🔗 Share this article

While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.