Bondi exerts a strange gravitational force on the city of Sydney, disproportionate to its 1.2 sq km crescent of sand. It’s a brand name. It’s a dream. It’s a pilgrimage. It’s a church. It’s the gym. It’s a community. It’s a gateway. It’s a baptism. For international tourists coming in, it’s the name they know, where they take off their shoes, walk down to the water and take their first swim in Australian waters.
And how about that swim? After the discomfort of a long-haul flight, to take your weary body down to Bondi and jump into the glistening surf, then dry out in the sun while drinking a flat white is to have arrived in Australia not just physically, but also spiritually.
There are better beaches in Sydney, but none have the charisma of Bondi, the whole “Take me, I’m yours!” swagger.
Part of its alchemy is that the beach never looks, or even feels, the same. It’s constantly changing depending on the light, the tides, the seasons, the weather.
Golden hour is my favourite time down at Bondi, when the sun hits Ben Buckler Point and the cliffs briefly glow a deep buttery yellow. To be in the water then, up the north side, becoming part of the golden hour tableau is to enter, however momentary, a state of grace.
The other part of the magic is the people. Come down to Bondi any day of the week and you will see just about every type of person imaginable.
Busloads of tourists by the Bondi pavilion, new and very tired parents at the playground, off-duty models at the north end, surfers at the south end, elderly dawn swimmers, Orthodox Jews, the muscle crowd at the jungle gym near the surf club, the fit jogging, and those trying to get fit.
The suburb’s housing prices are increasingly homogenising the suburb and making it a place of extreme wealth, but down at the beach, none of it matters and everyone is welcome.
I remember telling a friend visiting from Melbourne and feeling body-conscious among all the strutting bronzed models, “Don’t worry – it’s Bondi, no one is looking at you, they’re all just looking at themselves.”
And it’s true. It’s full of the vain and the beautiful, and the rest of us, all sharing the great freedom of Bondi – “You do you.” No judgment.
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On Monday night, I was in an Uber heading back to Bondi. My driver had been there when the shooting started and was shaken. He wondered if there’d be race riots at the beach like there had been 20 years ago in Cronulla.
I bet against it. The Cronulla riots were, in part, about turf and race. Locals versus outsiders, white versus brown.
But Bondi is so much more porous than that. You can claim it as your own if you’ve been a backpacker staying up the road for a day, or someone who grew up in the back streets of North Bondi.
As part of the area’s stable population, Jewish life has thrived in Bondi, with around two-thirds of Sydney’s Jewish population living in the eastern suburbs.
Beachside hedonism and international tourism has long coexisted with observant Jewish life and the Jewish schools, synagogues and cultural facilities that make Bondi a hub for religious expression.
Part of Bondi’s charisma is that somehow it all works – and there’s room for everyone.
Since the mass shooting on Sunday, there have been a few pieces published saying things won’t be the same in Australia again. While politics and questions about policing, immigration and weapons will dominate the news agenda for months to come, there is something curiously impervious about Bondi beach.
There’s Indigenous rock art at Ben Buckler that’s thousands of years old. Discoveries of shell middens and stone tools mark it as a gathering place since ancient times. It’s forever been a theatre, a stage for some of our best days, and some of our worst.
Police shot mentally ill French photographer Roni Levi on the beach in June 1997 in a dramatic and controversial standoff that changed policing in this state.
And on the south side in Marks Park, gay men were hunted and killed in the 1980s and 90s, their bodies thrown off cliffs.
More recently, I remember in the dark days of Sydney’s coronavirus lockdown, seeing the beach empty, except for people walking around in full PPE – working in the area behind the Pavilion that had been turned into a mobile Covid testing facility – and thinking things won’t be the same.
But Bondi comes back. It always comes back. We just can’t stay away.
Brigid Delaney is the author of the philosophical novel The Seeker and the Sage (Allen and Unwin), out now
