Cooper’s Bellevue Hill-Bondi Estat…

Rare c.20th large scale poster of the Bellevue Hill-Bondi estate sale on Sat. 15th. March 1919 at 3p.m.

In 1885, the Cooper estate (in the person of Daniel Cooper- the England-based great nephew of its emancipist founder) vested the authority in its Sydney agents, Edmund Compton Batt and John Mitchell Purves, to make sales from the estate at their discretion.8 In the early twentieth century, largescale freehold releases, along with the freehold conversion of former leaseholds also authorised by the estate gradually dispersed the Cooper holding. By 1912, when the Bellevue-Hill-Bondi estate was first offered for auction, freehold tenure was not only well established, but a matter of public expectation.

The Bellevue Hill-Bondi estate, the last of the land to be alienated from the Cooper estate in large-scale releases, the Bellevue Hill-Bondi estate was submitted to the market in three separate selling exercises. Despite the estate name, none of these three subdivisions included any part of the neighbouring suburb of Bondi, which falls entirely within the municipality of Waverley, separated from Woollahra by the Old South Head Road boundary. The subdivision name was presumably invoking, as a selling point for the land, the proximity of a desirable landmark – Bondi Beach, already a byword for scenic beauty and leisure when the land went to sale, located within feasible walking distance of the estate, and soon after to be a tram destination on a line running through the estate. The third subdivision was offered for sale in 1919, with unsold portions auctioned in 1921.