On the Beach

On Saturday's On the Town I played the late Ted Egan's classic song "We Got Some Bloody Good Drinkers in the Northern Territory" - and wondered afterwards: "Does it get any more Australian than that?"

Answer came there less than twenty-four hours later. Wherever you live in the west, "diversity" seems to be making us all the same: one big rapey-stabby blood-drenched craphole. That said, Sydney's Jew-slaughter was of sufficient scale to obscure America's two simultaneous Hannukah attacks - in Los Angeles and at Brown University, the would-be killer and actual killer still at large.

As I first wrote all those sod-bollocking decades ago, demography is destiny because everything else - corporate tax rates, mandatory vaccines - are changes that can be changed back. But, once you've changed the people, there is no changing back. The public discourse on this is still nowhere near where it needs to be, although the headline to Rowan Dean's piece in the Aussie Spectator comes close:

The Night Australia Died

Indeed. I don't suppose the killers gamed it out as such, but, if you wanted to demolish the no longer Lucky Country's self-image in a single atrocity, piling up the corpse count at Bondi Beach is hard to beat. As Andrew Christopher writes:

Bondi Beach is my backyard. Our family life is built around North Bondi Surf Club and the beach. My son was running the bar at the Surf Club yesterday when it was turned into a makeshift field hospital where many of the wounded and terrified were tended to by him and his fellow club members (the very best of our community). My youngest daughter was staffing the North Bondi RSL (Returned and Services League)...

In our mind's search for a symbol of the 'Australian way of life' – an image of the aquatic arc of Bondi framed by its ageing Art Deco unit blocks and craggy headlands springs quickly to mind. What Sydneysider or tourist has not visited the Bondi Pavilion and enjoyed a swim or an ice cream or a stroll along the promenade with their family and friends?