is that Australia 's oceans are shrinking . Today technology allows a man to be more connected to militant extremists across the globe -- in spirit , if nothing else -- than he was to his neighbors in Bexley North . He can find and latch onto toxic ideas from the other side of the globe and bring them into Sydney . Whether we call it a siege or terrorism , it was something that used to happen Over There . And now it 's here . It was n't unexpected , and arrived more benignly than it could have , and today the country will get on with business as usual . But life is becoming a little less charmed . We are no longer so far away .
Sydney : Sydney hostage incident brings home terrorism threat . But this was n't Manhattan 's first brush with terrorism , writer says . thousands of American were killed in Earth bombing in 2002 , Barry adds .