An Important First Step to Healing Our Ancient Nation

The name ‘Bondi’ is an Aboriginal word. Or so historians think. Early British settlers claimed it to mean ‘water tumbling over rocks’. But any direct Aboriginal source – or connection to a clan or language group – has since been lost. The picture is muddied by competing theories. Some say Bondi means ‘place where a fight took place’, while others suggest it was named after Bondy in Paris. Today, most people know it to mean ‘the sound of waves breaking’. The creeping emphasis on ‘waves’ certainly resonates with Bondi’s modern reputation for surf. But is this the voice of Aboriginal Bondi speaking? Or present-day Bondi projecting itself into the past?

When Aboriginal people first lived in Bondi, it wasn’t a beach but an inland plain. That was 20,000 years ago. The climate was brutally cold and the coastline further east. If ‘Bondi’ means what we think it does, then it must have had a different name back then. Around 6,000 years ago, rising sea levels settled and Bondi Beach was formed. Most archaeological evidence since this time has been lost or destroyed. A major campsite unearthed in 1919 is now beneath the beachfront Queen Elizabeth Drive. Bondi’s sweeping sand dunes, which swallowed many historical sites, are now encased in concrete. For a time, Bondi’s cliffs were scattered with Aboriginal rock engravings. At one site, at the Bondi Golf Club, there are still fragmented images of people, turtles and fish. One image, now partially erased, once showed a man fleeing a shark. But as Bondi was colonised, engravings like this were damaged, sometimes deliberately. In 1964, the golf course engravings were ‘re-grooved’ by Waverley Council. Today, local concern for this site has waned. When I went there this year, the engravings were mostly buried in silt and grass. The site was unfenced and unmarked, except for a small plaque commemorating the re-grooving.

Written records of Aboriginal Bondi are even rarer. One comes from A.R. Stone, a Bondi settler, who in the 1870s watched Aboriginal locals ‘camped at Ben Buckler, enjoying the ocean waves, with their wives and children’. The locals’ disregard for sharks emboldened A.R. Stone to brave the ocean himself. For Stone, this was ‘the start of surfing at Bondi’. Not long after, in 1905, daytime swimming was legalised and Bondi’s surf lifesaving clubs were beginning to form. Bondi was on its path to stardom, but its first inhabitants had all but vanished.

History is full of forgotten voices. In the case of Aboriginal Bondi, however, this loss is comprehensive. Aboriginal experiences of Bondi have been translated, written about or - like the engravings - reimagined. But they were never properly heard. While Bondi’s first inhabitants clearly shaped Bondi into what it is today, who they were and what Bondi was to them is mostly lost. And silence easily goes unnoticed.

Last weekend, the government announced the words they plan to insert into the Constitution to establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. This would be an Indigenous advisory body, tasked with advising government on law and policy that affects Indigenous people. The detail has been ironed out in four separate government inquiries and committees running back to 2012. The First Nations Voice will provide Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous policy, and would not create a veto power or ‘third chamber’ of Parliament as some critics falsely claim. It would also acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have not been heard in the past, and it will ensure that they are heard in the future.

Aboriginal people watched Bondi become beach over the course of millennia. Yet in 200 years, their stories have washed away. It is easy to say past is past, but marginalisation is a process, not an event, and it is enabled when people are not heard. We can correct this. A First Nations Voice in the Constitution will make Australia richer, stronger and more complete. It is an important first step to healing our ancient nation.

Billy McEvoy is a Bondi local and the Research Assistant at the Radical Centre Reform Lab, a research group at the Macquarie University.