19/1/09
THE COUNTRY OF MY HEART: why I love Bondi
by Robert Darroch
THAT PHRASE was coined by DH Lawrence, to describe the place
where he was born and grew up
In his case, Eastwood - a rather grim (though not to him) mining
village, atop a hill in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands
Admittedly, the land around - if you could ignore the
paraphernalia of the mines - was quite picturesque
…rolling green pasture, dotted with rocky outcrops and
copses of trees, and the occasional hayrick
No matter where
In fact, it was a return to that landscape in 1925-26, four
years before he died, that inspired - and was the setting for - his last, and most
notorious novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I, too, have a Country of My Heart
It is Bondi, in
…where I was born, grew up, and have now returned to, and
where I expect to see out those days left to me
I have lived, in what is becoming a gratifyingly long life, in
many lands and in many places
…
…in
I have lived in
and various places in
…Cremorne, Collaroy, Paddington, Glebe, Potts Point
(each of which had their charms and attractions)
Yet, like
...though Bondi can hardly be called a “country”
(but then, neither is Eastwood
what
...however, he did I think intend to imply that he was referring
to something more than just the physical Nottinghamshire landscape)
Bondi, patently, is more than just a beach
I would claim, in fact, that Bondi is identifiable sub-set
of Australian civilisation
…it certainly has a distinctive culture
(as the various TV programs that feature it endeavour to show)
There is a saying about Bondi
“You can take the boy out of Bondi – but you can’t take
Bondi out of the boy”
An old saw, maybe, but in my case it’s true
I and my wife - who, though from the
http://www.cyberbondi.com.au
So not only do I know Bondi from a personal acquaintance
that goes back to the 1940s
but I also know it as it is today, and in perhaps a way granted
to few others
So, what is Bondi, geographically speaking?
Yes, the beach, of course
and an area some distance back from the beach
We at CyberBONDI take the Bondi subset of our
Bondi, significantly, is regarded as
as connected to, and part of, the city, as
In ages gone by, there was – when the sea-level was much higher
(in those pre-CO2 days) - a navigable entrance to
and when, some years ago, the elderly mother of my friend
Paul Delprat came to visit us
she came out on our balcony overlooking the beach
and was struck dumb by the sight
for it was not the Bondi she had remembered as a child
(and which she had not set eyes on for more than 70 years)
She had grown up at Tamarama, where her father and
grandfather – the artists Howard and Julian Ashton - had a house
and from where she accompanied them on painting excursions
over the hill, past grazing cows
to the vista of a beach, almost bereft of buildings
with (as she described to us) a string of lagoons that
stretched westwards from behind the beach through the grassy sand knolls to
(Royal
The heyday of Bondi was in the 20s and 30s
When, each weekend in summer, the trams used to bring tens
of thousands of beachgoers, from all over
Not to mention the two big hotels: the Hotel Bondi and the
Astra (see view from above)
which catered to the alcoholic needs of locals and visitors
(I can remember the sly-grog shops and the SP bookies, too)
There was an amusement park along the “drag”
(which is now called “the strip”)
with a ferris wheel, coconut shies, a merry-go-round and
dodgem cars
It was tremendous fun, a magical place, a
Next to it was a nine-hole mini-golf facility, across the
road from the Hotel Bondi
“Flats” were then the main accommodation in the precinct
immediately behind the beach
and beyond them came the semi-detached cottages, and then the
bungalows
(it was mostly a rental area)
...crowded side-by-side in streets called
which to me, growing up there, were names that meant nothing
until I went to
As a kid, Bondi was a wonderful place to grow up
Of course, the beach dominated everything
and I spent eons down there
...after school (Bondi Beach Public) and every weekend
...body-surfing, riding waves on my surf-o-plane, crawling
around in the hot sand, cultivating a tan, skylarking in the park and pavilion,
fishing from the rocks, catching crabs under them, collecting bottles on the
beach on a Sunday afternoon (to be redeemed for tuppence each), and waiting for
the southerly buster to arrive, almost by clockwork, around 6 to 7pm
At the end of March every year, however, Bondi sloughed off
its summer skin
From April through to September, the beach was deserted – for
almost nobody swam in winter – and many of the shops put up shutters, the sky was
grey and overcast, the wind blew cold off the sea, and rain scudded in from the
south, as Bondi donned its winter garb
Paradoxically, I liked it even more then than I did in
summer
It was more “mine”, and more like the wild and windswept
place
formed originally when some pre-historic volcano erupted out
at sea
and split the cliffs on either headland
forming the perfect bay through which that eternal tongue of
sea-green water lapped up to the edge of the wind-whipped dunes
...on
(Being so exposed to the south, where the wild weather comes
from, gives
...but at the cost that everything that is exposed to the
south bears the brunt of the corrosive, salt-laden wind
which can erode the cement from between the bricks, five
blocks - as our flat was - from the beach)
Early last century, non-aboriginal Bondi* came to colonise those
great, wind-crafted sand-hills, heaped up by thousands of years of southerly
gales
It was then, in the 20s and 30s, that the drifting sandscape
became progressively loused over by promiscuous layers of suburban accommodation
... which, however, when I was growing up, had become – the
flats in particular - almost seaside slums
frozen in time by wartime rent-control, genteelly decaying for
wont of landlord attention
(but bought up at bargain prices, in the late 40s and 50s,
as investments by the influx of European refugees who came to
As a child and youth, there were so many things to do at
Bondi
...exploring the military reserve up on the cliffs next to
the golf course, where there was a big gun that dated back to a Russian scare
in the 1890s
...tadpoling in the reserve’s bush pools, and blackberrying
in the vacant land above the Bondi-sandstone quarry under the cliffs behind
...hitting a tennis ball for hours against the wall of the
tram terminus at Ben Buckler
...finding golf balls every afternoon on the golf course,
and selling them for two shillings each to weekend players
... then there was
my paper round, my milk round, and spending the few shillings earned on
ice-cream sundaes, and going to the Saturday-arvo matinee at the Six Ways pictures
(One vivid
growing-up memory stands out in my mind – of the local milk bar we frequented
next to the Kings picture theatre, in Roscoe Street, around the corner from
Campbell Parade, which had a juke-box, and where we consumed malted milks, and first
heard Rock Around the Clock, when I must
have been 13)
No doubt other
places - Manly for example - had an analogous seaside culture
(Manly was where
“the Little Boy from Manly” – the precursor of Ginger Meggs – came from)
But, to me and my
mates, Bondi was superior in every way:
better than anywhere else in
We felt immensely
and profoundly privileged – and very proprietatorial
It was our Bondi
Even its ostensible
detractions were beautiful to me – like the smell of the
“stink-pot”, the sewer vent on the golf course...Bondi’s Gloriette...which
permeated the suburb when an easterly was blowing
...to me, however,
it was the perfume of summer, because it meant that the weather was switching
from the south back to the north-east
...for Bondi’s
prevailing wind in summer is the nor-easterly, and it is it that ushers in
those glorious, lazy days, on that wonderfully sun-blessed, God-given beach
But now, Bondi is
changing again
Today it is in the
throes of becoming a very desirable and expensive place to live
(as indeed it deserves
to be)
Its former milk-bar
and hamburger culture has been replaced by trendy cafes, fashion boutiques and
multicultural eating places
(an example of
which, the Hungry Czech, opened opposite us in Campbell Parade only last month
– and I recommend it)
Bondi is now a
backpackers’ destination, a tourist attraction, and the stalking-ground of
estate agents
Young professional
couples are moving in, and snapping up the flats that we once so despised – some
at a million dollars and more apiece
...as their
elderly owners go into retirement homes, and need to turn their earlier
investments into realisable cash
Bondi is in the
process of being, as the Americans say, “yupped”
(“They’re coming
over the hill from
What was, when I
was growing up, a lower-middle-class (if not working-class) suburb is now the realm
of the upward-mobile – the “yuppies” – and, increasingly, the wealthy
Baby shops are
opening up in the streets behind the Strip, and the ever-burgeoning cafe scene
has prams outside, with bowls for their customers’ Weimaraners to drink from
Bondi now has Serious
Cultural Events (such as Sculpture by the Sea, art exhibitions in the Pavilion,
short-film festivals, etc)
...as well as noisy
pop concerts, concatenations of kites (“the Festival of the Winds”), and (until
recently) naked board-riding displays in the twilight
Not to mention the
annual influx of migrating, lobster-skinned Poms on Xmas Day
These days hardly
a week goes by – summer or winter – without some event or other taking place at
the Pavilion, or in what is now called, grandiloquently,
(it had no name
when I was growing up – it was just part of the beach)
We now have “the
(that’s where we and
James are, at the south end – facing north)
...the “artists’
street” (
An expensive
Jewish retirement complex has recently been opened in (rather appropriately, I
thought)
which itself
boasts the most modern
Needless to say,
as our CyberBONDI listings show, all the infrastructure for catering to the
well-off has also set up business in and around what we kids called “the Jungo”
I dare say we have
more doctors, dentists, prosthesists, podiatrists, psychotherapists, yoga teachers,
foot-spas, nail salons, Shiatsu masseurs, Tarot card-readers, iridologists,
naturopaths, and other what are now called “auxiliary health practitioners” and
New Age prophets than you can poke the proverbial stick at
(I am sure we have more hair salons and beauty
parlours per square inch than any other purlieu in
When, in 1986, Sandra
and I returned from
(and which, due to
my “in-house” connections, I had the opportunity to acquire “off the plan”)
...I happened to take
an early-morning stroll down the Campbell Parade that I had known so well, and
which was then in the early stages of coming up in the world
Outside the
Biltmore Private Hotel – today a backpacker hostel - I encountered a group of
late-partygoers, trying to hail a taxi, presumably to return to their suburban
homes (or else to go to Kings Cross, to party on)
One of them said
to me: “Excuse me, sir, but can you tell
me where the edge of reality is?”
I paused and
pondered for a moment
Good question, I
thought
“I’m sorry,” I
replied, “but I don’t think you will find it at Bondi.”
Today, I’m not so
sure
R
*Bondi was also a
very popular place with the pre-settlement aboriginal population of