When on stage, Eurydice Dixon would invite people to laugh at things other comedians wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot mic stand. She joked about feminism. She joked about suicide. Some nights she won the audience. Others she left in a heckling rage.

To people who knew her well, who understood where she came from, her comedy material wasn’t surprising. Her young life, ­abruptly ended in the early hours of Wednesday morning by an ­opportunistic attacker, had been shaped by tragedy, radical thought and a determination to see and do things her own way.

Eurydice was 22 on the night she played her last comedy gig and said goodbye to boyfriend Tony Magnuson at a tram stop outside Melbourne’s Federation Square. It was the last time he or any of her friends would see her.