Terror Nullius: How Australia Forged a Nation Through Terror

by Simon Mansfield
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Dec 16, 2025
On 14 December 2025, two gunmen - a father of Pakistani origin who was a long term Australian resident, and his Australian-born son - opened fire along Sydney's Bondi Beach, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more before one was shot by police and the other arrested. In the hours that followed, Australia was again told this was the "worst" or "darkest" day in the nation's history, headlines that may sell copy but quietly erase a far longer, bloodier record written into the country's foundations.

Bondi and the poverty of "worst ever"

The Bondi Beach attack has been officially designated an act of terrorism, with the Joint Counter Terrorism Team leading an investigation into antisemitic motivation, possible overseas connections and how the pair acquired their weapons. Some coverage has immediately reached for "worst in decades" or "worst since Port Arthur" language, framing the event as a near-unprecedented rupture in an otherwise peaceful national story.

There is nothing to minimise in what happened at Bondi. Families have been destroyed; first responders and bystanders carry lifelong trauma; survivors will spend years trying to rebuild ordinary life around gunshot wounds, prosthetics and flashbacks. But recognising that reality does not require pretending Australia has no prior history of mass killing and terror; it requires the opposite, insisting that the nation's oldest, largest campaigns of terror not be erased in real time by editors chasing "biggest ever" superlatives.

From Terra Nullius to Terror Nullius

Australia's legal and political beginnings are often summarised with a Latin fiction: terra nullius, the idea that the continent was "land belonging to no one" when Britain planted a flag at Sydney Cove. First Nations societies were already here, with law, agriculture, diplomacy and custodianship stretching back tens of thousands of years; terra nullius was a doctrine used to justify ignoring that reality in law and policy.

What followed was not the peaceful, organic "settlement" of empty land, but a drawn-out struggle in which the emerging Australian colonies and later the Commonwealth used organised terror to secure control of territory. "Terror Nullius" captures that pattern: not as a claim that every settler was a killer, or that there were no Indigenous reprisals, but as a description of a national strategy in which patrols, police units and settler militias were repeatedly deployed to make certain districts unliveable for Aboriginal people. Fear was not a side effect; it was the mechanism by which Australia extended its frontier.

Counting the massacres the news ignores

The Colonial Frontier Massacres project at the University of Newcastle has documented 438 massacre sites between 1788 and 1930, each defined as the deliberate killing of six or more defenceless people. Their final analysis estimates at least 10,657 victims, of whom 10,374 were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people killed by colonists, police or state-aligned forces, and 160 were colonists killed in massacres by Indigenous groups.

Behind these numbers are specific campaigns. In Tasmania's "Black War" of the 1820s and 1830s, roving parties and military operations cut deep into Aboriginal communities, forcing survivors into ever smaller pockets of land and then onto islands and missions. In south-west Victoria's Eumeralla conflict, settlers and Native Police carried out repeated raids that cumulatively killed hundreds of Gunditjmara people over two decades. In north-west New South Wales and Queensland, mounted police units rode circuits over vast areas, attacking camp after camp in what researchers now describe as "groups of massacres" rather than isolated events.

Individual incidents rival or exceed any modern-era terrorist attack on Australian soil. At places such as Slaughterhouse Creek and Hospital Creek in New South Wales and at Arafura Station in the Northern Territory, contemporary accounts and later oral histories describe death tolls running into the dozens or even around 200: camps of men, women and children surrounded and shot down as they ran, or driven into rivers and over cliffs. These actions were often led by or involved state officers, justified as "dispersals" or punitive expeditions, and aimed at sending a warning to every neighbouring group.

Coniston and the logic of terror

The Coniston killings of 1928 in Central Australia show how late and how openly this logic endured. After a white dingo hunter, Fred Brooks, was killed near Yurrkuru, Constable William George Murray led a series of punitive expeditions targeting Warlpiri, Anmatyerr and Kaytetye communities over several weeks. Official reports admitted to 31 Aboriginal deaths, but later research and Aboriginal oral histories estimate between 60 and 70, and some accounts suggest as many as 100-200 people were killed across multiple sites.

An official Board of Inquiry in 1928 and 1929 cleared Murray and framed the shootings as necessary reprisals, accepting that those killed were "hostile natives" and rejecting calls for prosecution. The purpose of the expeditions was not simply to arrest or avenge a single death; it was to demonstrate that challenging pastoral expansion would provoke overwhelming lethal force and that Aboriginal presence in certain areas would be tolerated only on terms set by the state and station owners.

How corporate media curate amnesia

This is the context that makes today's "worst ever" headlines so harmful. Current coverage of Bondi routinely describes it as the worst mass shooting since Port Arthur in 1996 and one of Australia's worst mass casualty events, but almost never connects it to frontier massacres except in occasional opinion or analysis pieces. When a present-day atrocity is framed as the beginning and end of Australia's experience of mass terror, it quietly reinforces the founding myth that real history starts when the archives include white witnesses, parliamentary speeches and televised funerals.

The target here is not the reporters on the ground in Sydney who are interviewing families and standing outside hospitals; many are doing emotionally gruelling work under deadline pressure, trying to give victims back their names and stories. The problem lies higher up the chain, in editorial conferences where decisions are made about how to frame Bondi, how far back to go in "background" paragraphs, and what language will lead the nightly bulletin. It is at that level that a choice is made to treat frontier massacres as a separate, dusty category - "colonial history" - rather than part of the same continuum of mass terror on Australian soil.

Corporate media, driven by ratings, advertiser comfort and a tight news cycle, have limited incentive to complicate a simple narrative of innocent Australia suddenly assailed by imported hatred. Linking Bondi to a longer history of terror, some of it carried out in the name of Australia itself, risks controversy, audience discomfort and accusations of "politicising" tragedy. It is far easier, from a commercial standpoint, to speak of "our darkest day" than to ask why prior dark days never made it into the canon.

Naming terror without collapsing distinctions

None of this means equating every frontier massacre with every modern terrorist attack in motive, ideology or global context. Pre-Federation Australia did not face online radicalisation, foreign propaganda networks or transnational militant movements, and today's security debates about gun control, policing, encryption and foreign influence are distinct and urgent in their own right.

But there is a common thread: the deliberate use of violence to send a message beyond the immediate victims. On the frontier, that message was clear - this land is no longer yours; resistance will be answered with collective punishment. At Bondi, the message was directed at a broader public as well, framed in antisemitic hatred, radical ideology and personal grievance that investigators are still untangling. To call both forms of violence "terror" is not to collapse difference; it is to acknowledge that the Australian state has both inflicted and now suffers terror on its own territory.

Being honest about that history does not dishonour those killed at Bondi. It does the opposite: it refuses to build empathy for today's victims on top of denial of yesterday's. A nation capable of holding both realities at once - present-day grief and historical truth - is a nation that treats terrorism not as theatre for the nightly news, but as a repeated moral failure, whether committed in uniform or in defiance of the law.