Bronte Beach is located 7 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district, in the Waverley Council local government area of the Eastern Suburbs.

Bronte offers scenic cliff-top walking paths south to Coogee via the Waverley Cemetery and north to Bondi Beach, via Tamarama and Mackenzies Bay.

[4] Owing to the devastating effects of the European invasion on Aboriginal peoples, including forced displacement and the catastrophic impact of introduced European diseases such as smallpox, most or all of the original indigenous inhabitants of the area were killed by disease or forced to move further inland during the late 18th and early 19th century[citation needed], resulting in the near-total loss of indigenous cultural knowledge about the area, and this had been compounded by the massive residential and commercial development of the area, which has destroyed nearly all archaeological evidence of the indigenous occupation and use of the land and seashore around what is now known as "Nelson Bay".

[citation needed] Robert Lowe, who later became Viscount Sherbrooke, bought 17 hectares (42 acres) of land from Mortimer Lewis, the English-born Australian Colonial Architect who was given a free grant of most of the frontage in the area in the 1830s.

The house, a single-storey stone bungalow located in Bronte Road, is owned by Waverley Council and leased to private tenants who hold open days a few times a year.

A feature of this line was the final approach to Bronte Beach in a rock cutting leading to the Pacific Ocean cliff tops.

[citation needed] According to The Dictionary of Sydney, it is believed that the famous swimming style generally known as the "Australian crawl" was first seen at Bronte Baths in 1899.