Today at 6.30am, Bondi Beach belonged to everyone.

In the early hours of the morning, Bondi is at its most honest.

The tourists are still asleep. The influencers haven't arrived. The beach belongs to the people who come every morning not to be seen, but to feel something: sand between their toes, cold water, salt on skin, lungs filling, fear giving way to calm.

And at 6.30am today, exactly six days after extreme horror and heartbreak, that's what the Bondi community did.

People carried boards down to the sand like offerings. Longboards, shortboards, foamies with cracked rails. Some paddled, some just stood at the shoreline. Some swam in caps and goggles. Some didn't surf at all. But that was the point.

Because this isn't about surfing.

It's about the beach. And it's about taking back that community. 

For Australians, the beach is not just geography. It's mythology. It's where we go when we need to remember who we are. It's where we take our kids to teach them courage. It's where we go to grieve. It's where we go to feel free.

It's where we believe, perhaps naively, perhaps beautifully, that everyone is equal.

In the water, you are not your job. You are not your politics. You are not your religion, your accent, your background, your last name. You are a body moving through the same swell as everyone else. You wait your turn. You follow the rules. You look out for the person next to you.

And if something goes wrong, you don't ask who they are. You save them.

Image: Supplied.

That's the unspoken contract of the ocean. It has its own folklore, its own code. Surfing is solitary, yes, but it is also deeply communal. Radical, even. In the water, hierarchy dissolves. Humanity doesn't.

Which is why what happened at Bondi has shaken us so deeply.

Because when violence enters a place that represents freedom, it doesn't just harm bodies, it fractures belief.

And belief matters.

I am not Jewish. But it is precisely because I am not Jewish that this moment demands something of me.

Antisemitism doesn't persist because Jewish people fail to explain themselves better. It persists because everyone else stays silent. Because we outsource moral courage to governments and platforms and policies, as though goodness can be legislated.

It can't.

Governments can police behaviour. They cannot police humanity.

Only communities can do that.

And as more than 700 people on boards formed a wide circle in the water this morning, the ocean briefly became something else entirely, a living symbol of peace in the aftermath of violence. From above, it was unmistakable. From within it, even more so.

They splashed the water in unison. They reached for one another. Strangers hugged. A reminder that community is not an idea but an action.

"Community is where the power really resides," said one of the organisers, speaking to the thousands gathered along the shoreline.

"The sun comes up here in Bondi," he said, "and in many ways, this is where life in Australia begins. From the people who arrive here at 4.30 in the morning to those who come later in the day, you are the custodians of this place. You are the ones who respect and protect the Bondi way of life. You are the ones who know how to share its love."

He urged the crowd not just to mourn, but to participate in healing to help Bondi return, quickly and deliberately, to the open, generous place it has always claimed to be.

"Let us lead the change we want to see," he said, "and ensure that a heinous act like this never happens again on our beautiful Bondi shore."

Image: Supplied.

Among those who paddled out was Rabbi Yosef Eichenblatt, a Bondi local, a father. Speaking before the paddle, he described how over the past few years, Jewish Australians have been made to feel unsafe not just by extremists, but by something quieter and more corrosive. Slurs reframed as politics. Hatred laundered through social justice language. Fear minimised. Pain ranked.

And so people shrink. They go quiet. They stop speaking, stop showing up. They calculate risk in places that should never require calculation: schools, synagogues, workplaces, beaches.

That's what hate does. It narrows the world.

The paddle-out this morning was a refusal to let that narrowing stand.

It is a declaration that the beach, our most sacred public space, cannot become a site of fear for anyone. That if Jewish Australians don't feel safe at Bondi, then Bondi isn't safe at all.

This is not about symbols. It's about solidarity.

Real solidarity is uncomfortable. It asks something of you. It asks you to show up when the pain is not yours, when the story is not centred on you, when you could easily scroll past.

It asks you to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that humanity is still a force worth betting on.

The beach teaches us this lesson every day. The ocean doesn't care who you are. It will humble you. It will test you. It will demand respect. And still, we return because somewhere between the fear and the freedom, we remember what it means to be alive together.

At 6.30am today, Bondi reminded us all that.

Image: Getty.