Comment

Stan Grant
This is not Australia

This is not Australia. I say that over and over again, yet the images on my television screen are telling me it is.

This is Bondi Beach. This is summer. This is music and surfing and food and laughter.

This is a place of strangers in all our diversity who call ourselves a nation.

This is not Australia.

The bodies scattered on the ground. The dead and wounded. The sirens. The panic. The screams.

By latest count, 16 people are dead. Dozens are wounded. We fail the test of humanity if we measure this in numbers. Evil is not a body count; it is intent.

A whole nation is traumatised. Two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. Their bullets have dimmed the light of Hanukkah, for now.

This is not Australia.

Yet it is. The images on my television screen are telling me it is. We live in a world where anti-Semitism is real and virulent. We have allowed it to fester. We have allowed the evil of anti-Semitism to bore into us.

Without prevarication, without platitudes, without reaching too soon for the light, we must dwell in the darkness of what we are capable of.

I have heard people say this is not Australia. I feel that, too. Yet we cannot look past what we are capable of, past what horror is possible in our country.

I can’t make sense of this. I am not meant to. I should not have to.

This happens somewhere else, not here. I have seen it in other places. I can process that. My old journalist mind kicks in, surveying the scene, putting things in order, compiling facts and figures, constructing a bloodless, detached narrative.

Somewhere else, yes. Terrible, shocking, outrageous, tragic. Somewhere else, yes.

Not here. Those old hack words, they don’t work here. I don’t recognise this place because it is now unrecognisable. It looks like home, but this is not home.

I was not born for a place like this. The smell of eucalyptus, pavement that burns my feet, bikes and footballs, swimming and backyard cricket, orange iceblocks on the way home – I was born for that.

I was born for G’day. How ya goin’? I was not born for Get down! Hurry! Hide!

I was born for hard history. My home has a hard history. Yet I was not born for a place without hope. I was not born for hell.

In my Australia, where summer days don’t end, this is unthinkable. We had our blues, of course we did. We argued it out and sometimes our tempers flared, but not this. This is unthinkable.

In my Australia I dreamt of having a pump-up scooter when I was a kid. I got banged up good when my billycart crashed into a barbed wire fence. In my Australia my mate Luigi slipped me a pizza from his parents’ shop after school. In my Australia this never happened.

In my Australia Skyhooks were the most outrageous thing I’d seen. They even got banned on the radio. Germaine Greer gave the old blokes the finger and about bloody time. Graham Kennedy had a twinkle in his eye. Patrick White won a Nobel Prize.

In my Australia we wanted to be Lillee and Thommo. Charlie Perkins took a freedom ride. We voted “Yes” in a referendum.

In my Australia this is unthinkable. My Australia is gone.

Yes, things look better in the past. Yes, there was a lot of myth in my Australia. It hid a lot of bad things. But thank God we had a myth.

My Australian myth is gone.

Whither my Australia? How did we lose her? Was she ever here?

This is what we have made of our country, this carnage. This, on Bondi Beach for heaven’s sake.

This does not happen somewhere else anymore. Somewhere else is here.

The hours tick by. The fog starts to clear. Now, the anger. Now, someone to blame. I am irrational now.

Right now I want my idea of Australia back. This is human. This is natural. This is hurt. This is where the hate gets in.

This is what got us here. This hate that pits us against other people.

Old instincts die hard. We are tribal. All around the world we are being shaken from our glorious liberal cosmopolitan dream and it is ugly. Now it is here. Now someone must pay.

Thank you, God, for Ahmed Al Ahmed. That man with that name. He wrestled the gun from one of the shooters. On his own, he did. Fearless.

Thank you, God, for Vladimir Kotlyar. The Jewish chaplain for the State Emergency Service, who was enjoying Hanukkah and threw his body over his son to protect him. A stranger was shot next to him and Vladimir helped him, too.

Thank you, Ahmed. Thank you, Vladimir.

We don’t hear enough from the Ahmeds and Vladimirs. In this noisy, angry, self-righteous Australia, we hear too often from people with too much to say.

There are too many flags. Too many sour faces. Too many them and not enough us.

Pick sides. Hate each other. Stop talking. Stop listening.

I don’t disagree with you – I hate you!

The media loves this. They love watching us tear each other apart. They go to the ugliest faces.

Then they ask, how did we get here? How can this happen?

The politicians love this. They ridicule faith. They see moral equivalence. They play their word games. They plot and scheme and dog whistle for a bump in the polls.

Then they ask, how did this happen?

There are good people in the media. There are good politicians. Yet they are losing the fight.

Protest is good. Protest is necessary. Yet not the protests we have seen. All of them on all sides. Protests with people carrying banners of hate and photos of the hateful. Good people who march for good causes but stand alongside people who want only vengeance.

This is not Australia. There will be a lot of people saying that. Be careful. They might mean you are not Australian.

That is not Australia. That’s the Australia I don’t recognise.

Right now we need all the Ahmeds and Vladimirs we can find. We need people who put themselves in front of the bullets.

Be quiet, please, just for a while. Stop the noise.

For God’s sake. For Australia’s.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "This is not Australia".

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