Bronte Baths and Bronte Beach

Bronte's fifteen minutes around the cliffs from Bondi, and it's a different coast altogether. The gully runs straight down to a short, steep beach, and the sea drags off it hard. Somebody was complaining about exactly that, in a letter to the paper, back in 1886, saying the incline made the waves recede with gigantic force. He wasn't exaggerating. So you've got two or three rips working at once, one against each headland and one through the middle, and the nasty one is known here as the Bronte Express.

The baths at the southern end went in in 1887, on top of a natural rock hole people had bathed in for years, long before anyone thought to pour concrete round it. Bogey comes from an Aboriginal word meaning to bathe, and there's a second one here, the shallow hole on the beach where you'll have put your own kids at some point. That one's from 1916, after the Bronte Progress Association asked the council to lift a few rocks out, so women and children had somewhere safe to swim.

What makes those baths a gift, for me at least, is how low they sit. The wall is barely above the waterline, so on a high tide with any swell behind it the whole pool goes under and comes back, and half the entertainment on a big day is watching people stand on that ledge waiting to be knocked clean off it. I've missed it more times than I've caught it. Because it fills from the sea, it's drained and scrubbed every Wednesday around low tide (check before you drive over, or you'll find it empty).

The surf club here was formed in 1903 and reckons it's the oldest in the world. So does Bondi, and I'm not going to be the one who settles it. Most of my twenty three Bronte pictures were made in winter, before seven, from the rocks on the south side, with the pool below full of people who've done that same swim for thirty years.

More on this beach: the history of Bronte Baths and the bogey hole it was built on.