Bondi Icebergs and Bondi Beach

I've got thirty six Bondi pictures in here, from about a kilometre of sand, which probably tells you how sensible I am about this place. The trouble is that almost every photograph of this beach is the same one, taken from the road, on a January Saturday. So I'm down there at five in the morning in July instead, when it's cold enough that the only people about are two or three swimmers, wandering down with towels. Between December and June the sunrise slides more than fifty degrees along the horizon. Stand on the same ledge six months apart, and you'll come away with two completely different pictures.

The Icebergs pool, down the southern end, was started in 1929 by surf lifesavers who wanted to keep their fitness up over winter. The rule they wrote for themselves is still magnificently unreasonable: three Sundays out of four, for five years, or you're out. It fills over the wall from the sea, so on a solid southerly the sets come through the lanes, and the swimmers just carry on. And I've stood up on that wall for an hour, waiting for one wave to land properly, and gone home with nothing.

Two things you'd only know if you swim here. The rip in the southern corner has a nickname, the Backpackers Express, and it causes a good share of the rescues, because people come off the bus and walk straight in. Then there's Mackenzies, a few hundred metres south, which is bare rock for years and then turns up one season with a whole beach of sand in it (2007, after a decade away, and stripped again by April 2024).

I shoot it from the water when I can, and from the Ben Buckler end at first light when I can't. But almost nobody who buys one of these is buying the beach. They're buying a morning they had here themselves, and my job was to be in the right spot when it came round.

More on this beach: Bondi Icebergs, the club, the pool and the rule that still stands.