The Alleged Invasion Day Bomber Was Just Your Typical East Perth Derro. Anyway, Look Here Thanks

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Australia has a refined instinct for threat. It can detect menace as it enters a pub, a questionable sermon in a distant suburb, a slogan shouted through a megaphone. But when a 32-year-old Perth derro is charged with allegedly throwing a homemade explosive device into a crowd gathered on Invasion Day, the national temperature settles almost immediately to mild concern.

The device, it is alleged, was designed to detonate on impact. It did not. And because it did not, neither did the panic.

The man now publicly identified faces charges including 'engaging' in a terrorist act. The matter is before the courts. Allegations remain allegations. The presumption of innocence is foundational, not decorative.

Yet the reaction carries its own quiet logic. When an accused person presents with an Anglo-Celtic name and an East Perth address, the story instinctively contracts. He becomes a troubled individual. A loner. A derro. A Buswellesque mental episode. A personal rupture rather than a political symptom. The language cools. The analysis narrows. The word "terror" is spoken, but gently and with genuine concern.

In other contexts, one alleged act metastasises. Birthplaces become weaponised. Communities are summoned to account for themselves. Think pieces bloom overnight tracing ideological supply chains from childhood to catastrophe. We get rhetorical questions. Would our fragile society be better off if we just cut up their visas and passports with a pair of secateurs and turned them loose in Dubai International? Why do we actually need them here anyway? Can't we just get more Irish lads? Brazilian chicks? We'd even take more Chinese because they have good manners and keep to themselves mostly. They also love making cash, getting on the beers and eating until their insides look like the Easter Show from above.

But here, the expansion never arrives.

Invasion Day rallies are not obscure gatherings. They are public, symbolic and, for many Aboriginal Australians, deeply personal assertions of survival. Thousands attended in Perth. Families attended. Elders attended. Children attended.

Had the alleged device detonated, the national conversation would have been unrecognisable. Instead, the episode settles into the consoling category of "isolated incident" and a "byproduct of the bogan menace".

Anyway you worthless taxpayer, look at the neutraliser. Forget about it all, worry about your mortgage. Worry about your investment property and how Jim Chalmers is going to cut your fiscal cock off and alley-oop it into the nearest wastepaper basket. It doesn't really affect you, either.

The courts will determine what happened. The culture, meanwhile, has already decided how loudly to care.

Please maintain eye contact with the light, it doesn't hurt.