Prepare to surf [Explore]

Looks like a surf school group about to hit the waves at Bondi.

 

We're looking south, the shoreline building at far left is Bondi Icebergs' club. You can see people sitting in the stand and around the pool edge. Elsewhere is expensive real estate, seen through afternoon spray.

 

The brown building at top right was once the Astra Hotel, built on the premises of an 1880 building, the Cliff House, on the corner of Campbell Parade and Sir Thomas Mitchell Road. That was demolished in 1920, and the new building opened in 1926 as The Hotel International. It was sold to the hotelier, racecourse and newspaper owner Sir James Joynton Smith and renamed, before being taken over in 1937 by Allen Oldfield and his sons. It was popular before World War II, with a seated 'casino bar'.

 

Requisitioned for the war, later it was the setting for the 1959 film Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The Oldfields sold in 1967 and the Astra became an infamous dive, known for bikies, junkies and New Zealanders (frequent Bondi residents through the '70's and '80s) before its seedy reputation caused the local council to shut it down. It reopened as the Bondi Astra Retirement Village, catering for over 55's, in 1984. People used to joke about the elderly finding a bullet hole in the walls or a cache of needles.

 

Reprising Gotye, a sound of the summer - Doechii's Anxiety:[www.youtube.com/watch?v=riCP9x31Kuk]

Done