Christmas Day at Coogee Beach

If you are a backpacker planning your first Australian Christmas, or a local wondering whether to avoid the place entirely, this is the honest version. I have watched this gathering move around the eastern beaches for years, and 2025 was the year it came full circle - back to the beach where it started, and where it got banned.

When

December 25, building from late morning

Where

Coogee Beach, Goldstein Reserve and Dunningham Reserve

Council

Randwick City - not Waverley, and the rules differ

2025 crowd

About 15,000

Alcohol

Permanently banned on the beach and in Goldstein Reserve

Glass & smoking

Banned on all Randwick beaches, year round

Organised by

Nobody - it is not an official event

Cost

Free

What actually happened in 2025

For most of the last decade the travellers' Christmas - "Orphans' Christmas", if you have been in a hostel long enough to hear it called that - belonged to Bronte. In 2025 it stopped belonging to Bronte. Waverley Council spent more than $220,000 on a management plan with a glass ban, alcohol checkpoints and a heavy police presence, and asked people plainly not to come. On top of that, the Bronte Surf Life Saving Club redevelopment turned half the park into a construction site. The message landed, and the crowd simply went somewhere else.

Somewhere else was Coogee. On Christmas Day 2025 roughly 15,000 people filled the beach and the two grassy reserves above it, with DJ tents, a sea of Santa hats and a lot of red swimwear. Randwick City Council had prepared for large crowds as a precaution even though the gathering had been billed for Bronte - extra staff, extra bins, extra rubbish bags, and close coordination with NSW Police. Waverley Council sent its own clean-up resources across the boundary to help.

Two things are worth holding side by side, because the headlines only carried one of them. The behaviour was fine: NSW Police reported no arrests and no fines across the whole day. The mess was not: council crews worked through the night with beach rakes, footpath sweepers and high-pressure hoses to clear more than 20 tonnes of rubbish from the sand, the grass and the toilets. A well-behaved crowd and a badly-littered beach turn out to be entirely compatible, and that gap is the thing worth fixing.

The rule everyone gets wrong: alcohol

People arrive at Coogee assuming that because the crowd was pushed out of Bronte by an alcohol crackdown, Coogee must be the relaxed option. It is the opposite. Randwick City Council banned alcohol at Coogee Beach and the surrounding parks after Christmas Day 2016, and councillors made that ban permanent in March 2017. It has been in force ever since. Alcohol and glass are prohibited on all Randwick beaches - the sand and the rock platforms - and there is a permanent alcohol ban in Goldstein Reserve, the grassy terrace right above the beach where most of the crowd sits.

• Alcohol - banned on Coogee Beach and in Goldstein Reserve, permanently and year round. Not a Christmas measure.
• Glass - banned on all Randwick beaches, in any form, at any time of year.
• Smoking - banned on Randwick beaches, and that includes vaping.
• Enforcement - police and council rangers are on the ground on Christmas Day. Expect alcohol to be tipped out or confiscated.

If a drink is central to your Christmas, the answer is a licensed venue rather than the sand. Coogee has pubs and hotels along Arden Street and Coogee Bay Road, and on a public holiday you should book well ahead and expect surcharges. Do not plan on walking up on the day.

Getting there

There is no train to Coogee - there never has been - so it is buses or a long walk, and on Christmas Day driving is the worst of the options. Christmas Day is a NSW public holiday, so everything runs to a holiday timetable. Check Transport for NSW before you leave rather than trusting a weekday memory.

• From the city - the 373 and 374 run to Coogee, roughly 30 to 40 minutes from the CBD.
• From Bondi Junction - the 350 is the quick one, around 12 minutes down to Arden Street. The 313 also connects. (If you have an old set of directions mentioning the 353, that route has been replaced.)
• From Bondi Beach - up to Bondi Junction on the 333 or 380, then the 350 down. Allow far longer than the map suggests on the day.
• On foot - the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk is about 6 km and finishes right at the beach. Lovely in the morning; unpleasant in the middle of a hot afternoon with no water.

Driving is a genuinely bad idea. Randwick's beachside streets are signed 4P - a four-hour limit - and they fill early on any warm day, let alone this one. Randwick councillors voted against introducing visitor pay parking at Coogee and Clovelly, so the free 4P system stands for now, but a free space you cannot find is not much use. There is more detail in my guide to parking at Coogee, Clovelly and Tamarama.

Swimming, and the four ocean pools

Coogee is a patrolled beach and a relatively gentle one by eastern-suburbs standards - it sits in a bay with Wedding Cake Island offshore taking the sting out of the swell, which is why families have come here for a century. That does not make it a swimming pool. Swim between the red and yellow flags, where the lifesavers have judged it safest and are actually watching, and if no flags are up, stay out.

Coogee also has four ocean pools within a few hundred metres, which is more than anywhere else in Sydney:

• Ross Jones Memorial Pool - the castellated one at the southern end of the beach, shallow and sheltered, and the best option with small children.
• Giles Baths - at the northern end, a rougher, rockier natural pool that fills with the swell.
• McIver's Ladies Baths - on the cliff between Ross Jones and Wylie's, and one of the last women-and-children-only ocean pools in Australia. A small entry fee applies.
• Wylie's Baths - about 300 m south, a 50-metre pool built in 1907 on a heritage timber boardwalk, with a cafe above it. Ticketed.

Do not count on any of the ticketed pools keeping normal hours on a public holiday - Wylie's and McIver's set their own, and they change. Check their official pages before you build a plan around them.

Facilities, and what to bring

There are public toilets and showers at the beach, and the reserves have shade trees and grass - but 15,000 people put every one of those facilities under real strain, and the queues by mid-afternoon are long. Sort yourself out before you arrive rather than after.

• Water - bring more than you think. Australian December heat catches northern-hemisphere visitors out badly.
• Sun protection - a shirt, SPF50+ reapplied after every swim, a hat and sunglasses. The UV here in late December is far stronger than a European summer, and burns happen inside an hour.
• Shade - the shady spots in the reserves are taken early. Bring your own if you want any.
• Food - Christmas Day is a public holiday and most cafes and shops will be closed or on short hours. Assume you are catering for yourself.
• A rubbish bag - the single most useful thing you can carry. See below.
• No glass, and no alcohol - not on the sand, not in the reserves.

The 20 tonnes, and how not to be part of it

This is the part I would ask you to actually take on. The gathering is not in trouble because of how people behave - the police record from 2025 is about as clean as a 15,000-person event gets. It is in trouble because of what gets left behind. Twenty tonnes of rubbish is not a few dropped cups; it is council crews working through Christmas night with hoses and beach rakes so that residents can use their own beach on Boxing Day.

Coogee has already lost this once. The 2016 mess is precisely why alcohol was banned here, and Bronte's crackdown followed the same pattern a decade later. If the day is going to survive at Coogee, it survives on this:

• Take a bag, and take your rubbish out with you. If the bins are full, that is a reason to carry it, not to stack it beside them.
• Bring reusable cups, plates and cutlery instead of single-use.
• Nothing glass, at any point.
• Pick up what is near you when you leave, even if it is not yours. It costs a minute.
• Follow directions from rangers, lifesavers and police - they are the reason this is still allowed to happen at all.

A crowd with no arrests and no fines still lost a beach once, on rubbish alone. That is the whole lesson.

If you would rather avoid the crowd

Plenty of locals do, and there is no shame in it. A few honest alternatives:

• Go early. Coogee before about 10am on Christmas morning is still a normal, lovely Sydney beach. The character of the day changes around midday.
• Clovelly or Gordons Bay - a short walk north, calmer water, far fewer people, and genuinely good snorkelling.
• Bronte - now the quiet option, which is a strange sentence to write. Enforced alcohol rules, a park, a rock pool, and a fraction of the crowd. I have written the full picture in Christmas Day at Bronte Beach.
• Bondi - busy but far more spread out, with more space and more facilities. See Christmas Day at Bondi Beach.
• Coogee Carols - Randwick City Council runs official Christmas events in the weeks before the 25th, including carols at Coogee. Family-friendly, sanctioned, and a completely different proposition. Dates are set each year on the council's Christmas page.

That is the whole picture: a genuinely good day, at a beach that has already taken it away once. Come early, take the bus, swim between the flags, skip the drink on the sand, and carry your rubbish out. Do that and the day survives - and Coogee stays the kind of place that lets 15,000 strangers spend Christmas together. For the wider picture of the eastern beaches over the holidays, see Christmas Day at Bondi Beach and my guide to the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk.