Patrick White wrote about it, Brett Whiteley painted it, Midnight Oil sang about it, Heath Ledger acted on it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Bondi Beach.

Bondi is an unruly coastal circus and that’s why I love it. If I wasn’t from Sydney and had ties to other parts of the city, I would, as many new arrivals and backpackers have done, adopt Bondi as “my Sydney”. I guess I can with some legitimacy claim Bondi as part of who I am. My parents grew up not far from each other and both were walking distance from Bondi’s golden crescent of beach. Like many postwar Australians, they later moved from Art Deco flats in the eastern suburbs into larger, freestanding homes in new outer suburbs, but Mum and Dad continued to talk fondly about growing up in Bondi and about the “Bondi Broad” – a much-loved cousin who steadfastly refused to budge.

Undoubtedly Sydney’s most famous beach, Bondi is a coastal superstar. The history of Bondi largely mirrors the history of Sydney and much of its story feeds our national narratives.

For thousands of years the Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal peoples have lived on and around the beach, and their rock engravings are still very visible in the area. In the early days of colonisation, Bondi was largely covered in dunes. Pastoralists who had purchased land in the Bondi area tried their hand at grazing cows where skateboarders and spray-painting street artists now congregate. Bondi was re-acquired by the state as a public beach in 1882 and, following Federation, the archetype of the bronzed, male, Anglo Bondi lifesaver was elevated to almost mythic status. Like the Digger and the Swagman, the Bondi Lifesaver came to represent “Australia” in advertising, wartime propaganda and jingoistic conversations about class, gender and race.

In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Bondi typified conflicts between those wanting to conserve and those wanting to commercialise Sydney’s beach life. User-pay change rooms; an organised opposition to a giant, never-to-be-realised amusement park; real-estate booms and busts; and erratic “beautification” programs were chapters in this struggle.

During World War II, the beach was heavily fortified in case of Japanese invasion, but people found their way past barbed wire and littoral defence blocks to swim at the beach. Soldiers keeping vigil slept in the tunnels that run under Campbell Parade and, ironically, the few men of service age who could be found on the beach during the early 1940s were American servicemen visiting Sydney on “rest and recreation” leave.

Peace, as well as war, left its mark on Bondi Beach and, in a brilliantly orchestrated royal photo opportunity, a newly crowned 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II famously traversed the beach in the back of a jeep in 1954. In the years following the war, large immigrant populations moved to Bondi, forever transforming the tone and flavour of the area, and setting the scene for today’s cultural diversity. Bondi’s giant car parks spoke of a newly mobile suburbia, and its Central European cake shops, Greek milk bars, Jewish delis and emergent backpacker culture pointed to a changing Australia.

Bondi has long been associated with skin and sin. In the great Australian novel The Tree of Man (1955), Nobel Laureate Patrick White called it a place of “many furtive lusts”. By the 1980s, Bondi’s reputation for hedonism and unlawful behaviour was widely known. Peter Corris, who has been referred to as “the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing”, portrayed Bondi as a place of drugs, decay and sleaze. Bondi was also infamous for violent, unsolved gay-hate crimes.