Bondi Beach seems to be the locus of all the world’s most proportionate people: long tanned legs, perfect triangular torsos and the bland and blameless faces of the square jawed, small nosed and high cheek boned. I wonder what ions in the water drew them all to this part of the coastal jag of Australia. Or what series of pinpointable events lead each sculpted-stomached being here (surely there was more to each life story that began with “I was born and decreed to be beautiful” and lead to the inevitable ending: “I live in Bondi”).

I ran this morning along the track that follows the smoothed and hollowed out cliff-faces of Bondi towards Bronte - the ocean whips at the saltwater lap pool at Icebergs, a woman with a Madonna-mike (to be heard over the crash of the waves) guides a yoga class of sweating waifs who salute the big blue, tourists amble and point and slow down in my way along the steps that go up down up down up down as we climb the cliff (please god don’t let me stop running because I’ll never start again). As I round the bend I see the white-toothed gravestones of Bronte cemetery, and then I’m at Tamarama (this tiny little wonder of a beach, a mere cove but with fierce white waves and some dazed looking lifesavers sprawled almost horizontal watching the four or five swimmers wrestle with the surf). I wonder at being a lifesaver – the 360-odd days of boredom with sand in your shorts must be made up for by those three or four moments of sheer terror and excitement when someone almost drowns and you are called to the rescue. Or maybe I have the stats wrong and it’s the other way around.

The locals call the beach Glamarama – is it one of those nasty Australian in-jokes, a cruel irony, a pinned on name to show what it clearly is not? Or does it refer to the trim torsos on the beach, to Sydney’s obsession with showy glam? There are no surfers at Glamarama today. I try and remember my 15-year-old surf-lifesaving training from the cruel coastal waters of Victoria, reading the churning lines of water frothing this way and that to detect a rip, but I fear my surf savvy has receded like the tide.

My thoughts whip around as unpredictably as the sea-spray: what does it mean to be a writer, why do we do it? Is this a noble pursuit or the most narcissistic profession imaginable? I fear that if I can’t find a reason in the middle of this all this churning, maybe like those ill-fated tourists who always chose to swim at the wrong end of Bondi, I’ll drown.

I am rehearsing a play of mine at STC, which will be read for the public at the end of the week. I started writing the play a year and a half ago: it’s set in the dead red centre of Australia, in a small dusty town. I wonder at this strange beast the play has become, separate to me and of me at the same time. I climb the track running up up up, zigzagging past the dog runners and the dilly-dallyers. My arms and legs ache like foreign limbs, as if they might fall off my body, as if pieces of myself were as angular and jagged as a Picasso. I started writing the play at a silent writer’s retreat in the Catskills with Erik Ehn: the bald and wondrous guru of playwriting. On the first day, gathered mute in a circle, all the writers looked at him wide-eyed as he described the original meaning of sin: to be out of step with oneself, out of place. Forget about guilt and reprobation. This was a definition of sin I could really get behind. Here I was in upstate New York, in a strange sticky summer with forested smells that weren’t recognizable to me (no eucalypt or jasmine or frangipani) and I thought: I am literally out of place. I don’t belong here. This is not my country And so I thought, Fuck it. I’m going to write an Australian play. And that’s the beginning of the story, and the story now is me in Sydney working on Underland. But there’s a lot between the beginning and the now, a lot I won’t bore you with. Or a lot I can’t explain: like Japanese businessmen crawling out of the earth from Tokyo, men who might be crocodiles, the nasty sharp edged love between schoolgirls, the terror of the Australian desert landscape for whities (that endless and infinite dry that runs hot by day and icy by night and can kill you just for getting in the middle of it). But for all of that you’ll just have to come see the reading yourself.

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(somehow this meandered its way into a plug… here are the details below, fab cast and director and it’s free!)

Underland 
By Alexandra Collier 
Directed by Paige Rattray

Featuring Yure Covich, Anna Lise Phillips, Shari Sebbens, Amanda McGregor, Annie Byron and Shingo Usami