The crescent of sand just southeast of downtown Sydney known as Bondi Beach has come to represent the relationship between Australians and the ocean. Comparable to Malibu in the United States or the Côte d’Azur in France, Bondi has a cultural geography and history worthy of international scholarship. Historian Douglas Booth has given the beach its due in Bondi Beach: Representations of an Iconic Australian.
The subtitle of the book might seem to be missing a word, since Bondi beach is a location, not an Australian individual. But Booth’s title accurately captures his creative approach as he offers both a biography and autobiography of the iconic beach. Broken into two parts, Part I is an environmental and cultural history of Bondi from its prehistoric origins to the present. Part II offers a first-person narrative ostensibly from the perspective of the beach itself.
As a historian of sport with a special interest in swimming and surfing, Booth is well-suited to tackle the history of Bondi. When explaining the origins of the beach’s name, Booth explains that scholars generally agree that it came from an aboriginal term used by the Eora who occupied the land when Europeans first arrived. Though there is consensus about the aboriginal origins of Bondi, there is debate as to whether the name meant “hurry,” a battle club, or the sound of breaking waves. (p. 8) Booth offers an evenhanded acknowledgement of each etymology for Bondi, arguing as he does throughout Part I that competing “representations” of the beach carry meaning for various authors and audiences.
In this way, Booth’s history of Bondi is also a meditation on the politics of history, research methods, and historiography that is instructive for scholars whose toes may never touch the beach’s famed golden sand. This is particularly true of the first several chapters of the book that delve into scholarship from the fields of geology, oceanography, and climate science in exploring the prehistory of the Bondi region. Readers learn that Bondi was once a valley several kilometers from the ocean before rising sea levels, waves, storms, and shifting sands created the cove as it currently appears. As he did with the competing etymologies of Bondi, Booth presents various scientific explanations for the origins of Bondi’s sand and the science of the cove’s creation. He wrestles with the scientific concepts of environmental “equilibrium” and “dynamic equilibrium” as a philosopher might. (pp. 78–79) This constructive criticism of scientific paradigms from a humanistic perspective lies on the cutting edge of environmental history. One place where Booth offers no alternative interpretation is on the modern effects of climate change, confidently discussing the scientific consensus about rising sea levels that will likely swamp local roads and undercut sections of the Bondi seawall in the coming century.
When Booth begins to discuss humans and the Bondi environment, he pivots from scientific to anthropological, historical, and literary methods. For instance, he contrasts the conflicting trope of Bondi’s “bounty” in Eora accounts with the opposing trope of “barrenness” dominant in the accounts of European colonists. (p. 90) The Europeans—known as Berewalgal (people from a distant place) to the Eora—had political and cultural reasons for seeing barrenness, justifying the changes in the land that colonization brought. Booth similarly challenges the settler myth, repeated in subsequent scholarship, that the Eora were a timeless people without history or an evolving relationship to the land and sea. The cycles of time in Eora folklore reveal that “prehistoric” Bondi was probably not pre-historic at all.
As a scholar of swimming (or “surfbathing”) and surfing, Booth offers the most traditional history of Bondi when discussing these leisure activities in the region. The rise of surfbathing among white Australians in the late 19th century raised the hackles of Christian moralists. Although laws at the time forbid surfbathing during daylight hours, illustrations from the late 19th and early 20th century clearly depict people bathing naked or in swimming suits. (pp. 130, 142) One moralist argued that bathers in suits were as bad if not worse than naked ones, “because their garments, after contact with the water, show up the figure too prominently.” (p. 152) The moralists found an unlikely ally in their battle against Bondi surfbathers. In 1902 police received a complaint about daytime surfbathers. The manager of Bondi’s private baths lodged the complaint not out of moral concerns, but because he was annoyed that locals were swimming for free in the ocean.
As swimming, surfing, sunbathing, and other leisure activities grew in popularity throughout the 20th century, development accelerated, contributing to overcrowding and pollution in the once pristine area. By the 1970s and ‘80s Bondi earned the nickname “Scum Valley” among surfers in part because of a stormwater drainpipe that deposited runoff directly onto the sand. Greenpeace launched a protest with activists wearing gasmasks and hazmat suits placing “toxic waste” signs at Bondi in 1987. In response, local authorities began to filter and divert runoff, leading some longtime residents to complain that cleaning up the beach led to its “bourgeoisification”. (206)
After the biography of Bondi in Part I highlights different interpretations and representations of the beach’s history, Booth pivots dramatically in Part II to a creative nonfiction narrative from the perspective of the beach. “Eora called me Bondi” Booth writes, “and you Berewalgal adopted the name, somewhat surprisingly, given that you cavalierly dismissed or bulldozed most things associated with Aboriginal people.” The first-person narrative is a welcome shift, but the second-person “you” seems to assume a non-aboriginal audience. This is unfortunate since descendants of both Eora and Berewalgal will learn from this book. Another problem with the “you” in Part II is the way that Bondi (in Booth’s imagination) takes on a patronizing persona akin to Mother Nature, scolding “you” contemporary humans as careless children despoiling the beach. This section also romanticizes the Eora relationship to Bondi in ways that oversimplify the nuanced history told in Part I.
Still, I applaud Booth’s ambitious choice to do both a biography and autobiography of Bondi. Some of the best writing in the book comes when Booth is liberated from the constraints of academic prose in Part II. Here, birds “squawk, screech, warble, cry, chatter and beat their wings,” and we hear “wombats grunting, possums snorting, and koalas snarling.” (p. 265) After reading both parts of this book and coming to know Bondi Beach quite intimately, readers will undoubtedly agree with Bondi’s conclusion: “that local environments are interconnected and that what happens at the global level, will impact us all.” (p. 299)