I keep taking the bus through Bondi with my children. Approaching the stop on Campbell Parade, I want to get off the bus, walk across the road past the pavilion, soak up the air, feel sand under my feet, feel my sadness – but my hand stays put in my daughter’s, my arm around my son on my lap. The bus rolls on.
I can’t explain how beautiful Bondi beach is on a Sunday summer afternoon. You have to be there to believe it. There are no words for how golden it is as the heat seeps out from the sun and sinks into the sea.
Bondi has been just down the road for most of my Australian life. I had been talking about taking my British friend there for fish and chips that Sunday night three weeks ago and only decided against it because I thought the day was too nice. It’ll be crowded; I’m feeling curmudgeonly. Let’s leave the happy crowds to enjoy it. We’ll just stay here at my dad’s house. Have a quiet night in. Then we heard a chopper and then another, and then my phone started buzzing.
I want to talk about how existentially joyful Bondi makes me feel on a pretty summer afternoon; truly astonishing to see all the people in this beautiful place, just hanging out in peace, sand blowing at their legs. The great wall, the pyramids, the moon with rocket ships have nothing on this monument built of safe people in the sun, in peace, together, different, sharing the golden light. What a colossal thing to have constructed out of will.
I cannot comprehend anyone seeing that and not seeing it. I can’t get my head around any ideology that wants to destroy it. Isn’t this just too nice to pin crazy hate on? Why not just get a gelato, maybe? Watch the sun go down?
When I was at law school, there was a concept we were taught, which was the idea of “the reasonable man”. The best legal minds in Australia have pondered the question of who the reasonable man is, and – the answer, embedded in our laws, is that the reasonable man is “the man on the bus to Bondi”. It makes me laugh a little bit, every time I get on the bus to Bondi, wondering, which of us here is “the reasonable man”?
***
I can’t bear to be on social media right now, seeing all my lovely clever thoughtful friends saying clever thoughtful things. Trying to make this event proportional to the whole of everything, the context of world events and not overweight our pain and fear because of course other people, other places, also have pain and fear.
It’s not that all that context isn’t true, it’s just that it’s also a lie.
Every second post I see is telling me what the thing that happened in Bondi was actually about. It’s about immigration, or Israel or the Labor party or the Jews, it’s about western culture, the Crusades, Islamic State, the Oslo accords. It’s about Australia and what they hate about us. It’s about hate speech and Islamism and the internet.
It’s not, though, is it?
Oh, some of them are right, I’m sure. But it’s not really about any of that. It’s actually just people.
It’s people who went to a place where people were, unprotected and joyful, and the people who came used guns to force bits of metal into the people who were there so that the parts inside their bodies would stop working and they’d die.
The rest is set dressing.
I grew up in and around Bondi. It’s where we swam, where we walked and played. Where I did pottery class at four and flirted at 14. When I lived in Bondi in my 20s, I was a member of the surf life saving club. I’ve spent summers patrolling there, rescuing tipsy pink tourists from their failure to apply sun cream, pulling backpackers out of rips.
My parents would take me and my brother out beyond the breakers into the calm waters before we could even walk. I was convinced I could breathe underwater and would dive and dive. The golden flickering of light when you’re looking up through the green water, the underside of a wave rolling over.
Mum would meet her sisters there at the pool on weekends. My twin aunts would swim the beach length, a kilometre wide, then back, diving out from the rocks at the iceberg baths. My aunt Emily would do it topless; so cool and arty and strong, her hair in sun-bleached salty curls.
My own motherhood is Bondi-born. My WhatsApp mother’s group chat is called Bondi Beach Mums. We message every day, asking for advice and sympathy, reassuring each other that it’s fine, that’s normal, checking allergies and saying oh yeah, mine’s doing that thing too; so weird, that’s normal.
***
I’m still a million miles short of explaining what Bondi means because to me it’s layered with a thousand memories of sun and wind; the changing face of the ocean cupped in the warm sandy curve of the beach.
Late nights talking under stars, walking wide berths around the backpackers making out. Swishing your ankles in the water, choosing with your feet the right density and wetness of the sand. Sprints from the water to the wall. The skate ramp kids, the wall-art in the dawn, the glamour girls in leggings setting forth, matcha in hand, for the Bondi to Bronte walk. The old Russians playing chess in the arches of the pavilion. The tessellated tiles, the dolphin statue that I would climb, my daughter climbs it too. Old Jewish women with their tiny dogs. The muscled men at the outdoor gym, the punctuation point of a stubborn steak-baked oldie in too-tight togs, striding through a TikTok dance in progress, defiantly uncool.
My Bondi mums group chat on the Sunday evening, as the sun set, all asking if we were all here, inside, alive, OK, our children? Partners? Safe? OK? Our neighbours? Doctors? Safe? Alive? It’s two, now three, now 10, 10 and the gunman, one of the gunmen, and a little girl dead. It’s 12, 15, they’re coming up the hill, it’s just a rumour, don’t repost misinformation. Where’s your dad, your mum? Tell me that you’re safe at home? The rabbi’s wife has a two-month-old baby boy. The rabbi’s dead.
I think of my granny, when she was young and glamorous at Redleaf pool in the 1960s or the Icebergs in her high-waisted leopard print bikini. I have a photo. She’d point to it, talking about how she had chosen to be here. When she had survived the Holocaust, when she had accepted that all of her family was never coming home, how she decided it would be Australia she’d build her life in. She chose it because it felt so far away from war, from that hatred, so far away from things like that. Things which could go wrong.
Bondi is the postcard of Australia. It manifests so much about us as a culture; our egalitarianism, our openness, our mixing pot of cultures, hanging out together on the beach. Our glamour, our dagginess, our families and brunch places and surf life savers. Our tanned and muscled glitz, the bright dazzle underwritten by the undeniable realness of the place; its sun and sand and weather. It’s a symbol, yes, but mostly it’s this place I hop off the bus at when I want to be somewhere nice.
How is it possible to see people being people with their families on the beach as a part of any war? I begin to think my morality is quite small, in some way, because I just can’t. I can’t get my head around it when my friends frame up these wounds and deaths in any kind of context. Talking reasonably about all the factors. Pro or anti this or that; part of this other thing over there. Killing Jews at the beach doesn’t exist for me in context, world politics played out by proxy on the bodies of people here. I hit a limit of my capacity to understand. It’s just awful murder.
To reframe it in some cleverly formulated geopolitical context feels grotesque to me; treating the people at the beach as pieces in a dinner-table argument about ideologies – it feels like acquiescing to that distorted and grotesque delusion that took two men to Bondi on a lovely Sunday evening to fling death at children in the sun.
Friends of mine have done beautiful community work in the last days and weeks; memorials and music and community, asserting that we are unbroken and unbowed in the face of hate; that we will fight this horror with our kindness and joy and connection. And I can’t get off the bus. I know it’s not reasonable. I guess I’m not the reasonable man.
I don’t want to get off at Bondi with my children and look around me with untrusting eyes, to feel the air changed and warped by horror. Or worse, to feel nothing changed. So the doors close, the bus drives on. I sit on the seat and look out the window and see all these things and places that have made me feel safe my whole life blurred through the salt on the glass and my tears.
• Alice Fraser is an author, comedian and podcaster. She was named as one of the 50 funniest comedians of the 21st century in the Daily Telegraph (UK). Alice was brought up as a Buddhist by a lapsed Catholic and a secular Jew in the eastern suburbs of Sydney
