Bondi Revisited
Not much has changed since I lived in Blair Street, Bondi, in the early 1930’s. The ‘stink pot’ is still at the top of the steep hill, King of all it surveys, denoting the sewage outlet into the ocean for the metropolitan area and so named because when the nor’easter blew that’s just what it did — stank! It blew a terrible stench over the red roofed, jerry-built, two and three storied flats that were scattered like scabs all over the sandhills. It thumbed its nose at all it surveyed.
The street leading up to the ‘stink’ pot’ was divided by beds of boring Canaan lilies in alternating bands of strident red and yellow, and the tarred surface of the road was a constant source of pleasure in the summer when we would burst the tar bubbles with sticks to hear them pop. You pricked them with our toe if you were really brave.
Not long after starting in kindergarten we moved to Glenayr Avenue, Bondi, perhaps a ten-minute walk to school and another minute or two to the beach which was more less considered the ‘pool at the bottom of the garden’. Most waking hours after school and during the holidays were spent at the beach. By the time I had graduated to high school there was hardly a rock, storm water drain or aspect of Bondi and the Pavilion I didn’t know intimately.
After school, summer and winter, along with the other kids, I would take my penny play money and swim or run along the beach to the baths at the south end where we would swim the length of the baths a couple of times, then throw our pennies into the deep end and dive till we found them.
The rocks at the south end of the beach, past the baths, were a source of excitement and threat. We often sighted Bondi Mary who lived in a semi-cave shielded from prying eyes and the weather by sheets of galvanised iron and sacking. She was obviously a witch and chased us with sticks when we went sticky-beaking and threw stones on her roof. The smell of salt, seaweed and something best diagnosed as excreta, probably the result of sewage fallout, hung heavily in the air.
The beach, with its three-quarter-mile crescent of off-whit, off-yellow sand and thousands of footprints detailed by the sun, was an unending source of pleasure and discovery. At the end of a hot summer’s day rummaging in the sand produced a surprising variety of booty — anything from pennies to diamond rings and once, a set of false teeth, red-gummed and grinning. After a storm the spoils were interesting to say the least — bloated fish, blue bottles, driftwood and a plethora of condoms, no doubt thrown back from the sewer outlet.
On ‘Black Sunday,’ February 6, 1938, three huge waves dissolved a sandbank at Bondi on which bathers were standing and hundreds of surfers were swept out to sea. The lifesavers managed to bring back two hundred and fifty people to the shore — forty of whom were unconscious and five were dead. Wen the waves struck many of the bathers were only in the water up to their knees one moment and next thing it was way over their heads. The killer waves as they rolled up the beach removed people, towels, umbrellas, surf boards, the lot. Dad and I had just left the beach on that hot, peaceful day and in my mind’s eye I still see the water coming up to the esplanade and re-live the shock I felt as we were preparing to go home for the Sunday roast lamb and creamy rice custard.
Black Sunday was to become one of the most terrifying but triumphant days in Australian surf rescue history with 80 volunteer lifesavers — many of whom would not have been there had it not been a Sunday — saving all but five of the swimmers without the aid of boats because of the roughness of the sea.
Then there was the Romanesque, multi-arched beach pavilion with two piers from the esplanade running down to the water (dese were demolished during the war in 1942 to make access to the promenade difficult in case of a Japanese beach landing.) The pavilion was used for dressing, mainly by the rich, but occasionally you would find yourself there, subsidised by an affluent friend. The pavilion was also the only place where you could ‘spend a penny’, literally, as there were no other lavatory facilities for women (or girls) and that’s what it cost — a penny. Boys of course could go to the toilet for free, only girls had to pay.
In this grand edifice cold showers, lined up as in army barracks, were available, surrounded by dozens of dressing cubicles. If need be, towels and woollen cozzies were also available for a modest hire.
We also had dancing lessons in the pavilion where tapping like Shirley Temple was all the go. At the end of school term, we performed in a concert / pantomime for which our fathers repainted our tap shoes with silver frost and our mothers blistered our ears attempting to achieve Shirley’s curls with hot tongs.
On Saturday nights during the summer, concerts were held, and the odd movie was screened out of doors on the street side of the pavilion. Here deck chairs were arranged in a semi-circle in front of the stage which was recessed into the cement wall and concealed by a roller blind on warm, balmy nights tempered by a soft offshore breeze, it was heaven to recline in the deep canvas chairs and watch Fred and Ginger Putting on the Ritz under a star-studded sky.
The north end of Bondi had a character all of its own. First there was the big rock bearing the notice: ‘This rock weighing 235 tons was washed form the sea during a storm on 15 July 1912’. What sort of wave could possibly lift such a weight? It was an awesome contemplation and engendered a very healthy respect for the unpredictable nature of the seemingly friendly sea.
Summer and winter the rocks at the north end of the beach were dotted mainly with fat old men in sagging jowls and Buddha bellies. These were tanned a dark shade of teak, almost ebony, with a skin texture similar to cracked leather. The air around them hung heavy with the smell of coconut oil and they wore the skimpiest costumes, about fig leaf sized, which was a far cry from the one-piece singlet-top, skirt-bottomed swimsuits worn by the life savers and those respectable people who bathed between the flags in the middle of the beach.
Cold water cranks, members of the Icebergs Club, swam in the saltwater baths at the southern end of the beach where we dived for pennies The baths jutted out into the water and were blasted by huge waves during heavy seas which challenged many of the foolhardy y to try and ‘sur up to the bath steps, often with bloody results.
In high summer some 100,000 people would visit the beach on any given day. On one occasion I recall a family comprising mum, dad and four or five young kids sitting on the sand so covered with ring worms you couldn’t put a pin between the angrily inflamed red circles. Although unpleasant it wasn’t an unusual sight.
Disease and infection was a common occurrence in Sydney in those days. I remember head lice playing chasings over the neck and through the hair of the kid sitting in front of me in primary school. I wasn’t surprised. We were all infested sooner or later with the wretched things and within days of starting school my head was shaved, treated with kerosene like all the other kids. I wore the beret of the ‘nit brigade’ for what seemed eternity.
On a recent visit to Bondi, seventy odd years later, I found that it hasn’t changed all that much. The ‘Stink Pot’ is still King of the Hill, the red roofs are there in profusion; the exterior of the Pavilion has hardly changed a smidgeon even though the two piers running down to the water are long gone; the old Bondi Public School is just the same — bleak, colourless, uninviting — the Icebergers are still challenging the pool a the south end of the beach (although the upmarket restaurant and bar above the pool is a recent addition and quite a shock to the system) but the beach doesn’t seem to have changed at all. Some of the bathers are more scantily dressed than in the old days but for the most part they haven’t changed much either.
The main addition to the area seems to be the small army of black-suited surveys poised behind the eighth wave waiting on their surf boards for the big one’. They’re out on the water from dawn until after dusk impervious to danger. In my day the sounding of the Shark Bell went off with monotonous regularity at any hour, clearing the water in seconds flat. Back then the bell put the fear of God into you the next time you ventured into the water, and you watched nervously to see that a shark hand’t joined you on the same wave as you body surfed back to the beach. I wonder what happened to the sharks? Have the kids in black a secret weapon? I’d like to know.
