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Bondi Beach Toilets
A striking sight you will surely agree. One
by one, as they alighted at Bondi, a busload of Japanese tourists were
tying on face-masks before they entered the public toilets.
Had there been a chemical spill? Had
unwholesome gases been released? Was the air inside grossly polluted? All
three I’m afraid—and that’s how it’s been for many years at the
heritage-listed Bondi Pavilion, an arcaded antiquity in the middle of our
most famous beach.
* * *
As a concerned resident it was up to me to do
something so I wrote to the local authority. It was obvious what was
wrong. Lofty fanlights high in a single wall provided far too little
ventilation. Worse still, although used in summer by thousands of
desperate clients, there were no extraction fans. Fit powerful fans, I
wrote, and you’d soon improve the situation.
Glowing with public spirit, and warming to my
theme, I suggested that if Bondi seriously wished to attract international
visitors it was the responsibility of the municipality to do some
research, find out about Best Public Toilet Practice abroad, hire an
engineer, give him a drawing board, and get the facility rebuilt.
I received a cautiously non-committal letter
in reply. It suggested I take the matter up with a local citizen’s group;
more correspondence followed; vague talk was heard about planned
improvements down the track—a modest widening of the window openings
perhaps. But in the five or six years that have passed (all this was back
around the time of the Olympics in Sydney in 2000) nothing has been done.
There are no fans anywhere. A sickening odoriferous cocktail of urine and
disinfectant still pervades the foyer of a building in which theatrical
entertainment is offered and food prepared.
* * *
How do you explain this sort of thing? Is
reactionary proletarianism a cause? The Pavilion is owned and staffed and
managed by local government. Some council workers begin working as garbage
collectors, move up to driving a truck, and eventually find lifetime
employment in odd corners of the jobs-for-mates apparatus, work at the
Bondi Pavilion being one. I suppose that if you begin by collecting
garbage you’re unlikely to find much wrong with toilets that stink.
Is bureaucratic inertia to blame? Local
government is concerned with rate-payers, development applications,
traffic, roads, water supply and so on. Tourists are here today and gone
tomorrow. They’re unlikely to call from overseas and complain.
Is sheer cussedness and “near enough is good
enough” part of the story? Certainly my suggestion that there might be
such a thing as internationally recognised best practice in public toilet
arrangements was received with little more than derision.
* * *
From time to time the idea has been put
forward that the Australian flag should be flown from a mast on the
Pavilion, and on January 1st of this year the matter was raised
again by the local Federal MP, a prominent politician. Writing in the
Daily Telegraph he said
We don’t fly our flag as
often as the Americans do, but which Australian heart does not beat with a
quiet patriotic pride when we see that big blue banner snapping in a brisk
nor’easter or waving languidly in a gentle summer breeze? And what better
place to fly it than right in the centre of Bondi Beach at the Bondi
Pavilion?
I think he’s right. I can’t think of anything
nicer than the Australian flag atop the Bondi Pavilion snapping in a brisk
nor’easter. But my insulted nostrils would also like to be able to inhale
downwind.
October 2006
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