Editorial
Hatred and silence

According to police, the bomb was packed with screws and ball bearings. Weapons such as this are called fragmentation devices. They are designed to cause as much damage as possible, the shrapnel ricocheting out from the blast.

“It had the potential to explode and injure many people,” Western Australian Police Force Commissioner Col Blanch said, “or kill them.”

Footage shows a man in black throwing the bomb into a crowd of peaceful protesters demonstrating at an Invasion Day rally in Perth. He turns immediately and runs down a balcony. He is wearing a black mask and his shirt appears to carry the co-opted cross of the Eureka flag.

At the same time as the bomb was allegedly thrown into the crowd of mostly Indigenous people and their allies, Noongar Elder Hedley Hayward was speaking. Without knowing what had happened, he said: “Today we stand together, united, and we will not be silenced.”

Soon after, police arrested a 31-year-old man. His name was suppressed by a court. He was charged with committing an unlawful act with the intent to harm and with making or possessing explosives under suspicious circumstances.

Two days after the incident, the Joint Counter Terrorism Team finally confirmed they were investigating a “potential terrorist act”.

Fabian Yarran, an organiser of the rally, said the response was too slow. There was a reluctance to see this as an alleged hate crime. “The police, government and media response in the 24 hours following the incident has been inadequate, consisting solely of investigations and charges for less serious, non-terror and non-hate offences.”

Daniel James, a Yorta Yorta writer and broadcaster, made a similar point. The response to this attack on First Nations protesters was the special silence of indifference, the shared commitment to ignore at all cost the treatment of First Nations people.

“The Forrest Place incident deserved sustained attention, not because it was sensational, but because it ruptured the illusion of safety that the majority of Australia prefers to maintain,” he wrote. “That it failed to do so tells us how the country now manages discomfort: by smoothing it into process, deferring to institutions and moving on before its implications are allowed to linger.”

When W. E. H. Stanner first described the Great Australian Silence, he was talking about a culture of forgetting, a national tendency to avoid this country’s history. This is something else, something worse. It is a lack of empathy for the present.

Australia is a country divided. It celebrates its nationhood on the day of First Peoples’ dispossession. It does this through a cruelty it dresses up as ignorance.

Court proceedings are now under way. Not much can be said, but much can be felt. Peace is needed in this country, across all communities. It won’t come through silence.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 31, 2026 as "Hatred and silence".

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