As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.
It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.
Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.
Those who have not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as they are to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right 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 especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.
And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.
This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.
And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. Ahmed al-Ahmed. Reuven Morrison. Boris and Sofia Gurman. First responders – police and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised like lifeguard Jackson Doolan but for the most part unnamed and unsung.
When the police tape still fluttered wildly in the winds all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.
Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.
Unity, light and love was the message of faith.
And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.
Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.
Witness the dangerous message of division from that great fomenter across three decades of Australian racial division, Pauline Hanson, and her latest sidekick, Barnaby Joyce, in Bondi not yet two full days after the massacre. Then read the words of Andrew Hastie, Liberal leadership wannabe, while the crime scene was still active.
Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.
Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers (one of whom had come to Asio’s attention in 2019 for alleged links to a fundamentalist person of security interest) have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?
How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.
In this city of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.
We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.
This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.
But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, sadness, confusion and grief we need each other more than ever.
The reassurance of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.
But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and Griefline on 1300 845 745. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
