Saturday 16 November 2019

Meditation: Bondi Beach, dusk

It’s summer soon and I have been spring-cleaning. Tidying up a room brings with it memories from the past. For many, with the hot weather thoughts turn to plans for a day at the beach, so I give you both memories and a beach in the form of 46 photos taken on 9 March 2008. For some people going that far back in time could mean traversing in memory half of a lifetime.

These photos were taken after 6pm during daylight savings. They show a Bondi Beach already with the shadows lying over it, and people getting ready to go home. Or not. But you can see sunlight out of the west shining in the windows of some of the apartments on the north side of the beach, and the lights already bright out the front of the pavilion and out the front of the Bondi Icebergs, which is located on the southern side of the beach. The lamps set along the promenade are likewise glowing.

To the east a placid cloud sits, tinged pink by the sun, over the horizon. Heedless of the hour, a man with a metal detector makes his rounds. Joggers jog, some in groups. The last of the surfers wait for waves to arrive, while others carry their boards under their arms and head home. Two girls are dancing on the sand.

Appropriately, the day before this post went up, “Harold Holt” was trending on Twitter. The former prime minister had gone missing while swimming off a beach in Victoria in December 1967. His name was being freely deployed because the current prime minister, Scott Morrison, had been absent from the public sphere for, allegedly, three days. No explanation had been unearthed to justify this kind of manoeuvre on the part of the PM, so people were having fun at his expense.













































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