Coogee Beach

Coogee is a short beach in a deep bay, which is why it draws a crowd and why it has never been kind to anything built out into the water. These photographs run from the 1920s to the 1950s and keep returning to the same three hundred metres of sand.

The centrepiece is a building that stood for barely six years. The Coogee Ocean Pier, begun in 1924 by a private company that meant to give Sydney a Brighton, opened on 24 July 1928 — 180 metres of promenade carrying a 1,400-seat theatre, a ballroom for six hundred, a restaurant and a penny arcade. Then the Depression took the crowds, the surf took the structure, and the superstructure was demolished in 1933–34. Its pylons are still out there; a storm in 2022 briefly uncovered a dozen of them.

Either side of the pier the beach is doing what it always does. Bathers run out of the surf and crowds pack the sand. Horses are swum and rolled on it — a working-animal habit that reads as extraordinary now and was unremarkable then. And at the end of the 1940s the Coogee surf boat crews are photographed training at night, at the oar in the dark, which is probably the best argument this beach has ever made for itself.