14 December 2025Bondi beach terrorist attack

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 2022Wieambilla ambush

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 – and one of their neighbours, Alan Dare, were shot dead by police. An inquest heard that the Train family had “shared paranoid delusions”.

Read more: Two Australian police officers were killed in an ambush. It was deemed terrorism – but an inquest says otherwise

4 June 2019Darwin mass shooting

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 2018Margaret River shooting

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 2014Sydney siege terrorist attack

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 1996Port Arthur massacre

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