1959

During World War II, Bondi emerged as one of the rare targets in Australia for enemy aggression. On the morning of June 8, 1942, approximately nine kilometers off the coast, a Japanese submarine unleashed a barrage of a dozen explosive shells, each a formidable projectile measuring 140 millimeters in caliber. The majority of these shells found their mark in locales like Rose Bay, Woollahra, or Bellevue Hill. Remarkably, only one of these shells detonated, causing damage outside an apartment block in Rose Bay. Another shell descended upon Simpson Street in Bondi, creating a sizable crater in the road but mercifully causing no harm to property or individuals.

Local writer Jim Deagonhart reflects on experiencing the aftermath of the bombing as a young child:

In 1959, I was attending school at Wellington Street, Bondi, Public School. Occasionally after school, instead of going home, each of us would visit the home of one of our schoolmates. So off I went with my mate Derek, following him on the bus and then arriving at Plumer Road, Rose Bay, and then walking across the golf links to Derek's family home. 

The Rose Bay golf links complex was a huge, lawn-covered oval shape, covering the Rose Bay valley. Protruding into this green ‘oval’, like a finger touching into the centre of this oval, is Manion Avenue, and at the end of Manion Avenue is a three-storey block of flats, built in the 1930s. My friend and his parents lived on the top floor, and our visits went very nicely in that welcoming home.

But being, even at 12 years old, an architectural sticky-beak, upon leaving the flat at twilight, I noticed for a second time, glancing up to the bedroom of my schoolmate up on the southeastern corner of the building, that the bricks in the wall surrounding and forming Derek’s bedroom were a different colour to all the other bricks forming the otherwise quite tasteful building. So I casually mentioned my observation to Derek. His response was instant – so he obviously had been given the explanation in some detail. Thus, his answer was: “Oh, that’s because a Japanese submarine lobbed a bomb onto my bedroom during the Second World War.” Derek and I were born at the end of that war, and he and his family were still in England during the bombing. Many years later I read of a submarine that surfaced off Coogee and lobbed several bombs on North Bondi and this one on Manion Avenue in the early 1940s.

Other subs got into Sydney Harbour, sinking vessels there, and with the fall of Southeast Asia and the bombing of Darwin, quite a few residents fled to the Blue Mountains, causing traffic jams on the Great Western Highway. Meanwhile, our own Australian army was caught overseas in North Africa and the fall of Singapore, so the situation looked desperate.

The churches in Australia had good attendance at that time. Finally, the two victories of (1) the Battle of the Coral Sea and (2) the Battle of Midway gave that generation hope and turned the tide of war. So this incident in 1959 helped our young minds start to grasp what our parents’ generation had gone through.

Image courtesy the Australian War Memorial