There’s a permanent rip at North Bondi. It’s been there since I was a kid and no doubt for hundreds if not thousands of years before that. It hugs the Ben Buckler rocks and even on days with tiny waves, you can feel its inexorable pull. I’ve surfed that spot since the early ’70s and have come to know that rip as a friend – one that must be respected, but one that can be relied upon to jettison us out past the break to the optimum spot, like a chairlift up a mountain for skiers.
A recent late afternoon. A southerly change has just busted in. The beach has cleared and the swell is unexpectedly increasing by the minute. I walk down for a quick surf, aiming to take advantage of the empty conditions amid the mayhem. Two tourists have hired boards to try to learn to surf. I watch as they’re dragged into the rip, making futile attempts to paddle against it and directly back to shore. They have no hope.
I dive in and paddle out, shouting at them to paddle diagonally across to the sandbank. One of them does and makes it safely to shore. The other is swiftly dragged out the back. The surf is increasing by the minute, four- to five-foot waves powering around the point. The guy is petrified but I try to calm him, insisting that if he follows me, he’ll be okay. We float out in the rip, then do a loop right out into the middle of Bondi Bay in the howling wind. I instruct him to grab my leg-rope and I physically tow him towards the impact zone in the middle of the beach.
Right in that crucial spot, a set of waves looms. By some version of a miracle, I’m able to manoeuvre him onto a wave, this complete novice surfer subsequently hurtling down a five-foot boomer with perfect aplomb, making it to shore in one piece. We’re both exhausted. He’s grateful but also thrilled. “That was a great wave,” he says, with no idea how much danger he was in. I walk home, the thought of the power of the ocean and the counterbalance of joy and risk it offers shaking through my body.
Another day. A warm Wednesday morning in North Bondi. I watch as a group emerges from the Pilates studio across the road after a class, an explosion of competitive activewear detonating onto the street. Pilates must be hard work. None of them are ever smiling; a svelte bunch of grumps flowing out onto the street. Off they go, grabbing a coffee and hoping their car hasn’t been fined. It’s another kind of risk, I guess.
An anomaly yesterday. A louche young woman, otherwise perfectly aligned in clothing and demeanour as her Pilates compatriots, walking down Campbell Parade after class with a big, burning-bright cigarette poking straight out of her mouth, puffs of smoke emanating from either side of her lips. No hands involved, the cigarette like a horizontal chimney doing nicotine’s good work. Early in her smoking career, by the looks.
She reminds me of an ex who lived around the corner on Brighton Boulevard more than a decade ago. Full of the looseness of the era, we ranged the nighttime streets of Bondi, scouring the suburb for whatever source of alcohol we could find after the bottle-shops had closed. She smoked constantly and I recall her asking, “Do you really think it’s bad for me?” I replied, “Yep, I’m pretty sure.” But she kept on smoking.
A man named Jim. He used to run a surf and fishing store on Campbell Pde in the ’70s and ’80s. Sold fishing tackle and wetsuits, boogie boards and Survival Surf Wax. The shop is long gone. I always saw Jim around right up until about two years ago. He had reddish hair, a long face. Red beard. Always wore shorts. I saw him one afternoon on the hill overlooking the surf at North Bondi. He said hello, as usual, and I said hello back. Then a week passed and I didn’t see him. A month. Six months. I never saw him again. He had passed away, sudden heart attack. Disappearing from the streets he walked for decades with barely a mention.
Lately, I’ve started to question these moments of vulnerability and obscure grief as I walk the streets of my home suburb. Some days I sense that Bondi is becoming my own personal ghost story. A moment of terror and murder on that sunny Sunday last December somehow enmeshing itself into everything I know, every history I have been a part of.
What does my home mean to me now? Somehow, I regularly feel “homesick” for Bondi even though I am still right amongst it. So many old faces have gone, and things changed so much that it’s hard to recognise the place and remember the fact that I haven’t actually left. I’m still here, living 200m from where my mum fed a whole cohort of straggly kids at the beach on weekends in the ’70s as they barely had enough money to buy a sandwich or hamburger.
There’s an old Greek lady who lives round the corner. She has that distinct “Greek Australian” accent indicating she’s been in Australia for decades. She must be 80 at least. Skinny and wiry, she always says hello, buttonholing me or anyone else she recognises on the corner to help her carry her heavy plastic bags full of groceries to her little flat on Brighton Blvd. Like my youthful Pilates smoker, she always has a durrie hanging out of her mouth. I haven’t seen her in a month or two though. One of the few elderly people remaining in this part of North Bondi, just up from the beach. Has she left us too?
I walk past a shiny BMW parked in a driveway on Lamrock Ave, squeezing between it and a garage door. Metres along, a young real estate agent in tight shiny pants, no more than two years out of high school, is supervising the installation of a “For Sale” sign. He sees me looking intently at the sign and says, “Interested?” I say, “Maybe”, but I’m not. The sign says, “Welcome Home.” And I laugh as I’m welcomed to my lifelong home by a 20-year-old in Tarocash with a leased BMW.
Across the road, the grocers that have been there for 50 years have finally bitten the bullet and are selling up. The old Art Deco building, a local institution I attend in bare feet every day, is to be sold. I see a real estate agent in the surf and he tells me that they want $40 million for the site – they’ve had an offer of $28 million but knocked it back. It will sell for there or thereabouts. A chip off the edifice of the old village will go, no doubt to be knocked down as soon as the buyers can get their plans fast-tracked through council.
My band plays a gig up the hill at the Bondi Golf and Diggers Club in March. The night is hot and steamy, the threat of storm hanging heavily. The band before us, full of testosterone and loud guitars, elicits unsettling performative violent slam dancing from a group of local boys. Unimpressed, the local women stand back. When my band starts, a more melodic tone brings them forth as rain bursts through, the crowd sheltering under a rapidly erected tent which appears out of nowhere, the girls owning the place again.
Another young band plays after us, Bird in Hand. In the surf out in the southern corner or at Third Ramp or at North Bondi, lead singer Ethan and his mates now rule the waves. A whole new hot generation that has emerged from these broken-footpath streets. Their hard-pressing attitude and fearlessness in surfing and life gives me a heartening sense that reminds me of when my friends and I were their age. Dauntless and confident about their path but with a surprisingly sensitive and connected sensibility when you talk to them individually.
Doing a surf check one morning, I bump into a mate, Robin, a long-time magazine designer and university lecturer. My brother and I went to Europe with him on our big rites-of-passage trip in the ’90s. Another mate, Pete, joins us. Pete tells Robin he loves his regular Facebook-posted photos of Bondi. “The best shots of Bondi are ones without any sign of the ocean,” Pete says. Robin points out the rust spoiling the paintwork of a Deco block across from where we stand. “That’s more ‘Bondi’ than a photo of the beach or the ocean,” he says.
I’m only half convinced. The waves, the briny smell, the ocean does shape everything here. It’s the underline on the text of our days, the unifier that wipes a salt-smear on everything eventually. The southerly change contains it, an elemental force that comes blowing in. It’s the great leveller that irons out the influencers, the real estate proponents, the old-timers and the newcomers. Every time it arrives the scent of something completely fresh is blowing in with it again. Clearing things up, renewing.
After the past summer, everyone I speak to can’t wait for winter. There’s been too much attention here. Too much heartache and tension and too many police and media. We want the crowds to disperse, go away, give a reprieve. We need that southerly.
Old locals call Bondi “Scum Valley”. When we were kids the sewage works were in full force, drugs and violence were common, the water was filthy. We loved it. Getting out after a surf today a mate from the dark recesses of Scum Valley is excited to see me and produces a hat he wants to give to me. It says, “Welcome to Scum Valley – Now Go Home.”
I laugh at its defiance and old-school narkiness. I have moved on from a lot of that vibe, but it still feels good somewhere deep down that such a sensibility remains.
On Easter Saturday this year, a “total Bondi” reunion is held at the Golf and Diggers Club. Rather than a specific surf club or boardriders or Bondi United Rugby League Club reunion, it is an all-encompassing event, with everyone invited. The room is a heaving cross-section of familiar faces, like some old memory come to life. I see people I haven’t seen in many years and, as we all look out across “Scum Valley”, an old friend puts her arm around my shoulder and says, “Where did our home go?” She now lives elsewhere, up the coast, as do most of the people in attendance.
Late on another afternoon I head down for a wander and to check the surf again at North Bondi. Almost without thinking I find myself heading up to the now-infamous footbridge where the shooting began last December. The chalk memorial drawings marking the location are as simple as decals on a school bag: an Australian flag, a lit menorah, a bumblebee so beloved by 10-year-old Matilda, who was among the 15 people killed on that hot summer Sunday.
I skirt down and across the park where the shooting occurred and then do a loop back towards Ben Buckler headland. The surf looks okay, so I go home, put my wetsuit on, grab my board, loop back down and dive into that rip at North Bondi. The water’s still warm, summer’s traces holding firm against the incoming autumn. I sit on my board and look back at the coast, at Bondi, across the spot where my mum always sat, past the surf club, across the park, past Bondi Pavilion and to the stacked flats to the west, as the sun heads over the Great Dividing Range.
A wave comes and I catch it. For those brief seconds as I ride it into the corner, I’m back in my body, away from my thoughts, anchored in an eternal present. I could be 10 again, I could be 30, it could be 1998. Being in the surf, I realise, is my essential connection to this place. Cut off from the land and despite the massive changes that have unfolded across Bondi, the surf remains a zone where, for myself and many of my friends, our fundamental sense of belonging holds. A place where the line between forgetting and remembering blurs, allowing us to keep moving forward, as best we can.
Photography by Franck Gazzola