In 2026, I increasingly feel as though I have been transported into another plane of reality. I’ve always lived in Australia; a reliably peaceful and tolerant place.
A place that was real. Where the things I saw, were the things I saw. A nation where differences of opinion or even unpopular opinions, could be expressed without intimidation or violence.
I’m not sure that I’m still in that place. The faces around me are the same. The streets and buildings are still there.
And yet something has shifted. Something dark and frightening has arrived and I’m surrounded by people who will not admit that it exists.
The Bondi Beach massacre was just the latest horrifying expression of a war that has raged for decades in the Middle East; the latest expression of an implacable hatred which has existed there for over a millennium.
It seems to me to be clearly, undeniably connected to events like the siege at the Lindt cafe, the dreadful images of 9/11 and more worldwide atrocities than I can count – or would wish to.
Apparently, my disquiet over these events cannot be expressed in this strange new world I inhabit. Friends and acquaintances act as though they don’t understand.
When I explain that I don’t want to see people slaughtered when Middle Eastern grievances and violence play out on Australian soil, they respond almost before I have finished speaking.
They explain that, “it was just a couple of bad people” or “one was from India and one was born here”. They act as though their elliptical responses are sufficient to explain it all away as a random event.
I think there is a thread which connects the people who were killed on Bondi Beach to their murderers and to the massive angry street protests that preceded the massacre.
My friends, however, make me feel as though I am being unreasonable or foolish for discussing it.
Despite these negative sentiments, I can’t help feeling that we somehow collectively allowed this to happen, either through acts of omission or commission.
I sometimes wonder if the strange responses are a smokescreen which otherwise decent-seeming people use for their own benefit rather than mine. Do they descry a modicum of complicity within themselves that they cannot face?
Even though recent events have played out over every possible news and social platform a foreign spectre walks among us strangely unremarked. Like Voldemort, it can’t be safely acknowledged or named. It camouflages itself with words like colonialism and genocide and ‘upwelling emotion’. But I can see it. It’s destructive and I don’t want it here.
When I say so, the strange sideways conversations just keep happening. People look serious or sad and mention Gaza, yet seemingly October 7 and Hamas are no longer a factor.
What about-ism is running rampant and some mysterious calculus has determined that permissible retribution has been exceeded and victims are now villains.
In the current framing one would think that missiles, bombs and bullets only leave Israel. Maybe munitions headed the other way are as inconsequential in the new calculation as the Bondi killings.
I can’t accept this measuring and remeasuring of grievance to justify this killing or that threat. It’s foreign to my way of thinking and it should be foreign to this soil.
I don’t want to watch Australians engage in this endless hate-fest. Why can’t I call out cynical geopolitics and selective moral outrage for what they are? I see the players at the heart of this maelstrom painting themselves as angels and their opponents as demons.
I refuse to be pulled down into it with them. If am forced to pick a side, then I choose my side. I’m on Australia’s side.
