Who knew that a rock could be so shrouded in secrecy, so entangled in enigma, so clothed in…read morecontroversy? And furthermore, where have these elusive mermaids gone?
Let me back up. There's a rock. It's big. It's called The Big Rock and it's at the heal of Bondi's boot, the thumb of Bondi's Shaka sign, the tip of Ben Buckler's, well, you get the idea. And lo, there's a brass plaque! It reads: "Municipality of Waverley. This rock weighing 235 tons was washed from the sea during a storm on 15 July 1912. (January 1933. J. S. MacKinnon. Town Clerk)" So for you mathletes out there, it's been just over 100 years since the savage storm dredged up this hunk of earth from its watery abode and, like a carelessly-chewed chunk of steak, violently spit it out in a brute force majeure oceanic Heimlich maneuver.
But I did a little internet digging (it's been a long week, mmmkay?) and learned that this claim is in question. And it makes sense. I mean, it's not just a creative name - it's a *big* rock. And the fact that, from the pages of the 1912 Daily Telegraph, this "huge rock was displaced and rolled some distance" is a tough sell, despite how bad the "monsoonal conditions from a cyclonic disturbance" could've been. So in 2002, the cutting edge Bondi View dropped a hot, high-profile take down piece, rife with rebuttal analyses, exposing the rock for what it truly is: a fraud. Turns out, it's not worth the minerals in a migmatite - the story just doesn't hold water. The famed felsite falsity fell from the headland at Ben Buckler and furthermore (furthermore!!!) it was languidly lounging there as long ago as 1888. Or so says the breakthrough piece of investigative journalism: "The Big Rock: exploding the myth."
Oh, but there's more. You see, laying lying rocks aren't metamorphosized in a vacuum - there are ripples of repercussions. And the cosmic consequences weren't felt harder by anyone other than Lynette and Jan, the portendingly doomed Bondi Mermaids. Installed on the artist's own dime in 1960, these ladies lapped up the life of luxury atop the rock that soon bore their name. But in 1974, a green-eyed storm with an ax to grind from years of being told it "just wasn't tempestuous enough" sought redemption in the form of a meretricious mermaidnapping - Mermaid Jan lost her tail and her arm and Mermaid Lynette was swept to sea never to be seen again. ("I'll never let go Jan" rumoured to be the final sea-salted words from her caramelized lips. Unconfirmed, but probable.) Arm and taleless, Jan tried to stay strong with a short lived, yet surprisingly illustrious career of singing Siren songs of sacrifice and selling seashells by the seashore, but Waverley Council had tempted fate long enough and two years later, removed her for safe keeping.
So with a sordid past, The Big Rock looms from its prestigious vantage point, bearing the 235 ton weight of being the source of contemptuous controversy, Siren sacrifice and oceanic atonement and shaking in its brass-plaqued boots anytime the wind picks up and the sky spoils into bad banana baby food.
