Michael Weeks occasionally brags about his job. Who else, he reasons, gets to drive a $100,000 machine while watching the sunset on some of the world’s best beaches?
He has a point. The evening we meet at Sydney’s Bondi beach is unseasonably warm. A man glides along the esplanade on a skateboard pulled by five dogs and, on the sand, volleyball players leap, couples linger and swimmers emerge from the water until well after sunset.
This means it’s a late start for Weeks, 51, who is charged with mechanically raking Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama beaches, ridding their sand of rubbish and dirt. He waits until the beach is almost empty before driving Waverley council’s three-tonne John Deere 6110M tractor on to the sand and lowering its attached 1,200-pronged rake. By 10pm, he is safe to begin the first of about 30 laps of the beach, raking 50km of some of Australia’s busiest sand.
Inside, he sets the cruise control, cranks up the radio – 101.7 WSFM, the home of “better music and more of it” – and sings along at the top of his “shocking” voice.
He tows the rake at a steady 9.6km/h, about running speed. Its 20cm prongs and oversized conveyor belt sift and trap about 80% of the tissues, cigarette butts, cans and other rubbish on the beach. Attached to the underside of the tractor is a $10,000 magnet encrusted with bottle tops and bobby pins. In the glow of the tractor’s eight floodlights is a party of moths and sandflies.
His shift lasts as long as the elements dictate: a long, hot day means light, dry sand but lingering crowds; a wet day means fewer people and heavy, waterlogged sand. A king tide delivers half the work, while a low high tide means an hour’s extra driving. Tonight is a three-and-a-half-hour night.
Weeks then heads to Bronte beach via the coastal road and finishes with Tamarama. Both take about 40 minutes. He will finish about 2am and head home to Revesby, an hour’s drive away. As he’s getting ready for bed, pre-sunrise runners, surfers and dog walkers are greeted by corduroy sand that is groomed to smooth, arcing orderliness: unnatural, perhaps, but a perfectionist’s pleasure.
Night rider
Weeks hasn’t always worked nights. He’s tried being a train driver, glass cutter, croupier, children’s clothing retailer, kangaroo pelt maker, tomato farmer and house cleaner. Eighteen years ago he became Waverley council’s relief driver, then, 10 years ago, the job switched to a night role after decades of early mornings.
Because of the popularity of Bondi and its constant flow of surfers, swimmers, fishers, divers, kayakers, surf skiers and exercisers, the raker’s 6am start time had shifted to 5am and then to 4am. Eventually, a night shift made more sense, with two nights off on the quietest days, Tuesday and Wednesday.
During Covid restrictions, he sometimes worked in the day. “I had a headache all the time, I wasn’t used to the bright light and the people and the noise,” he says.
The transition to night work wasn’t easy for his five children (their names are tattooed in a string of balloons up his forearm) but now, he asks, “How much better could it be? My kids can say Daddy drives a tractor on Bondi beach. That’s pretty cool.”
Beach tractors have been used on Bondi since 1933, says Lawrie Williams, Waverley council’s public domain officer, a local historian and former professional lifeguard. The council later resorted to using manual labour to pick up the litter on the beach, a 1979 report stating that “no mechanical cleaning equipment [was] found to be successful”.
At Bondi, six men worked for eight hours a day, seven days a week. In Bronte, the same hours were kept by four men. The council noted that the problem of litter on beaches was “continuing to escalate” and that their cleaning took “considerable time”.
Now, one man and his tractor – plus $450 worth of diesel a week – can handle all three beaches and the waste generated by some 80,000 people on a summer’s day. Weeks can fill 12 wheelie bins with waste on a single night but still has to stop to pick up each glass bottle by hand. He also picks up forgotten towels – his partner donates them to her workplace, a special needs school.
In a 2001 interview with Williams, locals Brian and Patricia Collins remembered fossickers following in the wake of the tractor, making a living from the coins and lost keys they found. Among the things they found were a cardboard box full of purses and another of false teeth. “All these teeth, I thought, ‘God help me’,” Patricia Collins said.
Weeks, too, has found dentures on the beach. He once found a riding saddle. The largest piece of rubbish he has come across was a 20,000-litre water drum, washed up in a storm in 2016. When we talk, he has just found a broken mirror. “I reckon they’ve done a photoshoot,” he says, referring to the many models and brands who have helped cement Bondi’s role as global Instagram icon.
Earlier this year Weeks saw someone trying to flatten out the sand on the beach – a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. It turned out the man was about to propose to his partner and wanted to tidy the area around the blanket, picnic basket and candles he had arranged. Weeks quickly “did a few loops” around the set-up. (She said yes, the man told him later.)
There is also a less happy side to the job. Twice Weeks has turned the tractor’s lights towards the waves, called triple zero and waded into the surf to make a rescue in the dead of the night. Once, he found a body.
The police have told him his presence on the beach has been a good influence on antisocial behaviour. Still, he says, “you’ve got to have your wits about you”. He locks himself into his air-conditioned cab each night since he was attacked from behind with a glass bottle in Bronte, and avoids confrontation. He will drive around sleeping people.
Prince of tides
After 10 years he says he has learned to read people. Children wave, others panic and some people don’t seem fussed by a tractor heading their way. “You’re barrelling along with a hundred lights,” he says, “95% of people work it out and move out of the way.”
For years, he dodged a resident fox that dashed in front of the tractor. At Tamarama, he stopped for a baby turtle on the sand. “I love the seagulls,” he pauses, then says it again, really meaning it. “I love the seagulls. They float away and come back in a big mass.”
Every hour and a half, he stops for a Manchester cigarette. Otherwise, it’s just him and the sand and the tides.
“My aim is straight lines,” he says. “It’s so nice, you see all your curves. Always at about halfway, I stop and have a look – half is done and half is messy.” He’s not the only one who appreciates the orderliness. People tell him they love the lines and the loops at the end of each lap. Some run across the neat sand, then apologise to him.
On the way home from Bronte, he parks the tractor in Bondi, ready to rake and meditate again the next night. His aim is to keep raking until he is 65.
“I have friends who have office jobs and have ulcers, I have friends who work on construction sites and have hernias and bad backs and bad knees, and I drive along Bondi beach, bopping along to music,” he says, looking at the dark sky and waves lapping nearby.
“I don’t think I want to do anything else bar this.”
