Bondi has had a colourful history, but this is why it’s never lost its appeal

Patrick White wrote about it, Brett Whiteley painted it, Midnight Oil sang about it, Heath Ledger acted on it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Bondi Beach.

Bondi is an unruly coastal circus and that’s why I love it. If I wasn’t from Sydney and had ties to other parts of the city, I would, as many new arrivals and backpackers have done, adopt Bondi as “my Sydney”. I guess I can with some legitimacy claim Bondi as part of who I am. My parents grew up not far from each other and both were walking distance from Bondi’s golden crescent of beach. Like many postwar Australians, they later moved from Art Deco flats in the eastern suburbs into larger, freestanding homes in new outer suburbs, but Mum and Dad continued to talk fondly about growing up in Bondi and about the “Bondi Broad” – a much-loved cousin who steadfastly refused to budge.

The word “Bondi” is derived from a Dharawal word meaning “loud thud”, and it refers to water breaking over rocks. Credit: Dom Stuart / Stocksy United

Undoubtedly Sydney’s most famous beach, Bondi is a coastal superstar. The history of Bondi largely mirrors the history of Sydney and much of its story feeds our national narratives.

For thousands of years the Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal peoples have lived on and around the beach, and their rock engravings are still very visible in the area. In the early days of colonisation, Bondi was largely covered in dunes. Pastoralists who had purchased land in the Bondi area tried their hand at grazing cows where skateboarders and spray-painting street artists now congregate. Bondi was re-acquired by the state as a public beach in 1882 and, following Federation, the archetype of the bronzed, male, Anglo Bondi lifesaver was elevated to almost mythic status. Like the Digger and the Swagman, the Bondi Lifesaver came to represent “Australia” in advertising, wartime propaganda and jingoistic conversations about class, gender and race.

In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Bondi typified conflicts between those wanting to conserve and those wanting to commercialise Sydney’s beach life. User-pay change rooms; an organised opposition to a giant, never-to-be-realised amusement park; real-estate booms and busts; and erratic “beautification” programs were chapters in this struggle.

During World War II, the beach was heavily fortified in case of Japanese invasion, but people found their way past barbed wire and littoral defence blocks to swim at the beach. Soldiers keeping vigil slept in the tunnels that run under Campbell Parade and, ironically, the few men of service age who could be found on the beach during the early 1940s were American servicemen visiting Sydney on “rest and recreation” leave.

Bondi Icebergs is the belle of Sydney’s ocean baths.Credit: Tom Compagnoni

Peace, as well as war, left its mark on Bondi Beach and, in a brilliantly orchestrated royal photo opportunity, a newly crowned 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II famously traversed the beach in the back of a jeep in 1954. In the years following the war, large immigrant populations moved to Bondi, forever transforming the tone and flavour of the area, and setting the scene for today’s cultural diversity. Bondi’s giant car parks spoke of a newly mobile suburbia, and its Central European cake shops, Greek milk bars, Jewish delis and emergent backpacker culture pointed to a changing Australia.

Bondi has long been associated with skin and sin. In the great Australian novel The Tree of Man (1955), Nobel Laureate Patrick White called it a place of “many furtive lusts”. By the 1980s, Bondi’s reputation for hedonism and unlawful behaviour was widely known. Peter Corris, who has been referred to as “the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing”, portrayed Bondi as a place of drugs, decay and sleaze. Bondi was also infamous for violent, unsolved gay-hate crimes.

Like much of Sydney, Bondi got a makeover for the 2000 Olympic Games and, despite local protests, it hosted the beach volleyball events. Property prices soared with the arrival of the new millennium, and young corporate movers and shakers such as James Packer moved in, building or renovating multimillion-dollar beach pads. Marketing itself as a haunt of affluence and celebrity, Bondi once again reinvented itself.

In a brilliantly orchestrated royal photo opportunity, a newly crowned 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II famously traversed the beach in the back of a jeep in 1954.

One of the most appealing aspects of a visit to this beach is encountering its many tribes. Dreadlocked Brazilians, power walkers, frolicking Nippers, gay boys, hippie girls, influencers, car hoons and paddling Chinese tourists are as at home at Bondi as the early-morning, all-year surfers and the leathery long-time locals. Billed as the world’s biggest fun run, the City2Surf ends at Bondi every August. As it brings the smell of Dencorub and 70,000 joggers down the hill from Dover Heights to the beach’s finish line, this avalanche of diverse humanity easily melds with the regular, colourful Sunday morning Bondi crowd.

“Bondi” is one of the few place names that has firmly entered the popular lexicon of Sydney. A local will immediately collocate it with “Icebergs”, the famous ocean pool, but older Sydneysiders will also likely pair “Bondi” with the word “tram”. The expression “shoot through like a Bondi tram” is one of coastal Sydney’s most endearing idioms, bested only perhaps by a phrase my grandfather used to describe a male weakling: “He’ s got a Bondi chest!” – that is, far from Manly! My grandfather, an ironically vain and self-deprecating man, would sometimes admire himself in the mirror. Combing his still considerable volume of septuagenarian hair, he’d joke, “You won’t see better waves than those at Bondi.”

The word “Bondi” is derived from a Dharawal word meaning “loud thud”, and it refers to water breaking over rocks. At the northern end of the beach, waves wash over the rocks with the impact and self-possession of a superstar, and this is where I most love to come to swim when I’m at Bondi. Stroking out beyond the Mermaid Baths towards Flat Rock and leaving the colourful seaside circus behind me, I arrive at verdant sea gardens that are teeming with dazzling fish and intriguing sea creatures. Pipefish, seahorses, anemones and tube worms weave in and out of kelp and algae, and sea urchins, limpets and periwinkles cling to the tidally massaged shoreline. It’s miraculous that the waters of this most famous of beaches are so abundantly alive and varied, and, like its extraordinary history and the diverse human cavalcade on the water’s edge, this is cause for adulation, cheering and applause.

Edited extract from Swimming Sydney: A Tale of 52 Swims (NewSouth) by Chris Baker, out now.

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