1771 - 1832

Bondi’s neighbouring suburb of Waverley – postcode 2024 – is about 5.7 kilometres south-east of the Sydney CBD, and the Waverley local-government area includes eight suburbs: Bondi, Bondi Beach, North Bondi, Bondi Junction, Bronte, Clovelly (parts only), Dover Heights and Queens Park.

Strangely, both the suburb and the local-government area owe their name to a novel by Sir Walter Scott, a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright and historian. His book entitled Waverley, also known as ’Tis Sixty Years Since, was the inspiration behind the naming of ‘Waverley House’, a home that Barnett Levey (or Levy) (1798–1837) built near Old South Head Road in 1827. Waverley was his favourite book. The Municipality of Waverley was proclaimed on 16 June 1859, and ‘Waverley House’ was a distinctive landmark within it, so the surrounding suburb was named after it. Waverley is one of New South Wales’s oldest-surviving local-government areas.

Sir Walter Scott was nicknamed the Wizard of the North because his hugely popular novels were set against a background of Scottish historical events. He possibly also gained the nickname because he reportedly ‘invented’ Scotland. He’s also considered to have both invented the historical novel and produced the best-quality examples of it. He was already famous as a poet when, in 1814, he chose to publish Waverley anonymously as his first piece of prose fiction. Literary historians consider it to be one of the first historical novels in the Western tradition.