The events of 14 December 2025 at Bondi Beach in which fifteen people attending a Hanukkah celebration were murdered by Islamist extremists is the worst incident of ethno-religious violence in the nation’s history. However, it is not without precedent in this country, except as to scale. On 25 February 2026 I gave a talk to the Aisling Society of Sydney entitled ‘Hate Speech: We’ve been down this road before’, which can be viewed on YouTube. In that talk I spoke about two incidents of ethno-religious violence in the nineteenth century in each of which shots were fired into a crowd with fatal consequences. The shooters were members of the Orange order, an anti-Catholic organisation founded in the north of Ireland in 1795 which was active in the Australian colonies from the 1840s. The crowds comprised mostly Catholics of Irish birth or descent.