May 2021 (ROTM#149) Dreamtime Beach, NSW

Dreamtime Beach was also the Rip of the Month for September 2018, but it deserves another mention. Dreamtime is just south of Tweed Heads, in Fingal Head, and was a relatively quiet location until it became a social media favourite, making numerous appearances on 'Top 10 Australian Beach' and 'Best Secret Beaches' lists - and now it's an Instagram destination.

It's also a dangerous beach with a permanent boundary rip current against the northern headland. That would be the big dark area of water in this picture with people in it. People arrive at the beach and of course it looks inviting to swim, but the beach is unpatrolled and there have been 5 drownings there in recent years. 

This picture was taken over the Easter School holidays this year during some fieldwork the UNSW Beach Safety Research Group were conducting on beachgoers visiting unpatrolled beaches. We surveyed beachgoers to find out where they were from, what their swimming ability was like, why they chose the beach and how good they were at spotting rips in pictures and at the beach itself. We also did surveys on the south coast of NSW and at an unpatrolled beach in Sydney's northern beaches. Results of over 400 surveys show that people are not as good as spotting rip currents as they think they are, even though they may be able to spot them in photographs.

We were hoping to capture international tourists who were drawn to Dreamtime, but COVID obviously stopped that from happening, but there were still plenty of Instagrammers arriving and then swimming in the rip! UNSW BSRG student Will Koon can be seen surveying beachgoers at the right of the photo and being a lifeguard from California, spent much of his time watching the water and warning people of the dangers of swimming there!

Instagrammers relaxing in the rip.