Bondi screengrab from The Queen In Australia, produced by Stanley Hawes in 1954 for the Commonwealth Department of Information, courtesy of National Film And Sound Archive and Simon Drake.
Hit the National Film and Sound Archive today with Cathy Mulhall on the hunt for film footage and viewed some amazing stuff. Needed a shower after all that sand, salt and suntan lotion and logged up a great list of movie material for our three ‘decade’ screens, swag of slideshows and of course the ‘Surf City’ documentary underway. Among the stand out cinematic treasures were water-level tracking shots in Stanley Hawes’ 1954 coverage of the Queen in Australia (as grabbed above), board rego and sun-baked bodies along with kids ripping on surfoplanes in John Martin-Jones’ Surf Beach 1965, those pivotal green left handers in 1956 with Californians Tad Devine, Mike Bright and Greg Noll on their spacey malibus in Service in The Sun and of course the wry in-the-wild anthropology of Richard Neville in David Price’s Surfing Roundabout of 1965.