Big Britain?

Sydney’s beaches were packed over the weekend as the city sweltered in unseasonably early summer weather. The temperature reached 38C in the western suburbs and a shade under 37C in the city itself, something like 14C hotter than the normal average for October. Unfortunately I was working all weekend, so was stuck in the office writing about people having a good time in the sun. (This is quite normal for journalists, so I got over it pretty quickly.)

I was off on Monday so I decided to make up for missing out on the weekend fun by making my first pilgrimage to that Sydney icon, Bondi beach. The weather had taken a turn for the worse – relatively speaking – and it was fairly overcast with a slight chill in the air: jeans and t-shirt weather rather than swimming trunks and sunscreen weather. The train doesn’t quite go all the way to the beach, which puts Bondi nicely on Sydney’s fringes and makes getting there enough of an effort that it feels like a mini-vacation. The nearest station, Bondi Junction, is surrounded by a web of roads and a huge, maze-like shopping centre with the atmosphere of a suburban London town centre like Uxbridge or Acton. It’s not very gnarly. But as you get closer to the sea, a 20-minute walk away, backpackers’ lodges and internet cafes start replacing TV repair shops, the and you start hearing more British accents. The beach was almost abandoned when I visited: there were no swimmers and only a brace of hardy surfers in the water. I took this as a hint that probably it wasn’t a good day for a Brit with nothing but his 100m swimming badge for protection to take to the water.

After sitting for 20 minutes or so, mesmerised by the big waves wrapping themselves around the little surfers, I set off on the beautiful coastal path that runs down to Coogee beach. Along the way it goes past various smaller beaches, including Tamarama. Also known as Glamourama, this has a reputation for being the place where the beautiful people hang out. On Monday it was deserted, apart from a man in a fluorescent yellow vest shovelling sand in a JCB (he was probably a body builder underneath), and the only hint to its normal state of affairs was a sign saying ‘No dogs’. The sea was a lot calmer here and I thought about diving in for a dip, but decided it would be embarrassing when the bored-looking lifeguard had to save me.

I was impressed that the council had built lots of small playgrounds alongside the path to keep young children amused. Until I realised that they were actually workout benches – each to exercise a different muscle – for the many joggers who were steaming past me. Australians take keeping fit pretty seriously – apart, that is, from the ones responsible for the “obesity crisis” that is currently provoking endless national soul-searching and buck-passing.

Along the way sweet-looking little girls tried to sell me chocolate muffins, and the path passed through a huge cliff top graveyard full of family vaults from the mid-19th century. I’m not sure which was eerier.

The walk got me thinking. Many of the names that I came across – Clovelly, Eastbourne, Waverley, Bronte – were more British than Britain. (For the record, Bronte is a beach, Waverley was the name of the cemetery, I walked along Eastbourne Road, and the president of Clovelly golf club almost ran me over.) And Bondi feels a lot like a British seaside resort – or at least it did on the grey, windy day that I visited. The beach is also a similar shape to Fistral beach in Newquay, albeit much longer and with rather larger waves . Brits fit into Sydney so naturally – hardly anybody ever comments on my accent, other than fellow foreigners – that it sometimes feels like a bigger version of Britain. There are three British newspapers – the Guardian Weekly, the Weekly Telegraph and the International Express – at most newsagents, and the top British football results make it onto the evening news. Most of the people I’ve met so far have some close connection – a parent, a grandparent – to Britain. But then you walk a bit further down Oxford Street or a bit deeper into Hyde Park, an odd-looking bird flies out at you, the scent of eucalyptus comes from nowhere, and the wild strangeness of the land hits you again.