Bondi Beach
On Sunday 6 February 1938 three big waves came in one after another at Bondi and swept some two hundred bathers out of their depth. The lifesavers were on the beach for a club competition and went straight in after them; five people drowned. Thirteen days later Bondi held the Surf Life Saving Association's championship carnival, and Sam Hood photographed the march past — club teams in striped costumes behind their banners, crowds banked up the slope behind them. North Bondi took the march-past trophy.
A generation earlier the argument had been about what to wear. The Star Photo Co.'s glass plates of the 1900s show neck-to-knee on a hot day: a beach of dark wool. In 1907 Waverley Council moved to add a skirt-like tunic for men, reaching to the knee. On Sunday 20 October men paraded at Bondi in curtains, tablecloths and borrowed underwear, and the tunic was dropped. The Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club had formed that February — officially recognised as the first, though Bronte disputes it.
The Bondi Pavilion opened behind the sand on 21 December 1929, built to take twelve thousand visitors at a time, and some two hundred thousand people came to see it open. A 1931 panorama looks along a beach paved with bathers and rows of hired deck chairs; by about 1950 the crowds below the Pavilion run from the promenade into the surf.
One of the old plates is captioned "Surfing, Bondi". Look for a board.
