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Things fall apart, as Chinua Achebe warned us. And “things” – the climate, the social contract, the rules-based international order – seem to be falling apart at a rate of knots. They fell apart spectacularly and horribly at Bondi last December, when allegedly Islamist gunmen opened fire on civilians, including children. Fifteen people were killed. Many more were injured. This monstrosity was described as the worst terrorist attack Australia has suffered on home soil.

Following Bondi, the Albanese government set up the royal commission on antisemitism and tacked on to it the job of investigating social cohesion. But what even is social cohesion? An obviously good idea that no reasonable person could oppose? Is promoting “social cohesion” a valid goal in a liberal democracy? Or is this the same old assimilationist bullshit being served up in a different bottle, designed only to silence dissent?

Former French president Charles de Gaulle once asked how he could possibly govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese. That’s the democratic conundrum. Western liberal governments have the task of ruling for “everyone”. (Everyone with a vote, that is. Too bad if you’re doing 12 months or more in a Queensland prison and want to vote in state or local elections. No democracy sausage for you).

Australia’s First Nations have never been well served by western liberalism. Many of us struggle to stay alive until pension age. Indigenous mobs know that Australian “social cohesion” is mostly a white man’s fantasy, issued only on the terms of the dominant society. Take Darwin in the Northern Territory, where a pastoralist with a history of making online posts described as racist and misogynist is now the administrator of the Northern Territory – literally the bossman. Appeals from the women of the Country Women’s Association and from the Northern Land Council for the feds to stop his recent appointment went unheeded. When local Larrakia people protested this utter disgrace, Uncle Eric Fejo was arrested for “trespass” on his own Country.

Staying in the Territory, a speeding motorist killed one Aboriginal pedestrian and injured another in Darwin in 2024. This young white man – related by marriage to the Northern Territory attorney general, walked out of court a few weeks ago. His sentence? Home detention. He will serve exactly zero days in jail after sending texts describing what he had done as a “two for one combo” against “oxygen thieves” and “ni**as”. This in a Territory where Kumanjayi White died on a supermarket floor, suspected of shoplifting.

The Bondi atrocity in December appalled the country, First Nations included. Yet a lot of mob are gnashing our teeth as we hear over and over again the racist fallacy that Bondi was exceptional. Because as horrible as that Sunday afternoon in December was, only wilful forgetting can paint it as singular. Yes, it was clearly murderous antisemitic violence, but it was far from the worst political violence seen in Australia. There have been literally scores of Bondis, some with death tolls in the hundreds – and the targets throughout Australian history have overwhelmingly been us, Indigenous Australians. The most cursory glance at online massacre maps proves it. Murdering innocent civilians, including small children and infants, was absolutely central to establishing the Great Australian Dream – home ownership on stolen land.

The terror started early. In 1816 Governor Macquarie sent troops out to kidnap Gandangara people at Appin, an hour south-west of Bondi. If any of them showed “the slightest resistance” to being taken hostage, Macquarie ordered they be killed and their bodies hung “on trees … in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors”.

Since Appin, countless tens of thousands of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders have been murdered across the continent. Shot, poisoned, brained with stirrup irons or rifle butts. Forced over clifftops by armed vigilantes. Do these stolen lives count? These victims? To hear much of Australia (not) tell it, the mass murders of First Nations never even happened. But not only did they happen, it was usually terrorism. War was never declared here by the British crown. Atrocities were about stealing land, yes, but also about “sending messages” and “instilling fear”. And the dawn arrival of armed murderers, at Myall Creek and scores of other massacre sites, must have felt exactly like Bondi to the slain. In every First Nation, the shots rang out, the bodies fell and the living huddled in terror, feigning death.

Is this false equivalence? The bullet wounds of Bondi haven’t yet healed, so why drag up ancient history? Well, for one, because it isn’t ancient. It’s today. Bondi, the white supremacist tragedy visited upon Christchurch, the Palestinian genocide. All front-page stuff, and rightly so. But a bomb – yes, a bomb – a murderous mix of screws, ball-bearings and explosives – was chucked into a crowd of First Nations people and our supporters on 26 January this year. If it had detonated there would have been huge mass casualties, including Elders and others in wheelchairs. By some fluke (some say Ancestral protection), it failed to go off.

It took a long time before many other Australians knew anything much about this January 2026 bomb. For nine days Indigenous mob around the country waited in stunned limbo. Was this how low the bar had been set, we asked? We’re used to worrying about white vigilante bashings of our people, and never surprised to hear about deaths in watch houses or jails. Were we now literally to be bombed in a major Australian city?

The 26 January attack on the First Nations rally in Boorloo/Perth was one of the more dramatic recent attacks on us. It is rightly being prosecuted as terrorism. But it’s only one attack in a long unbroken line stretching back to Appin. This is the context in which government is talking about social cohesion. The last officially recognised massacre of Aboriginal people was in 1926, at Coniston. But you’d be a fool to think the killings stopped there. They continued in less obvious forms. Five Aboriginal people were murdered by poison at Port Keats in 1936. Black workers at Roper River were poisoned in 1940, with two dying and 14 hospitalised. While thousands of First Nations people fought overseas wearing this country’s uniform, their countrymen were being murdered with impunity.

The terror and violence usually happens on a case-by-case basis these days. Twenty-seven-year-old Gungarri man Steven Lee Nixon-McKellar died during a police arrest in Toowoomba in October 2021. Steven died after being held in a chokehold. Moments before his death, a police bodycam can be heard, “choke this cunt out”. The only truly remarkable part of his story is that the bodycam was functioning. Steven was one of more than 600 Indigenous people who’ve lost their lives and their futures in police custody since the 1988 royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Australia has many endangered species, and blackfellas are one of them.

Indigenous, and wanting to avoid overpolicing and brutality by staying home? The avalanche of hate speech waiting for you online can scarcely be believed, except perhaps by other minorities. Since the voice to parliament referendum emboldened the right, racists and bots swarm like flies on a turd to any Indigenous topic.

When you add this to the real-life racism many of us experience – the school bullying, the exclusion from jobs and social spaces, the police bashings, the mockery from politicians such as Cory Bernardi and Pauline Hanson, the kind of toxic harassment Adam Goodes had to wear – it ends up costing Indigenous lives.

Whether it’s cops stripping us naked in watch houses, or security guards stalking us; whether its being refused housing, or hearing racist comments on the netball court, there’s nowhere we can expect to avoid white supremacy in Australia. I’ve lost count of the hundreds of places, events and relationships I never enter into because of the ambient racism – and that’s speaking as a two-ways educated blackfella with the very real protection of fair skin privilege.

When the Bondi royal commission was announced, there were loud calls for anti-Indigenous racism to be addressed, as well as antisemitism. The racism we endure, is, after all, as Australian as meat pies and Holden cars. The federal minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, has now announced a Senate inquiry into the hatred that is killing us. Senator Lidia Thorpe argues that the terms of the Bondi royal commission itself need expanding to include Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. (One useful line of inquiry might be how to govern a country with 246 varieties of racist.)

Australia does have a serious problem with social cohesion, but it’s no good pretending it’s recent. Koori civilisation has been torn asunder ever since the convict ships dropped anchor just south of Bondi, and the stealing of Blak land and lives and rights began. Back then white bosses didn’t talk about social cohesion. They talked about the “savages” and “heathens” standing in the way of their alleged British civilisation. If the modern Australian nation wants to rebuild the social cohesion we enjoyed here before the boats, it needs to acknowledge where it all started to unravel – with the failure of the British crown to negotiate Treaty. Or to put it in simpler terms – no justice, no peace.