For many Tasmanians, Port Arthur will always be our "where were you when" memory.
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A uni student living in Hobart, I was watching a soccer game when we heard the news on the radio and saw a helicopter fly overhead.
It was back at our residential college when we got a sense of how many lives those terrible events touched.
Frantic parents from around the country and overseas were ringing their kids' rooms. No one had mobiles back then.
If there was no answer, the calls came through to a common room, and if you were the closest, you picked up the phone.
Only now, as a parent myself, do I have an inkling of the fear that was driving those calls; of the dread they would have felt as the casualty count grew.
Thirty years on, how do we reflect on Australia's worst mass shooting?
Tuesday's commemoration will rightly focus on the enduring impact on survivors, families, staff of the historic site and the local community.
For those who were there, for those who lost loved ones, the trauma and the grief will remain.
For Australians at large, it is impossible for our minds not to go to the country's response.
There is a sense of pride to be felt today in recognising that we acted decisively; that we honoured the memories of those taken by not letting this become the norm.
It is without question that many lives have been saved as a result of the reforms to our gun laws.
In the years since, we have become jaded by another country's failure to act in the wake of one mass shooting after another.
We hope against hope that our experience will inspire change.
Yet, while we recognise the good that came from evil, the memory of the event is under attack.
The darker legacy of Port Arthur, only amplified in the age of social media, is the cruelty of conspiracy theories; a cruelty that exploits Tasmania's deepest wound, and for what?
Paranoia, internet clout, or, worse, political opportunism?
It is timely, given her party is riding high in the polls, to recall that Pauline Hanson is guilty of the latter.
The senator was caught on camera giving voice to the conspiracies, while her staff were stung trying to get donations from the US gun lobby.
That should be more than a footnote in her career.
How we respond, more broadly, to those who dishonour the dead is important.
Tempting as it is not to give the conspiracy theorists oxygen, the danger in letting their utterings go unchallenged is that they will take root in otherwise rational minds.
We must defend the truth against absurd and offensive falsehoods.
We owe that to the victims, to their families, and to the society we want for our children.
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