BONDI:

Bondi, the world-famous beach on this city’s Pacific shoreline, is my home, my inspiration, my relaxation and my temperamental companion. We’ve been together on and off for more than 35 years, so we know each other pretty well.

It’s likely that a visitor to Sydney will want to sample Bondi’s considerable charms at some point, which partly accounts for the beach’s sometimes aggravating crowds. When the city welcomes visitors from around the world in four years as it hosts the Olympic Games, however, my romance with Bondi is going to be even more severely strained. And my apprehension has been heightened by reports that a new TV series from the producers of “Baywatch” will start filming at Bondi next year.

I know that all this attention should make me and my neighbors feel proud, but it doesn’t. Instead, we locals feel insecure and highly protective of our beloved beach.

Sydney is blessed with about 30 beaches, but none with the brash, engaging and wild personality of Bondi, an arc of fine-grained white sand more than 250 yards long and washed by a sparkling surf of the deepest blue or the most magical green--or enchanting shades in between.

SCENE 1: New Year’s Eve, 1989. At the stroke of midnight, hundreds of people start singing, dancing, peeling off their clothes. Naked and semi-naked revelers hurl themselves into the warm surf. Couples are rolling in the sand in the position made famous by the late Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity.”

As in all intense romances, there are moments of turmoil and despair between Bondi and me. For example, when I turned 21, my parents presented me with the traditional gift of those days--a wristwatch.

Two years later, on the eve of my departure to find fame and fortune on London’s Fleet Street, I went for a sentimental, farewell swim at Bondi. I spent a delirious 30 minutes in the surf before returning to my spot in the sand to discover my watch had been stolen.

I didn’t see Bondi--pronounced BOND-eye--again until the mid-1980s, when I came back to start a new job, a new marriage and a new family. The bliss was shattered when my new apartment was broken into twice. In the same week.

And earlier this year, enjoying an early morning swim, I was suddenly caught in a malevolent riptide that carried me out beyond the breakers.

In a state of panic and exhaustion, I truly believed that I was about to become another drowning statistic when an alert surfer noticed my distress and pulled me ashore. That’s Bondi: sublime one day, a trace of treachery the next.

The surprise of Bondi is that it is little more than two miles from the center of downtown Sydney, 15 minutes in a cab or 40 minutes in a bus.

You can’t see Bondi from the famed Sydney Opera House because they are separated by a mountainous sand dune, which, since European settlement began in 1788, has been transformed into the exclusive residential suburb called Bellevue Hill, where captains of industry and commerce (such as media tycoon Kerry Packer) live.

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Bondi’s location is unique. What major metropolis has a glamorous, dazzling beach on its doorstep? Travel two miles from the center of London and you are . . . still in London. The same is true of Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York and most world capitals I can think of.

SCENE 2: Christmas Day, 1991. High-spirited English tourists are carrying a monstrous floral sofa across the beach during the heat of the midday sun. They set it down near the water’s edge, plant a flowing Union Jack in the sand, snap open cans of lukewarm beer and start singing, “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.”

Bondi, taken from the Aboriginal word “boondi,” which means “the noise of the tumbling waves,” is Sydney’s major tourist attraction after the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, receiving about 2 million visitors a year.

On all but a few windy, wintry months in the midyear (don’t forget that June is the dead of winter Down Under), the beachfront is the place to enjoy the sun-drenched democracy of the Australian seaside.

You can swim, body surf, ride a surfboard, sunbathe, jog, build sandcastles, read a book, picnic, listen to music, play volleyball, roller-blade, fly a kite, go fishing, play chess or do nothing at all.

Bondi has an egalitarian spirit that is much-prized by Sydneysiders. Where else can you see High Court judges, colorful ex-convicts, bishops, professional gamblers, sports stars, bankrupts, ladies of the parish and ladies of the night taking a constitutional walk along the seafront?

As a local observer once remarked, “When they take off their clothes and get into their ‘cossies’ (swimming costumes), cops or criminals, they all look the same.”

Because Bondi’s size is positively boutique by Australian standards--beachfronts can stretch up to 12 miles in the world’s vastest island continent--and becomes overly crowded in midsummer (New Year and Christmas), many Sydneysiders prefer to visit beaches north or south of the city.

This has left Bondi with its own special clientele: locals; immigrant families from Europe, the Middle East and Asia; and young people who are drawn to the beach’s easy lifestyle.

By a process of natural order, the beach has divided itself into three sectors: the northern end, with its small rock wading pool for parents and kids; the middle, for teenagers, surfies (surfers to you) and melanoma junkies and the southern bit, where topless bathers, gays and Latin American jugglers congregate.

Topless bathing is relatively new. It was officially sanctioned by the local council in 1979 after a torrid debate between the “wowsers” (killjoys and prudes) and the newly liberated. Its legalization brought to an end a tailor-made newspaper circulation builder: For decades, Sydney’s tabloids (one of them, the Daily Mirror, owned by global media mogul Rupert Murdoch) had feasted on photographing topless Amazon-size beauties being frogmarched off the sand.

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The surf can be soft and inviting at one moment and turn into a violent eruption of breakers a couple of hours later. This is because Bondi Beach, facing southeast and staring across the Pacific toward South America, takes the full brunt of winds, tides and currents that determine the size of the swell.

For swimmers, relative safety is provided by the presence of full-time professional lifeguards, courtesy of Waverly Council, the elected local government body in charge of Bondi and its environs.

But on weekends, the lifeguards are supplemented by the lifesavers from two rival surf lifesaving clubs, the Bondi and the North Bondi.

Lifesavers are a unique Australian invention. They made their first appearance in 1906, a body of volunteer swimmers who trained in rescues, resuscitation and first aid. Today, the superbly trained male and female lifesavers are part of a national movement guarding our beaches on weekends for free in the name of community service, good fun and staying fit.

No one knows how many people they have saved at Bondi in the past 90 years, but it must run into the thousands. The simplest advice for visitors is to swim between the flags and run like hell if you hear a siren--that means a shark has been sighted. But let me rush to assure the timid tourist from Torrance that the last fatal shark attack was in 1937. “Don’t worry about the sharks,” locals tell visitors, “the crocs have eaten them all.”

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The intoxicating charm of Bondi is its cosmopolitan energy. It is surrounded by restaurants serving Italian, Greek, Spanish, Indian, Lebanese, Turkish, Russian, Hungarian, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, Vietnamese and Japanese food.

My own disgraceful indulgence is to visit the Gran Caffe on Campbell Parade and scarf a dozen oysters for $10, suitably washed down by a local “Oz” (Aussie) wine at about $2 a glass.

SCENE 3: The Russian Lodge Restaurant on Hall Street, February 1996. An all-Russian band plays a raunchy interpretation of “The Girl From Ipanema.” The band leader says expansively: “It’s lounge music of the ‘60s, but the band is from the ‘70s trying to make a living in the ‘90s. It’s fantastic!”

Enjoying Bondi’s orgy of hedonism, I take satisfaction from the fact that a distant relative, Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell, delivered this golden slice of paradise to Sydneysiders in 1854. He objected to early settlers using the beachfront as a cattle yard, so he compulsorily acquired a 100-foot-eep corridor for public use, declaring that it should be held in perpetuity for the “health and recreation of the inhabitants of Sydney.”

In spite of the relentless procession of tourists, Bondi has resisted becoming a beach resort dominated by vast hotels of the Sheraton, InterContinental and Hilton variety. When the government of New South Wales, the state in which Sydney sits, switched to the Liberals (conservatives) in 1988, they made a crude attempt to snatch development powers away from the local Waverly Council.

Their aim was to end Bondi’s resistance to tourist development and to revamp the beachfront with high-rise hotels and millionaires’ apartments. The public outcry was so fierce that the “Hawaiianization” of Bondi was scuttled.

Only two hotel projects got off the ground--the bizarrely named Swiss Grand Hotel, which was restricted to just three stories, as well as other design controls.

SCENE 3: Full moon, July 1996. On the rocky escarpment at Bondi’s southern end, about 20 women, who call themselves “the witches of Bondi,” assemble. They light a bonfire and start dancing and offering incantations. “Are you putting curses on your enemies?” I ask. The heavily rugged woman peered from under her woolen cap, laughed and said: “No way. We’re good witches, not bad witches.”

To be utterly objective, it has to be admitted that Bondi’s beauty is exclusively its surf and beach.

Campbell Parade, the main street running along the beachfront, has a tumbledown appearance, while the virtually treeless park that sweeps down to the beach lacks the care of a conscientious gardener.

For the Olympics, Waverly Council has a $9-million plan to tart up Campbell Parade by widening the footpath and inviting cafes and restaurants to put tables outside.

This has alarmed Bondi traditionalists who want to see their patch stay just the way it is. Of more urgency is the debate over whether Waverly Council should be allowed to tear down the headquarters of the Bondi Icebergs Swimming Club, formed in 1929 to provide swimming in a public pool at the foot of the cliffs at the beach’s southern end.

Although the building is riddled with concrete “cancer” and is deemed unsafe, unhygienic and smelly by its detractors, its preservation is being sought by an astonishing coalition of locals, including lawyers, architects, writers and painters.

Why have they united to rescue a building so obviously a hideous eyesore? Because the premises are almost irrelevant in this warfare--what they are trying to save is a way of life.

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Since its settlement just over 200 years ago, Bondi has passed through three stages of evolution, from Recreation Beach to Bronzed Legend and to National Icon.

Land prices are soaring faster than any other part of Sydney and the buyers are people who are earmarking their properties, not as homes or shops, but as “investment opportunities.”

The prospect of a seaside television soap called “Bondi” going into production in 1997 has divided the community. At the Gran Caffe, Alfredo, the owner, was calculating how many extra coffees and pastries he might be able to sell. Meanwhile, Lifesaver Brett Armstrong was hoping to find a place as an extra.

As for me, I’m not about to start taking my romance with Bondi for granted. That would lead to the passion going out of our relationship, and I’ve made a lifelong commitment not to let that happen.

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GUIDEBOOK

The Land of Oz

Getting there: Qantas, American, United and Air New Zealand fly nonstop from LAX to Sydney. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at about $1,160 (includes tax).

The 2 1/2-mile trip from downtown Sydney to Bondi Beach can be done by taxi ($12), city bus ($2; line Nos. 380, 382, L82) or train from Town Hall to Bondi Junction ($1.50, then $1 by bus to beach).

Where to stay: The Swiss Grand Hotel (telephone 011-61-2-9365-5666, fax 011-61-2-9365-5330), centrally located on the corner of Campbell Parade and Beach Road, has 203 suites with rates starting at $160 (ocean views for about $200). Also on Campbell Parade is Ravesi’s (tel. 011-61-2-9365-4422, fax 011-61-2-9365-1481) a boutique hotel with 16 rooms (some with terraces) from $80 (about $150 for an ocean view) restaurant overlooking the beach and the passing Bondi scene.

For those on a budget, local boarding houses offer B&B-type; accommodation at about $20-$40 a night. Look for notices on local bulletin boards or in local newspapers such as the Wentworth Courier and the Messenger.

Where to eat: Campbell Parade is a smorgasbord of restaurants, many ethnic and inexpensive. Gran Caffee Restaurant (108 Campbell Parade; local tel. 9130-7033) is Oz-Italian with the best harmony of pasta and seafood on the strip. Dinner entrees about $12. Gelato Bar Restaurant (140 Campbell Parade; tel. 9130-3211) is an actor/model/writer angout with healthy fare: Salads, whole grain breads, goat’s cheese, fruit salads; two can eat for about $25. Aquabar (266 Campbell Parade; tel. 9130 6070) has heavenly foccacia and a dozen varieties of tea and coffee. Biboteca (252 Campbell Parade; tel. 9300-9639) offers fresh grilled fish and meats for about $15 per entree. For Thai food, I like Thai Flora (46 Hall St.; tel. 930-2751); appetizers about $4, main courses $10.

For further information: Call the Aussie Helpline, (847) 296-4900, fax (847) 296-4805.