1939 - 2023

Renowned journalist John Pilger often returned to his childhood home at Bondi in his writing. He grew up in a tiny tin-roofed house on Moore Street. In his 1990 book The Secret Country, he remembered ‘alleys of litter and smashed beer bottles and fences of rusted corrugated iron, and Art Deco flats, with stairwells that smelt of cabbage, and Bondi semis where the occupants never seemed to turn on the lights. Bondi was men coughing up their innards in a rush-hour tram because an entire Australian division was mustard-gassed on the Western Front.’

Pilger loved the beach, describing it as the great Australian democracy. He later wrote: ‘Nowhere else was the reflected light so bright it hurt. Nowhere else was the air laced with such an intoxicating smell, which came with the salt spray of the South Pacific, the greatest ocean on Earth.’

Pilger attended Bondi Public Primary School, where he was school captain, then Sydney Boys High. He learned to swim in Bondi’s ocean baths: ‘The great sandy crescent of Bondi Beach is benign most days ... But this is an ancient, unpredictable continent, and the sky can suddenly turn wild.’ 

Pilger’s career began at Australian Consolidated Press. He recalled the smell ‘of ink and smoke and sweat – these were the happiest days of my life’.

He headed to Europe in 1962, among a tribe of young Australian intellectuals including Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Clive James. In London, his newspaper reporting won him numerous press awards including Journalist of the Year twice, in 1967 and 1979 and an Emmy in 1991 for his documentary ‘Cambodia, the Betrayal’. In 2009, he won the Sydney Peace Prize. His acceptance speech, titled ‘Democracy has become a business plan’, argued parliamentary parties are ‘devoted to socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor and … servility to endless war’. His documentaries on Indigenous Australia highlighted the enduring discrimination against and ill treatment of Australia's First People.

Pilger had a complicated relationship with his homeland but acknowledged aspects he loved: ‘I walked along the Bondi tram route the other day. The trams are long gone, but not their phantoms. In tight-lipped times, beaches provided our hedonistic alter egos. In Sydney, their uniqueness is that they are not resorts and are all public spaces, unlike in California and Europe.’

Images courtesy the Pilger family.