The Bondi to Coogee Walk: Stories Along the Way
Most guides tell you how long the Bondi to Coogee walk takes. This one tells you what you are walking past: 2,000-year-old rock engravings, Sydney’s lost Coney Island, a clifftop cemetery full of famous names, and one of Australia’s strangest murder cases.
Hear these stories in the Sitesy app →This walk follows the coastline of Gadigal and Bidjigal Country. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of this land and pay our respects to Elders past and present.
The stories, stop by stop
Stop 1: Bondi Icebergs
Anyone can swim in this cliff-edge pool. Becoming an “Iceberg” takes five winters.
Local lifesavers formed the Bondi Icebergs club in 1929 to keep fit through the cold months. Its famous membership rule still stands: swim on three Sundays out of every four through winter, for five years running, before you are a fully fledged Iceberg. The club became licensed in 1960, and admitted its first women members in 1995.
Sources: Wikipedia — Bondi Icebergs Club · Winter Swimming Association of Australia — Bondi Icebergs
Stop 2: Mackenzies Point rock engraving
Near the lookout below Marks Park, a carving in the sandstone may be up to 2,000 years old.
This headland holds one of three Aboriginal rock engraving sites around Bondi. The carving shows sea life, read as a shark or whale and two fish, made by pecking a line of small holes into the rock with a pointed stone or shell and joining them into a groove. Its exact age is unknown, but it is estimated at up to 2,000 years. The bay and point take their European name from the Mackenzie family, who ran the Waverley Dairy on the land behind from the 1860s to the 1920s. Please look without walking on the engraving.
Sources: Dictionary of Sydney — Tamarama · Wikipedia — Mackenzies Bay
Stop 3: Tamarama and Wonderland City
This small, quiet beach once had a clifftop rollercoaster, an airship and an elephant named Alice.
From December 1906 to 1911, Tamarama was Wonderland City: at 20 acres, billed as the largest open-air amusement park in the Southern Hemisphere. About 20,000 people came on opening night to see the gully strung with electric lights. There was an airship hung over the bay, elephant rides on the sand and a miniature railway along the clifftops. But the owner fenced the public off the beach. Locals fought back, the government declared the beach public land, and some of those swimmers went on to form the Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club. Disputes, animal cruelty complaints and an airship accident emptied the park; the state bought the land in 1920 and made it Tamarama Park. Wonderland Avenue still carries the name.
Sources: Dictionary of Sydney — Tamarama · Wikipedia — Wonderland City · Wikipedia — Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club
Stop 4: Waverley Cemetery
Henry Lawson rests on this clifftop, alongside the poet who wrote “I love a sunburnt country”.
Waverley Cemetery opened in 1877, planned as a grand showpiece with strict rules on the style of its white marble monuments. Its first burial, of 85-year-old Ruth Allen, took place on 4 August that year. Buried here are writer Henry Lawson, Bulletin founder Jules Archibald, poet Dorothea Mackellar, aviation pioneer Lawrence Hargrave, Test cricketer Victor Trumper, New South Wales’ first salaried hangman Robert “Nosey Bob” Howard, and Fanny Durack, Australia’s first female Olympic gold medallist. Remember her name: she turns up again at the end of the walk.
Sources: Waverley Council — Waverley Cemetery · Wikipedia — Waverley Cemetery
Stop 5: Coogee Pavilion and the Shark Arm case
On Anzac Day 1935, a captive shark here threw up a tattooed human arm, and started one of Australia’s strangest murder cases.
The domed building at the north end of Coogee Beach opened in December 1887 as the Coogee Aquarium and swimming baths. In April 1935 a tiger shark, caught off Coogee after it swallowed a smaller shark that had been hooked first, was put on display here for the Anzac Day holiday. On 25 April, in front of visitors, it vomited up a human arm. A tattoo on the arm led a man to identify it as his missing brother, former boxer James “Jimmy” Smith. Fingerprints confirmed it, and doctors found the arm had been cut off with a knife, not bitten. A suspect was charged, but the key witness died before the trial and the defence argued that an arm alone did not prove anyone was dead. The jury was directed to acquit, and the case has never been solved. Since 2014 the building has traded as the Coogee Pavilion.
Sources: Dictionary of Sydney — Shark Arm murder 1935 · Wikipedia — Shark Arm case · Dictionary of Sydney — Coogee
Just past the finish
Stop 6: Wylie’s Baths
Just past the finish: a rock pool cut by a champion swimmer, where Australia’s first female Olympians trained.
Champion long-distance swimmer Henry Alexander Wylie opened these baths on 12 December 1907, reportedly cutting the pool from the rock with his two sons. His daughter Mina trained here with Fanny Durack, and at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics the pair became Australia’s first female Olympic swimmers: Durack won gold, Wylie silver. The baths hosted the first Australian Swimming Championships, were among the first in Australia where men and women could swim together, and have been on the NSW State Heritage Register since 2003. They sit a few hundred metres south of Coogee Beach, and are worth the detour.
Sources: Wikipedia — Wylie’s Baths · State Library of NSW — Mina Wylie collection
Practical info
Practical details from Sydney.com — Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk. Check conditions before you go.
FAQ
How long is the Bondi to Coogee walk?
About 6 km one way. Allow two to three hours if you stop to swim, eat or read the stories along the way.
Where does the Bondi to Coogee walk start?
Most people start at the south end of Bondi Beach, beside Bondi Icebergs, and walk south to Coogee. It is signposted in both directions.
Can I do the walk with a pram or wheelchair?
Not the full route: there are several steep sections of stairs.
What history can you see on the Bondi to Coogee walk?
Aboriginal rock engravings estimated at up to 2,000 years old, the site of a 1906 amusement park at Tamarama, Waverley Cemetery with the graves of Henry Lawson and Dorothea Mackellar, and the former Coogee Aquarium, scene of the 1935 Shark Arm case.