Wanda, sixty years

No, not the fish, the beach

Anniversaries that stretch into the decades are always marked as a ritual moment: either as a milestone to celebrate (ugh, that now-corporate weaselword*), a changing-course-of-history event, or simply a tragedy to mourn. The year 2025 offers a wonderfully bloggable array of all of these, not the least being the fiftieth anniversary of the UN declaration of International Women’s Year and the holding of its first World Conference on Women, in Mexico, in the middle of that year. And you can bet your little feminist whatevers that I’ll be blogging about these in due course. I might even do an 8 May one for the eightieth of the end of WWII in Europe. We’ll see. But today, I’m focusing on a tragedy-to-mourn moment, and those who listened to or read the news last weekend may already be guessing what it is.

Warning: some of this is horrific. It may upset you. Violence against women always upsets me though. And there’s a lot of it about. So it’s hard not to get upset quite a lot of the time.

*But first, before the horror, I open a wee parenthesis, as is my wont, to do a little riff on that weaselword of the week: milestone. In my former career as an academic (well, job in any case, if it was a career that was more accidental than intentional), I witnessed with horror the steady progression of corporatespeak in my workplace. Somewhere in the mid-twenty-teens, or perhaps before, the weaselword milestone appeared in yearly progress report forms for postgraduate research students. Not, as one might assume, as an already-occurred something, the passage of which to be marked as an achievement, such as: “I revised my thesis plan for the tenth time and this is the one!”, but as something to be planned for as a goal. So: what are your milestones for the coming year? The only logical answer to that when one is a postgraduate research student is, well, f**k knows. I know what my destination is: get that damn thesis written and submitted and move on with my life, but my milestone? Ummm…. draft number eleven? Close of parenthesis.

A haunting

So, Wanda. The beach not the fish. The place not the film. Wanda Beach is next door to Cronulla High School, which my older sister and then I attended. (Older sister might get a blog post one day, but if you can track it down you can find a book chapter on her here. I enjoyed contributing to that book, not the least because I got to write something not “academic” but personal. The experience became all the more enjoyable when the book was launched in the National Library by that wonderful feminist political scientist for whom I have an enduring respect and affection: Marian Sawer. Yes, readers, academe had its rewards as well as its milestones of trials. Incidentally, older sister also has a small speaking part in the film Brazen Hussies on the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia 1965–75.)

Just before my sister started her final year at Cronulla High to prepare her Leaving Certificate (the second last year of the Leaving before it was replaced by the Higher School Certificate [HSC]), two teenage girls were murdered in the sandhills at the north end of Wanda Beach. It was Monday, 11 January, 1965. Their bodies were discovered the following day. Their names were Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock. They were on a summer-holiday day excursion with Schmidt’s younger siblings, and at some stage went off for a walk on their own, never to return. They were 15 years old. The younger children waited, and waited, until around 5pm when they had to pack up in order to catch the last train home Out (North)West to Seven Hills.

Yes, they were Westies, more or less—but in those days, in the macho tribal surf culture of Cronulla, anyone who came from anywhere west of Woolooware was pretty much a Westie. And defo if you came from outside the Shire—although those in the inner city suburbs and particularly its eastern and some of the northern ones were dubbed Silvertails. (As were, for that matter, those who lived on the leafy north side of Gunnamatta Bay.) There was a we-are-white-trash-and-proud-of-it mentality all along the surf beach areas back then. When the Cronulla riots happened in 2005 (a fortieth anniversary of the Wanda Beach murders if you will), I found myself at once wanting to condemn the macho culture and stick up for the white trash, and ended up writing an op-ed about it for the Sydney Morning Herald. (And have just discovered that said op-ed made it all the way to Yale University, which arguably contributed more to my modest fame, particularly at that time, than any of my academic publications.) Maybe those riots deserve an anniversary spot this year as well. We’ll see.

So, Wanda Beach. The murders. The first body was discovered on 12 January by a man out walking with his nephews. Thinking there was only one, he called the police and they discovered the second one. It is New South Wales’s oldest unsolved murder case, and one of Australia’s oldest and most horrific. Schmidt and Sharrock had been beaten, with Sharrock’s skull being fractured, and multiple deep knife slashes had been inflicted upon them, almost decapitating Schmidt. Attempts had been made to rape them. A long drag mark near their bodies led police to conclude that Sharrock had attempted to flee while Schmidt was dying, but was caught, incapicitated if not killed there and then, and dragged back by the murderer to the site where Schmidt lay.

They both surely screamed and fought, but the Wanda sandhills are a bit like outer space: no one could hear them. Except there was nothing Alien about the killer. He was a bloke. An Australian bloke, like so many others.

As Marianne’s younger brother Hans Schmidt put it in an interview with ABC News over the weekend: “[Recently] we were two dunes back from the beach, and it was absolutely dead silent. You couldn’t hear the water. You couldn’t see or hear anything.” Schmidt describes his rare visits back as an “eerie” experience: one the makers of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome capitalised on for filming. I wonder what it felt like for the siblings of Marianne who were taken by police to see the crime scene after the murders.

It was here. Archival photograph by Adrian Short published by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014.

Over the years a number of men were suspected and hypotheses were formulated concerning possible links with other beachside murders and (attempted) rapes. Over 7,000 people were interviewed during the investigation and a £10,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest (equivalent of some $320,000 today but the reward amount offered has not increased over those sixty years). None of this resulted in any arrests or convictions. The case remains cold, sixty years later. The girls’ parents are probably dead by now too, I don’t know. However, their lives as parents OF must have been terribly difficult in the years following the crime, and I wonder if Schmidt’s siblings bore a weight of guilt for leaving to return home without their older sister and her friend. (Brother Hans, cited above, had not been part of the outing that day; it was a large family.) But what else could they do? They had a train to catch, and where could they go if not home? I wonder how old they were, how worried or frightened they must have been at the older children supposed to be responsible for them suddenly vanishing.

The Wanda Beach murders haunted us local girls. For years. They were possibly my first vivid memory of male violence against women (for I had the great good fortune, unlike many women I know, to not experience it within my family). Our high school was right next door to the sandhills. My parents would take us tobogganing in them when we were kids: I still have photos somewhere. It was a special excursion because we lived in South Cronulla so the sandhills were A Very Long Way Away. But that was a few years before 1965, and never, ever, after it. I remember our high school sports mistress once made us run to the end of the oval, climb the fence and run through the sandhills that stretched away on the other side. That freaked me out. It was one of the many reasons I hated sport—and the sports mistress, who also hated my sister and myself practically before meeting us because we were Pinkos, my Da being a well-known trade union official.

The dunes behind Wanda Beach and stretching along the isthmus towards Kurnell have another sad story now: they have been encroached upon by erosion and multi-million dollar development, part of Cronulla reinventing itself as a more upmarket beachside suburb. I find myself missing the eerie silence now, and deploring what the place is becoming.

Fleeing the legend

The Wanda Beach murders are also emblazoned in my memory as the macho surf culture of Cronulla taken to its extreme. It was a culture that shaped our teenage lives: one learned to do the beachbabe walk at around age 11, leading with the hip and flicking one’s long and preferably blonde hair with a practised, self-conscious air of nonchalance. For years I still fell into that walk whenever I landed on a beach. It is a cultural practice inculcated into one from an early age. And not being a petite and pretty girl, I had to try extra hard. Because to be anyone in Cronulla when you were a 13–14 year old girl you had to have a Cool Boyfriend. Bonus points if he was a surfer. Yes, Puberty Blues was the story of my life—more or less. Except Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, growing up in…I believe it was Miranda…were almost-Westies. So not quite part of the tribe. But then, neither was I. I just lived there. And tried. Really hard. (A bit like Lette and Carey.) Until I gave up and moved away to other things. (Also like Lette and Carey.) Without ever having achieved the goal of obtaining Cool Surfie Boyfriend (for which I am now very grateful).

Story of my life. And yes, we rooly did talk like that and rooly did eat Chiko rolls. And girls definitely did not surf.

Another Puberty Blues reference comes in the form of Mr Whippy. When I was a wide-eyed and generally uncomfortable First Year, Mr Whippy would be at the high school gates every afternoon to sell us icecreams before we boarded our buses for the long ride home (up to a few miles—we still talked in miles back then—if you lived in South Cronulla or Kurnell or Woolooware). Then one day Mr Whippy suddenly disappeared and the rumour spread that he had been selling drugs to the high school students. I have no idea whether that was true but it was certainly likely.

Weirdly, Puberty Blues has become a cult classic, transforming Cronulla and Wanda Beach into a cultural legend. Something iconic, to be celebrated even as we wince at it. It has become a feature film and a TV series. It has been through I don’t know how many editions, becoming what we call an international bestseller. We still talk about it (you have the evidence in front of your eyes right here), and surviving co-author Kathy Lette was twixing about it just a couple of days ago. It transforms us all into white trash surfie chick wannabes even as we look down on the quaint sexist unculturedness of the time. Well, not quite all of us. Certainly not me. Been there, done that. So glad to have escaped. (Even if I lovelovelove swimming in the ocean and miss being able to do so on a daily basis. Never been a surfer though.)

The Wanda Beach murders do not have anything to do with me. But Wanda Beach, and Cronulla more generally, do. Hearing about them on the news last weekend brought it all skittering back awkwardly and unwelcomely. Upon which I realised, yet again, that both Wanda Beach and its murders (and Cronulla more generally) continue to haunt me. Even though I began my escape at the age of 14 and completed it at 16, it is far more difficult to escape the ghosts of a place than it is to flee the place itself. As anyone who has either chosen or been forced into exile (often it is both) well knows.

In memoriam: Christine Sharrock, Marianne Schmidt and the approximately 7,000–8,000 women and girls who have died at the hands of violent men in Australia in the sixty years since 11 January, 1965.

Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt. Photograph supplied to the media by Hans Schmidt.