English

From shoot through + emphatic simile.

Verb

shoot through like a Bondi tram ‎(third-person singular simple present shoots through like a Bondi tram, present participle shooting through like a Bondi tram, simple past and past participle shot through like a Bondi tram)

1. (Australia, colloquial, informal) To leave in haste.
   • 1945 April, John Scarlett, censored dispatch quoted in 2011, Fay Anderson, Richard Trembath, Witnesses to War: The History of Australian Conflict Reporting, Melbourne University Press, page 197,

     […] then he gets back into his jeep says good luck boys and shoots through like a Bondi tram.

   • 1994, Lydia Laube, The Long Way Home: Nobody Goes that Way, 2002, page 22,

     When it came to the real thing, panic took over and the routine shot through like a Bondi tram, to be replaced by a three-ring circus.

   • 2006, Pip Wilson, Faces in the Street: Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Castlereagh Street Push, page 431,

     She had put the wind up them, called them “un-Australian”, and took to them with her parasol and they shot through like a Bondi tram, one of the men with a gash on his neck that he won′t quickly forget.