The third Ashes Test in Adelaide will not be the first to take place in the shadow of modern-day acts of terror. The 2005 series in England began two weeks after the 7 July London bombings, which killed 52 people. Day one at Lord’s coincided with an aborted follow-up atrocity that failed only because of the incompetence of those involved. Twenty years on, after the murder of at least 15 people at Bondi beach on Sunday during a Hanukah celebration, the most heinous act of terror in Australia’s history, the Australian government has bolstered its security operation for Adelaide.
There are practical consequences. Entry to the ground will take longer than usual. The recently formed armed Security Response Section will patrol the Oval’s beautifully green-tinged surrounds. The match was likely, at time of writing, to begin with a “moment of reflection” led by the premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas.
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In the days since Sunday Australia has felt, even in its round‑the‑clock live reporting of leads and details, like a place in a state of slow-motion shock. There were initially some suggestions the Christmas Test might be cancelled or postponed. But as the state police commissioner, Grant Stevens, said on the eve of the match, Sydney is being seen as a distinct event. “We don’t have any information whatsoever that indicates there’s a linkage between what happened in Bondi on the weekend and South Australia.”
No linkage, in policing terms. But there always is linkage. In Adelaide the main centre of public mourning has been the Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre, a mile across the city grid from the cricket ground. Malinauskas laid flowers there on Monday. The opposition leader, Ashton Hurn, then did the same. Malinauskas followed up by promising the centre half a million dollars in funding.
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Not that there was much sign of this the day before the Test. The centre is a detached building on Wakefield Street, a midtown triple carriageway lined with startlingly beautiful purple‑plumed jacaranda trees. By Tuesdaymorning it had returned to a state of dormant anonymity, barring a small selection of flowers left at the entrance.
The topic of morning mass inside the modern gothic Catholic cathedral next door was the commercialisation of Christmas. The only real tell as to the significance of this place were the blocks in its front wall, which showed signs of having been scoured and scrubbed a great deal of late, legacy of multiple antisemitic defacings in the years since the Hamas kidnappings of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s military response. Not long ago CCTV caught some local neo-Nazi groups performing fascist salutes outside.
In this context the police verdict that Bondi is unlinked to any wider threat might raise a weary sigh. Some of Adelaide’s earliest settlers were Jewish sheep farmers, but the Jewish population now is small, close to a thousand. Despite this, reports of antisemitism are common. The city’s synagogues have security guards on service days and suffer regular graffiti attacks. Adelaide University has been wrestling with the need to foster free political speech against reports of overt hostility towards Jewish students.
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These tensions might be at odds with the tourist-poster view of a hail‑fellow nation of immigrants. But Australia has a longstanding problem with racism. It has a problem, more specifically, with antisemitism, incidents of which have tripled in the past two years according to a report by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. The details in its appendix now carry a disturbing sense of narrative arc. In November 2024 there was an arson attack on a kosher catering business in Bondi. In December 2024 the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was burned to the ground. In January this year cars in Sydney were set alight and daubed with anti‑Jewish hate slogans.
From the outside Australia seems to provide a very vivid case study in the way violence in Gaza and Israel has echoed around the world. Its Jewish population has the highest percentage of holocaust survivors outside Israel, something Michael Visontay, commissioning editor of the Jewish Independent, described this week as “central to its identity”. As Visontay told the New Yorker: “The sensitivity within the community to the threats of antisemitism, of prejudice … are much more pronounced here than they are virtually anywhere else.”
At the same time Australia also has a significant youthful Muslim community, which has voiced its own concerns over the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. It is a familiar dynamic, a mess of bloodshed and irresolvable tensions, one that found its most murderously deranged expression in the horror of last weekend.
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And at Bondi of all places. As Rabbi Yossi Engel of Adelaide’s Chabad SA synagogue told local news outlets on Tuesday: “Bondi beach is a symbol of open Australia. In terms of a spot in Australia that’s symbolic of the fair dinkum way of Australia, Bondi beach is about as plain good old Aussie as it gets.”
As is the cricket, Australia’s summer pastime, and a Test match that will take place now against that same sense of horror. Even the announcement on Tuesday of Australia’s team was the spur for a trending tide of social media abuse directed towards Usman Khawaja, on the grounds Khawaja has expressed previously his concern for the suffering of Palestinian people in Gaza.
Sport must now march into this world once again, staging its own pantomime tensions, holding up its cameras, a window to the world beyond. A common reaction on Australian television this week is that the country feels irrevocably changed by the massacre on Sunday. It will be felt again in Adelaide, memorialised in Sydney when England travel east for the New Year Test; and preserved now in perpetuity by the images, the sounds, the highlights reel of this Ashes tour.
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