click on images for title and larger view   This work wasproduced during a six month residency at the Bondi Pavilion Community Centre in 1989 and exhibited at the Bondi Pavilion, Cambelltown and Orange Regional Art Galleries in 1990. Works were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the exhibition Twenty Australian Photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1990 and a substantial number werelater included in a major exhibition The Beach at the Museum of Heide in 1994.       This series challenges some of the dominant representations of the beach through a series of photographic portraits taken against a painted backdrop of Bondi. These images explore the cultural stereotypes that usually define its visual history and parody these in an ironic and critical manner. "Anne Zahalka has quoted the Australian Beach Pattern in her photograph The Bathers. Deliberately staged to prod our memory of the painting, Zahalka's version approximates the essential visual menu of Meere's work in preference to being an exact copy...The image, as made by Zahalka, and in referring to its iconic counterpart, reinforces the mythology of the idea of the beach, rather than the beach itself. It is a clever image. Both satirical and affectionate about the Aussie beach experience and about our changing notions of the bronzed hero and the white nuclear family." 1   1 Julianna Engberg, The Beach, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne 1994