For that area of Sydney which was to become, in the 19th century, Bondi/Waverley, "history" begins not only before the white man came, but before the aborigines arrived.

Bondi and what lies behind it - and probably its adjacent cliffs and coves - were largely formed by an immeasurably ancient volcano, that must have erupted thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It caused Bondi to become a rarity along Sydney's famous beach coastline: a south-facing beach.

This meant that the mighty waves swept in by the southerly gales and swells ran almost unhindered between the two headlands into what became first known as "Bundi" Bay, to crash down thunderously on the shelving sand.

Evidence of that ancient volcano can be seen to this day on the eastern cliffs above Bondi - a metre-or-so-wide fissure in the rocks, pointing south-west to where the active crater must once have been.

(It was the molten lava that filled the fissure that first attracted the Sydney aboriginal tribes to the area, chipping away at the igneous rock to make flints and other useful implements - see Aboriginal Bondi.)

Behind the beach is one of Sydney's biggest sand dunes, built up by millennia of storms and gales, and running from the high-water mark to the heights of Bellevue Hill.

Few people realise today that in fact the eastern side of Bondi was once part of an island, separated from the rest of Sydney by a channel that ran from Bondi through to the Harbour at Rose Bay, and through which, had the Endeavour arrived several thousand years earlier, Captain Cook could have sailed directly into Port Jackson.

When, in the late 1780s, Europeans first set eyes on Bondi/Waverley, the sight that would have met their eyes was one of a wild, wild beach, set in a natural amphitheatre of cliffs and hills, in the centre of which were grass-tufted sand dunes many metres high, and behind which lay a series of lazy, tree-fringed lagoons and pools, where the native aborigines fished and caught wild-fowl, oblivious to consequences of the invading white man.

cyberBONDI Plaza | History Index | History Intro l Early Bondi l Aboriginal Bondi l People & Places | First Landowner | Waverley Wowser | Facts & Fiction |

©2000 CyberSydney Pty Ltd
All Rights Reserved