During the Italian Risorgimento, once the House of Savoy had unified the peninsula, it confronted a problem more difficult than war: identity. Massimo d’Azeglio captured it succinctly — “Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani.” Italy had been made; Italians had not. People spoke different dialects, held loyalties to regions rather than a nation, and shared little beyond geography. Unity required something deeper than borders.
The events of last Sunday force a similar reckoning here.
On land taken from First Nations people, a radicalised Indian Muslim and his son — born of a woman with Italian heritage — attempted to murder Jews attending a religious gathering. In the process, two non-Jewish bystanders were killed. A Jewish couple tried to disarm one attacker and were slain. A Syrian Muslim shop owner intervened and was aided by a Jewish man; both were shot. The violence ended when a NSW police officer — himself the child of migration — stopped it.
You cannot invent this. It is stranger than fiction, and it will take years of serious thought to extract meaning from it.
Calling this land stolen is accurate. Claiming that everyone who lives here is equally complicit is not. Colonial dispossession created uneven benefit and uneven burden, and we live inside that inheritance whether we like it or not. But that reality raises a difficult question: on what moral basis does a modern state arbitrate rights, obligations, and belonging among radically different histories, loyalties, and grievances?
The attackers, Sajid Akram and his son Saeed, hated Jews — but for what, precisely? A distant war? A global ideology? Something inherited rather than lived? Whatever the answer, it was not a struggle rooted in Australian life. It was imported. And that distinction matters.
Australia is built on migration — British, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and more. That is a fact. But migration without integration is not pluralism; it is fragmentation. Malcolm Turnbull captured this with brutal simplicity: don’t bring it here. Not your wars, not your hatreds, not your ancient grievances. That injunction applies to everyone — Jews and Muslims alike.
What last Sunday exposed was not just an act of terror, but the structural irony of the country we have become. Like Italy after unification, Australia now faces the task it has postponed for decades: defining what it is, beyond coexistence. What do we hold in common? What values are non-negotiable? What must be left at the border?
Italy had to make Italians. Australia must now decide what it means to make Australians. And “don’t bring it here” is not the whole answer — but it is an essential beginning.
