Bondi Beach, where for one day a year nobody’s too cool for the flag

Bondi Beach was teeming with locals and tourists on Australia Day where the animosity towards the holiday seemed to be in keeping with its surroundings.

Just before noon, thousands of swimmers in the glittering emerald waters of Bondi Beach looked up at the sound of another chopper overhead.

Not a news camera or shark patrol this time, but a pale grey navy Seahawk, towing an enormous Australian flag.

It looped around Ben Buckler, headed back out to the deep blue Tasman, where yachts lazed down the coastline, and circled back again, swooping low over the bay-lappers and paddle-boarders and the red and yellow jet ski towing a hefty bloke out of a rip.

And as it swept over the splashing crowd just out the back of that famous break, the Seahawk and its flag were greeted not by boos or indifference but by loud, sustained cheering.

“Happy Australia Day!” a young boy yelled, scrambling onto his boogie board.

Nobody was too cool to wave and smile.

Nobody was too angry.

Sydney’s eastern beaches were packed with people enjoying a picturesque public holday.

Most days of the year, Bondi is Urban Elitism ground zero: highly affluent, socially progressive and largely white.

This is the suburb that successfully rejected an underground train line because it would “overcrowd” the beach, presumably with the wrong sort of people – the sort who live in the sweltering real Sydney, way out past the Kombucha Curtain.

Bondi is where, if anywhere, you might expect the Australian flag to be unwelcome – as gauche as an oi-oi-oi at the opera.

On Australia Day, however, the real Sydneysiders make the big pilgrimage to the surf, hopscotching over scorching sand and plunging into the glorious cool of perfect water on a bright yellow beach.

With the Sno Cone truck churning out treats and the teenage clubbies selling snags on a roll for $6 out the front of the surf club, the only anger on Thursday was in the eyes of frustrated drivers crawling through the back streets looking for a two-hour park.

Australia Day has never been purely about celebration; its flaws as a day, and ours as a nation, are starkly apparent each January 26.

In our cities there are loudhailers and placards and, this year, some workers showing up to office towers as a gesture of protest.

Gamay Dancers perform during a Dawn Reflection and Smoking Ceremony at Bondi Beach on Australia Day.

Everywhere else there are lamb chops on the barbie and kids shrieking on jumping castles and mango juice dripping down to the elbows.

The chopper swept down the beach and turned left, zooming out to the blue and back again, down the cliff-edge to Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly, Coogee, Maroubra and the Malabar headland.

It flew all the way down to Botany Bay, the wild and windswept basin which – as Arthur Phillip found out 235 years ago – looks pretty good until you see Port Jackson, the magnificent harbour to the north.

Ever since Phillip anchored at Sydney Cove in 1788, our national story has rippled out through these clear waters, all around our continent’s edge.

And it might be a little gauche to say so, but when you look back at our country from beyond the breakers, even with all her contradictions and her complexities, Australia looks exquisite. Something worth cheering for.

The Navy Seahawk helicopter’s flypast included Sydney Harbour. Picture: AAP