Content warning: This article contains references to suicide.
Bruce ‘Hoppo’ Hopkins has changed lifeguarding around the world as the face of Bondi Rescue. Editor Michelle Giglio talks to the Newport local about how the show went from a one-hour pilot to its 17th season, his Life is a Beach podcast, and Float to Survive Australia water safety campaign.
When Bruce ‘Hoppo’ Hopkins started dating his now wife Karen Griffin, he jumped on his surf ski at Rose Bay and paddled all the way over to her home in Little Manly. The super-fit professional lifeguard, who is a household name as the head lifeguard in Channel 10’s Bondi Rescue, grew up in Bronte and had lived in the Bondi area all of his life. But he made the move to the Northern Beaches for love.
“I had always known it as the dark side!” he jokes. Karen had moved to the Northern Beaches when she migrated from the UK in 2004. The couple first started talking about moving over during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. “We had a bit of banter when we first met, comparing the east to the Beaches,” he says. Once Hoppo ‘finally cracked’ and the couple moved to Avalon, he was apprehensive at first, but soon started enjoying the outdoor Beaches lifestyle. Now the couple live on the Pittwater and often paddle with their dogs to the Bayview Dog Park across the water.
“It’s a great spot,” Hoppo says. “I realised it was like growing up in Bronte as a kid 30 years ago. It’s quieter and the main thing I find compared to the Eastern Suburbs is that people actually say hello when I walk around the streets!” he laughs.
When Hoppo started as a lifeguard in 1992, essentially to fill time while he trained and competed in surf ski championships, he could never have imagined that a part-time job would one day lead to a television show broadcast to 140 nations – with Hoppo as the charismatic, steady tiller leading the motley Bondi crew. “I thought I’d just do it for five years while I was competing, and then move on,” he remembers.
In those days, men – and it has always been mostly men – undertook the job over the summer period, filling in between careers or picking up money in the busy months. Nobody stayed long enough to make a career of it.
But Hoppo did, sensing that there was a way the job could be done better. While the crowds at Bondi have not changed much since Hoppo first started working there, with 30,000 a day nothing to blink at during summer months, there were only ever three lifeguards on duty.
One of the problems was that anyone with experience would eventually move on once they needed a full-time job to support a family. “I could see that we were losing a lot of people,” he says. In addition, some of the lifeguards would work overseas in the European summer, then return to Bondi – but Hoppo worried they were becoming complacent.
He remembers thinking: “I’ve got a vision here on how we should go with lifeguards and how we can make it a professional job.” In a dramatic move, he dropped the swimming times needed to qualify as a lifeguard from 14 minutes for 800 metres in a pool, to 13.
“I was not doing it to get rid of anyone,” he explained. “I don’t want people just coming back and forward for the sake of doing (the job) or hanging around the beach all day.
Karen and Hoppo got married at Pasadena in Chyurch Point.
“The vision was to become full-time permanent down the track. And I thought the only way to do that is to get a group of people who were passionate about being lifeguards.”
Waverley Council was the first in Australia to employ full-time lifeguards at Bondi from 1994, but other staff were seasonal, which Hoppo wanted to change. It took almost 10 years, but eventually Bronte was open with full time lifeguards, and Tamarana went the same way a few years ago.
“My vision back in 2000 was where we are now, even though it’s taken probably 20 years. And I suppose that’s what’s kept me going back because I wanted to see out the vision.”
In the middle of all that, around 2004, a beach regular named Ben Davies who was a television producer approached Hoppo looking for summer work. He qualified as a lifeguard and it ended up being a ‘crazy summer’ with 12 resuscitations. Ben was surprised at how intense the 12-hour days were and suggested it could be good for television. “I laughed at him and said, ‘how the hell would I know!’”.
Ben set the wheels in motion, Waverley Council gave its blessing, and Channel 10 said it would come on board – but only for a one-hour special. What 10 didn’t realise is just how busy the lifeguards were. Not just saving people, but all the sorts of strife which happens when you add water, surf, searing temperatures, tourists who can’t swim and the brutal Bondi rips. Mix in bluebottle stings, bag theft, lost children, lost keys, board riders surfing into the flags, drunken teenagers, battling backpackers – and the job of a ‘lifeguard’ starts to look very spicey.
It also helped that during the first session of filming, the crew recorded the first-ever live beach resuscitation in the world, with some of Bondi’s most experienced lifeguards, including Hoppo, there that day not to work, but for a photoshoot to promote the new show.
“They captured it right from the beginning,” Hoppo remembers, of the Takahiro Ono miracle. “We resuscitated him, and back in those days, once the defib shocks three times, that was it. The machine would shut down. Whereas now you can keep going.
Karen’s horses Cisco and Jimmy are stabled at Terrey Hills.
“So we had one more shock left, (used it) and we got a pulse back. The majority of the time, people are still unconscious when they leave the beach for hospital. And this is the first time this guy woke up and I remember asking him, ‘man, do you know where you are?’
“And he’s looked at me, lying there. So he’s been dead for I reckon, four minutes? Dead as a doornail, and looks at me and says, ‘Oh, I’m at Bondi Beach’.”
It was spine-tingling viewing, and 10 said they had enough for an eight-part series. “From there, the rest is history!” the father-of-two says.
Six logies and 17 season later, the groundbreaking show paved the way for other such ‘factual reality’ series about paramedics, nurses and police officers. Most importantly, the resuscitation of Taka went on to change the way lifeguards around Australia and the world did rescues. “A real life resuscitation from start to finish had never been captured anywhere in the world because no one ever followed lifeguards or even paramedics in those days,” Hoppo explains. The production company was inundated with calls from across the globe by people who wanted to use it in resuscitation training.
Watching how the lifeguards were chillingly calm during the Taka incident, despite the challenge before them – and hundreds of people watching on – you have to remind yourself they are not actors. “I’ve done a lot of resuscitations, but when something major happens like that, I see things in slow motion,” Hoppo explains. “I’ve got a second to make a decision, but it feels like a minute.
“If people see me calm, everyone else becomes calm within the team. Everyone knows their place. We do a lot of training and scenarios so people know their place and what to do.”
The Bondi Rescue lifeguards receive no ‘television training’ but are just themselves while the cameras are on them for 10 weeks a year, from 9am to 7pm, seven days a week. Not much has changed over the years in how it is filmed, except the cameraman no longer has to dive in the water as now Go-Pro cameras are on every rescue board. Hoppo thinks the longevity of the show, which he thought would just go for a ‘couple of years,’ is because it focuses on the personalities of the lifeguards. “They’ve made us into a group of characters and people get to know the personalities.”
Hoppo and his lifeguard team at Bondi Beach.
The 55-year-old has seen his profession change with the introduction of defibrillators on the beach in 1997 which has allowed so many more lives to be saved. “Back then, I got a pair of shorts, a shirt and a whistle and out you went,” Hoppo remembers. “You worked on your own a lot back in those days. You’ve had to prioritise (who to save) and use board riders that you knew at the beaches and other people to help you.”
Now there is a team of six, jet skis have been added to the arsenal – very handy for scaring sharks away from the beach – and a trailer to load up all the equipment at the end of the day.
One other important change has been attention to mental health to deal with the sometimes tragic reality of loss of life. “We always trained physically for the job, but we never ever trained mentally,” Hoppo says. Unfortunately, not only do lifeguards have to deal with death by drowning, but body retrievals from the Gap of people who have committed suicide.
“Once trauma hits and then you go to counselling, it’s too late, because you’ve already had the impact,” Hoppo says. So he brought in a psychologist to ‘train our minds’. “And anyone that’s got any trouble or is feeling a bit stressed, they go to him.”
Hoppo started a podcast ‘Life’s a Beach’ two years ago to address what he saw as a need to talk more about mental health problems and how to overcome them. It saw him re- engage with another passion – radio – which was actually his first career after school at 2GB, where he worked in sports broadcasting.
“People always used to come up to me say, ‘Your life must be fantastic.’ Because all they see is me on TV. But then I had a rough period in my life. And when you talk to other people, everyone has their tough times in life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a multimillionaire, a Hollywood superstar or just an ordinary person going to work every day.
“I thought, if I can get people on and they tell their story, that will resonate then with everybody (and they realise) ‘everyone has the troubles that I’m having.’
Celebrities such as Olympian Michael Klim, Yellow Wiggle Greg Page, Ironman Grant Kenny and The Biggest Loser’s Shannon Ponton have all told Hoppo on his podcast how they overcame adversity. “It’s really good that listeners have (told us) ‘I just thought I was the only one in these situations’.”
Hoppo’s profile and expertise has also allowed him to pursue another cause close to his heart – drowning prevention. Last year he launched the Float to Survive Australia campaign, supported by over 20 organisations including Waverley Council and Surfing NSW. The campaign came about after years of watching swimming behaviour at the beach and countless rescues, resuscitations – and sadly, a few deaths. “When I thought about it, everyone we rescued could swim and everyone that drowned could swim to a certain extent.
“We always keep telling everybody that rips are dangerous. Whereas (as a kid at the beach with my dad) I never panicked in a rip because I was used to paddling out in the rip, then surfing the waves back.”
Research shows that 90 per cent of rips actually take people back to the sandbank or where waves are breaking. “Whereas the first thing people want to do in a rip is try and swim straight back to where they came from. But that’s straight back into the rip. And then they just get tired, exhausted, their breathing starts getting rapid, the panic sets in, and that’s when they drown.”
Using his knowledge of rips and the ocean, Hoppo developed a simple message and method which anyone can use if they get into trouble: float to survive. “If you float in any waterway and keep your head above water, you’re never going to drown.
“It’s a survival technique to reduce that panic and hopefully that’ll save your life.”
Earlier this year, Hoppo celebrated 30 years as a lifeguard, and as he gets older, has been thinking about how to pass on all his invaluable knowledge gained on the job.
“I want to leave a legacy,” he declares. “I don’t want to be remembered just as the guy off the TV show. There’s more to it than that. Because I’ve put so much more into being a professional lifeguard. The TV show’s been a bonus, but that hasn’t been the whole part of being a lifeguard, because I was a lifeguard before the show came along.
“It’s all about the helping people and, as I’m getting older, giving back to the community.”
As for how long he will keep going, not even Hoppo knows. “I don’t know if my body’s going to hold up!” he jokes. “When you are young, you’re invincible, but as you get older you think ‘if I get an injury, I’m out for three months’.
“But you just keep going as long as you can go.”
With filming for season 18 of Bondi Rescue kicking off in December this year, it looks like Hoppo will be around for a little while yet.
Watch Bondi Rescue on 10 Play.