14 December 2025
Bondi beach terrorist attack
Sydney, New South Wales
An terrorist attack on a Hanukah celebration at Australia’s most famous beach has left at least 12 people dead, including one attacker, after gunmen opened fire from a nearby footbridge. Prime minister Anthony Albanese said the “targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukah, which should be a day of joy … [was] an act of evil antisemitism”. A further 29 people, including two police officers responding to the attack, were taken to hospital with injuries.
Read more: ‘It was a massacre’: how antisemitic terror exploded the peaceful idyll of Bondi beach
12 December 2022
Wieambilla ambush
Queensland
Six people died in a gunbattle at a rural property in Wieambilla, Queensland. Two police officers, Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, were shot and killed by extremist Christian conspiracy theorists. The three shooters – Gareth, Stacey and Nathaniel Train – also shot dead their neighbour, Alan Dare, before being killed in a shootout with police. An inquest heard that the Train family had “shared paranoid delusions”.
4 June 2019
Darwin mass shooting
Northern Territory
A man who was out on parole fatally shot four men and wounded a woman in the northern Australian city of Darwin. Police said the shooting was not terrorism-related and that the man, who was wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet at the time of the shooting, was “well known to us”.
Read more: Witnesses describe panic and carnage in Darwin during hour-long shooting rampage
11 May 2018
Margaret River shooting
Western Australia
Katrina Miles, 35, her four children aged eight to 13, and Katrina’s mother and father, Cynda and Peter Miles were found dead on a remote property. Three guns found at the house were registered to Peter Miles, who police say shot dead six members of his family before taking his own life.
At the time, it was Australia’s worst mass shooting since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
Read more: ‘It’s simply too much’: Margaret River’s tourist idyll devastated by shootings
15 December 2014
Sydney siege terrorist attack
New South Wales
Man Monis, a self-styled cleric, took 18 people hostage at the Lindt café in Martin Place, in central Sydney. After a 16-hour siege, two hostages – Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson – were left dead, along with Monis.
Read more: Sydney siege: how a day and night of terror unfolded at the Lindt cafe
28 April 1996
Port Arthur massacre
Tasmania
In little over half an hour, at the historic site of Port Arthur, Martin Bryant shot dead 35 people and injured 23. It was the worst single-perpetrator mass shooting in Australia’s history and prompted a sweeping package of gun reforms across the country. On the 25th anniversary of the massacre, in 2021, John Howard, the prime minister who spearheaded those reforms, warned against any “erosion” of gun control laws.
“We’ve secured a safer community, we mustn’t do anything to unpick that,” he said.
Read more: It took one massacre: how Australia embraced gun control after Port Arthur
Associated Press contributed reporting.
• This article was amended on 15 December 2025 to correctly attribute who killed Alan Dare in the Wieambilla shooting.
