Originally published November 2020.

I don’t like repeating a story that brings any disrespect to the Beatles, especially one so clearly unlikely as the exchange attributed to John Lennon when asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world: “He isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles!” I raise this in relation to where I swim every morning. Is Bondi the best beach in the world? I think it is, but I can see how some people would say it isn’t even the best beach in Sydney – perhaps not even the best in the municipality!

If you live in Sydney and have chosen this city ahead of countless other places where you might have made your way, the ocean may well have been a key reason. I don’t claim to have turned down overpaid postings in the various alpha cities of our planet, but I know what would have mattered. Where do I swim? And for cities with beaches, well Sydney is the Beatles and the Stones on the same bill. It might be Oasis and Bruce as well.  There is no other place where (if you want one, of course)  you can have a well-paid, serious career that allows you to swim before and after work – or in this WTF/WFH interregnum, during work.

And while more than 99% of my countless beach swims have been at Bondi, where my grandfather taught me to swim almost 50 years ago, the recent viral closure forced me to look about for other swimming spots in Sydney which were either under- or unregulated by the covid authorities. I can now say with confidence that the second-best – or 20th-best, or 50th- best – beach in Sydney would still be the standout champion beach in so many places I have been, including celebrated locales like the Cote d’Azur, Phuket and the Hamptons.

I have lived in this city all my life, and even an alluvial source like Wikipedia tells me there are more than 100 beaches in Sydney: most I have never visited, some I have not even heard of. One hundred beaches that are not destinations for most but simply down the street, metres from suburban homes, in many cases relatively affordable. Not places for excursion. Places where we live.

Bondi was a backwater in my youth – relatively, anyway. The city’s celebrated harbour, about a mile away, was the place to live. The homes built around the harbour are large, lovely, freestanding, well situated, terraced and balconied, most with pools and large entertaining areas. And were always bloody expensive. The homes flanking Bondi are mostly apartments, mostly small, rarely have balconies, often are oriented to look away from the ocean, have tiny living rooms and were clearly built for a different demographic. Thirty years ago people who wanted to boast of their status, of their real estate credentials (and Sydney has more than its share of these) did not admit to living in Bondi. I cannot say exactly when it changed, but as kids we travelled the few minutes by car most summer days and I continued this by bus or pushbike or car as I grew up, not worried much about land values. The value was in the water.

Mind you I did happen to hear someone lament a few weeks back: “Oh it’s terrible, the banking people are coming in and pricing out the artistic community.” I overcame my preternatural shyness and offered my own perspective. Leaving aside the plaintiff’s claim to artistic status, I offered: “you’re effing kidding, aren’t you? Some of us remember stuff. You self-assessed artistic types chased out the working class before that. Your high horse is at best a Shetland pony.”

The most remarkable thing about Bondi is how unremarkable it has been to so many people for so long. I concede that visually that the location for “Home and Away” is more scenic. (Actually, Palm Beach, the city’s most northern, is Hamptonesque; it has second homes for the wealthy to own and rent.) Narrabeen, a bit closer in, makes you feel like you have left the city altogether. Similarly the south corner of Mona Vale. Manly, “seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care”, is the start of the insular peninsula, and why would anyone leave? Tamarama, just a few hundred metres from Bondi, has better waves in a small surf, and Bronte around the corner is better in large waves. Maroubra has fewer tossers and feels very open.

But Bondi is just there, the nearest ocean beach to the city, and for people who swim 365 mornings per year, to go to it is as mundane as grabbing some milk or bread. A day trip? God, no. And it’s busier at sunrise than at high noon. Local people running, training, bathing and getting poor boxing lessons. There is not much posing, at least not that early… As for rented umbrellas in enclosed areas, no such thing exists in this country. No one and everyone owns the beach.

In this internet age I commend you to search for photos of such under-loved spots as Clifton Gardens, the sublime Nielsen Park directly opposite, the vastly long strand of Cronulla, Redleaf pool where Murray Rose trained for his Olympic gold. Queenscliff, Shelly (two of them), La Perouse, Longreef. All of them so ingrained into the daily lives of the locals that we forget our own luck.

The best beach in Sydney? Too hard to say. But the best in the world? No question: Bondi.

The author lives very near but not in Bondi. He has been renting homes to Irish and British travellers who crave what he describes above: a short bus ride to the waves, a short train ride to work.

About Andrew Coorey

Andrew Coorey has a degree in Economics from the University of Sydney which he has used judiciously, spending most of the 1990s with Macquarie Bank. He has also presented radio, worked internationally as an event presenter specialising in live interviewing, invented the corporate act “Live Band Karaoke”, runs pub trivia events around Sydney and is currently working on his second documentary film.