The siege ended 16 hours later when Monis killed the cafe manager and a lawyer and mother of three who reportedly sheltered her pregnant friend from the gunfire.
Four days later, eight children were stabbed to death in a home in Cairns.
In the beautiful Bay of Plenty, we endured our own tragedies in 2014, and while they may not have been on the scale of international disasters, the pain was still as keenly felt.
The one that springs to mind most readily is 5-year-old Jack Dixon, who was swept out to sea while playing on a beach at Mount Maunganui with his cousins.
Just as Sydney-siders turned their city's Martin Place into a shrine for cafe manager Tori Johnson and lawyer Katrina Dawson, so too Bay locals made a memorial to young Jack at the base of Mauao.
This year has shown us life can change in an instant and there is no certainty to our existence. The best we can do is live our lives one day at a time, appreciating each moment we have with our loved ones, and taking nothing - particularly not the small and wonderful - for granted.
So, as this year draws to a close, the New Year's resolution I'm making for 2015 is one of acceptance rather than change.
While it would be easy to default to the usual vows to lose a few kilos or do more exercise, next year seems to call for something with a little more gravitas. I'm taking my inspiration from a book that has helped me through my own difficult personal journey in 2014.
This year, I've had to deal with the sudden break-up of my marriage and parenting two small children on my own, and time and again I've found myself returning to The Modern Family Survival Guide by New Zealand's master pop psychologist Nigel Latta.
There's a chapter called "A little Buddha goes a long way" in which Latta draws on Buddha's saying that "enlightenment is seeing things as they really are".
"The trick to attaining any kind of peace and contentment is to learn to live the life you have," Latta writes. "Not the life you'd rather have, or the life you think you deserve to have, but the one you actually have. You have to learn to live where you are, not where you'd rather be."
For me, that means living in the present, rather than the future or past, and counting my blessings for family, friends and inspiring people whose path I cross in my job.
Latta says appreciation for what we've got - not what we want - is a concept we would be wise to teach our children too.
Both the young and old, he says, "need to get clear about the life they actually have, savour the good in it, and make their peace with the bad."
And that is my resolution for 2015.
Marcel Currin is taking a break and will be back in the new year. Juliet Rowan is a reporter for Bay of Plenty Times Weekend.
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