Aquabumps the Bondi Book Photographs by Eugene Tan

There is a fixed, and vivid perception, of Bondi as a great, white, worshipped crescent of sand, fifty thousand, sometimes more, melting into its shore. Oiled brown bodies coiling into each other like conga lines of eels. The ball games played on the shoreline, soccer balls parachuting into the Pacific every now and then. Volleyball courts strung across the higher parts of the beach. The languages of every continent colliding in a polyglot sky. The customised cars of limes and golds shaking with an over-supply of power on Queen Elizabeth Drive, that slender ribbon that cuts through the beach. Sometimes fights, sometimes dancing. Sometimes hot, sometimes overheated. Yeah, that's Bondi. But it's only like that 2% of the time.When summer drifts north and the rubbish is cleared, a haven of bankers and creatives, rich and poor, a village of precincts, reveals itself. See North Bondi on Saturday morning fill with beautifully turned out families celebrating Shabbat. See Gould Street come alive with hunters of fashion as stores peel their doors open every day at ten am. For the past 17 years I've dedicated my mornings to shooting Bondi beach, yep, every day. There is always something to shoot: pink sunrises, big waves, huge crowds, odd faces, rogue storms, the wintery ocean with its freezing spray licking my face. Sometimes it's just an empty shoreline. Welcome to my third book. I have so much to show you that jamming it into 260 pages was nearly impossible. Bondi's true colours. It's here?