Australia is rightly grieving the horrific killings at Bondi. The loss of innocent life — particularly that of a child — wounds the nation, and the fear felt by the Jewish community in the wake of this attack must be taken seriously. Antisemitism is real, rising, and demands a clear and decisive response from government and civil society alike.
But grief should not suspend history. In the days following the attack, it has been said that this was the deadliest act of violence in Australia’s history. That claim, however understandably made in anguish, is not historically accurate. Long before the modern era, this continent was the site of hundreds of massacres of Aboriginal people during the frontier period. Thousands were killed over more than a century in violence that was often state-sanctioned, rarely punished, and foundational to the nation we inhabit today. This is not an abstract or academic point. How a nation remembers violence reveals whose lives it counts.
Australia has a long habit of treating violence against First Nations people as background noise rather than national trauma. Frontier killings were framed as “clashes” or “dispersals,” their victims denied the language of massacre or terror. By contrast, violence against non-Indigenous Australians is rightly marked as shocking, exceptional, and nation-defining. The result is a hierarchy of grief that distorts our moral vision. Holding this history does not diminish the suffering of Jewish Australians.
On the contrary, a society capable of remembering its foundational violence is better equipped to confront hatred in all its forms. Antisemitism should be addressed with seriousness and urgency — through education, law enforcement, and political leadership. But it should not be instrumentalised in ways that erase or overshadow earlier truths. Australia’s violence did not begin in the 21st century. Nor did it end with federation.
For Aboriginal people, the past is not past; it remains present in Country, in memory, and in ongoing structural harm. Any claim about “national shame” that overlooks this reality risks reinforcing the very exclusions it seeks to condemn. We do not honour today’s victims by forgetting yesterdays. We honour them by refusing selective memory — by insisting that grief, accountability, and truth apply to all, not just some.
If Australia is serious about confronting hatred and violence, it must do so with historical honesty. That means resisting the urge to rank suffering, and instead committing to a future shaped by remembrance, responsibility, and care for every life lost on this continent.