Writing Place

I'm sitting here surrounded by moving chaos and it was still easy to be absorbed by this paper. The discussion flowed so easily, and the personal voice you used in parts worked really well. The real strength of this paper was your use of primary sources, though: the speeches, photos, excerpts from the Lonely Planet, oral history projects and the like (note, though, that you needed to footnote these far more carefully and indicate where your pictures came from).

I liked the way you contrasted the current idyllic view of Bondi with its post-war immigration history and subsequent seediness. I did feel, however, that you needed to do a lot more to develop an historical argument about this. If the image of Bondi as national icon developed in the sun-worshipping 1920s, for example, why was it then possible for it to become so seedy in the late 20th C? You didn't provide an explanation for this, nor did you spend much time exploring how the Bondi of the Russian Doll scriptwriter's childhood could become Jamie Packer's Bondi in such a relatively short period. There was somthing more needed here, something more of the big picture - and also something specifically about the means through which Bondi became a national icon.