Forty Thousand Horsemen

Forty Thousand Horsemen
Directed by	Charles Chauvel
Produced by	Charles Chauvel
Written by	Charles Chauvel Elsa Chauvel E. V. Timms
Starring	Pat Twohill Grant Taylor Chips Rafferty
Music by	Lindley Evans
Cinematography	George Heath Frank Hurley John Heyer
Editing by	William Shepherd
Release date(s)	26 December 1940 (Australia) 14 August 1941 (USA)
Running time	100 min.
Country	Australia
Language	English

Forty Thousand Horsemen (aka. 40,000 Horsemen) is a 1940 Australian war film directed by Charles Chauvel. The film tells the story of the Australian Light Horse cavalry which operated in the desert at the Sinai and Palestine Campaign during World War I. It follows the adventures of three rowdy heroes in fighting and romance. The film culminates at the Battle of Beersheba what is reputedly "the last successful cavalry charge in history". The film was clearly a propaganda weapon, to aid in recruitment and lift the pride of Australians at home during WWII.

Filming commenced in 1938 on the Cronulla sand dunes, south of Sydney, with interiors shot in the Cinesound studios at Bondi.

Cast

• Grant Taylor as Red Gallagher
• Pat Twohill as Larry
• Chips Rafferty as Jim
• Eric Reiman as Von Schiller
• Harvey Adams as Von Hausen
• Betty Bryant as Juliet Rouget
• Joe Valli as Scotty
• Albert C. Winn as Sheik Abu

References

• Murray, Scott; (ed.) (1994). Australian Cinema. St.Leonards, NSW.: Allen & Unwin/AFC. pp. 26–28. ISBN 1863733116.
• Forty Thousand Horsemen at the NFSA
• Forty Thousand Horsemen at the Australian screen

Wanda Beach Murders

The Wanda Beach Murders refers to the case of the unsolved murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Sydney's Wanda Beach on 11 January 1965. Their partially buried bodies were discovered the next day.

The victims, both aged 15, were best friends and neighbors. The brutal nature of the slayings and the fact that the twin killings occurred on a deserted, windswept beach brought publicity to the case. It remains one of the most infamous unsolved Australian murder cases of the 1960s, perhaps second in notoriety only to the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

Marianne Schmidt

Marianne Schmidt had arrived in Melbourne from West Germany with her family in September 1958. At the time, the Schmidt family consisted of parents Helmut and Elizabeth and Marianne's siblings, Helmut Jr., Hans, Peter, Trixie and Wolfgang. Another child, Norbert, was born in Australia the following year. After arriving in Australia, the Schmidts lived in a migrant hostel in Unanderra before settling in Temora. In 1963 Helmut Schmidt moved the family to Sydney after contracting Hodgkin's disease and they found a home in the suburb of Ryde. In June the next year, Helmut Schmidt died^[1].

Marianne's next-door neighbour was Christine Sharrock.

Christine Sharrock

Christine Sharrock lived with her grandparents Jim and Jeanette Taig. Her father had died in 1958 and her mother Beryl had remarried and was living in the north-western Sydney suburb of Seven Hills. Christine had moved in with her grandparents by choice and when the Schmidts arrived next-door she developed a strong friendship with Marianne, who was the same age^[2].

The disappearance

The Wanda sand hills

On 1 January 1965, Christine and Marianne visited the beach at Cronulla, which had been a popular picnic spot for the Schmidts. The following day the Schmidt children visited the beach there again without Christine. Elizabeth Schmidt had meanwhile been admitted to hospital for a major operation, leaving Helmut Jr and Marianne in charge of the household. On 9 January, Marianne and Christine asked Elizabeth if they could take the younger children to Cronulla the next day and were given permission; however, rain prevented the trip^[3].

On Monday 11 January, accompanied by Marianne’s youngest four siblings, the girls again set off for Cronulla. They arrived at about 11am, but it was very windy and the beach was closed. The group therefore walked down to the southern end of the beach and sheltered among the rocks. Eight-year old Wolfgang Schmidt still wanted to swim however, so Marianne went with him to a shallow part of the surf away from the rocks. After they returned to the group, they had a picnic. At some point during this time, Christine left the others and went off by herself. There is no evidence of her whereabouts during this period, but after her death it was discovered she had consumed alcohol and some food that was different from the rest of the party; it is suspected this occurred while she was alone^[4]. It was also during this time that Wolfgang noticed a boy hunting crabs. Later, he claimed to have seen the same boy twice more, once in the company of his sister and Christine and again sometime much later. There has been doubt about his description of this person, as Wolfgang variously suggested he had a homemade speargun, a knife, or both^[5][6].

When Christine returned to the group, it was decided to take a walk into the sandhills behind Wanda Beach. Around 1pm, the group had reached a point around 400 metres beyond the Wanda Surf Club, they stopped to shelter behind a sandhill as the younger children were complaining about the conditions. Marianne told her younger siblings that she and Christine would return to the rocky area at the south end of the beach where they had hidden their bags, then return to fetch the children and head home. Instead, however, the girls continued into the sandhills. When Peter Schmidt told them they were going the wrong way, they laughed at him and walked on^[5][7].

The Schmidt children remained waiting behind the sandhill until 5pm. They returned to collect their bags and then went home. The girls were reported missing at 8:30pm.

Last sighting

The last official sighting of Marianne and Christine was by local fireman Dennis Dostine, who was walking in the area with his son and saw the girls walking about 800 yards north of the surf club. He told police that they seemed to be hurrying, and one of the girls was looking behind her as if she was being followed. Dostine did not see anybody else.

Bodies discovered

On Tuesday, 12 January Peter Smith was taking his three young nephews for a walk through the Wanda Beach sandhills. Some distance north of the surf club, he discovered what appeared to be a department store mannequin buried in the sand. He brushed away sand from the hand and realised that it was a body. The police were called from the surf club, however at this point Smith believed he had found only one young woman.

When the bodies were uncovered, Marianne Schmidt was found lying on her right side with her left leg bent. Christine Sharrock was face down, her head against the sole of Schmidt's left foot. From a 34-metre long drag mark leading to the scene, police determined that Sharrock had fled, possibly while Schmidt was dying, only to have been caught, murdered and dragged back to the body of her friend. Attempts had been made to rape both girls. Sharrock's skull had been fractured by a blow to the back of the head and she had been stabbed multiple times. Schmidt's throat had been slashed and she too had been stabbed several times.

Unsolved

A large police investigation failed to identify the killer. There had been a number of people seen in the area who were never identified; Sydney in 1965 was a conservative place and the area around Wanda Beach attracted a range of people, who did not necessarily want to identify themselves to police. This frustrated the police investigation.

Linked cases

Two murders occurred during early 1966 which, police at the time speculated, might have been the work of the Wanda Beach killer.

1. On 29 January 1966, a cleaning lady named Wilhelmina Kruger was killed in the Piccadilly Arcade in Wollongong. Her body was discovered by a casual butcher when he arrived to work at the local butcher shop. She had been strangled & mutilated. Police believed that the murder might have been the work of the Wanda Beach killer, but would not say why.
2. On 17 February 1966, a prostitute named Anna Dowlingkoa went missing after leaving a nightclub in Kings Cross. Ten days later, her mutilated body was found by a truck driver at the side of a road in Menai. Police immediately linked her murder with that of Wilhelmina Kruger. Again, they believed that the murder might have been the work of the Wanda Beach killer, but once again, would not say what led them to believe this. The murders of Wilhelmina Kruger and Annya Dowlingkoa are far less well known now than the Wanda Beach murders.

Suspects

Cec Johnson, a former detective who had investigated the Wanda Beach murders, was given a painting in 1975 by Alan Bassett. Bassett had been jailed for murdering Carolyn Orphin, a 19 year old woman, in June 1966. Sent to prison for life, he served 29 years before being released in 1995.

The painting that Bassett gave Johnson showed an abstract landscape. Looking at the picture, however, Johnson became convinced that it showed a scene from the Wanda Beach murders that only the killer would know, as well as clues to the murders of Kruger and Dowlingkoa. He became convinced that Bassett was the Wanda Beach killer.

Other detectives were far less convinced, but Johnson wrote a book about the case. Before it could be published, however, he was knocked down and killed in an accident. The book was never published. Other detectives, while retaining professional respect for Johnson, concluded that he was wrong in his belief that Bassett was the killer.

One person he convinced, however, was crime reporter Bill Jenkings. Jenkings repeated Johnson’s claims in his ghostwritten memoirs, As Crime Goes By, devoting a whole chapter to the Wanda Beach murders. Most of the chapter was essentially a repeat of what he’d written in his earlier book Crime Reporter, but he mentioned Johnson, Bassett and the painting as well.

Bassett threatened legal action, but Jenkings died shortly afterwards, and Bassett did not go through with his threat. Since his release, Bassett has offered to give DNA to clear his name, but whether or not he has been eliminated as a suspect by DNA has yet to be publicised.

Another suspect, not well publicised until 1998, is Derek Percy. Percy has been imprisoned since 1969 for the murder of a child on a beach in Victoria. He is considered too dangerous to be released and is the prime suspect for a number of other murders of children in Melbourne and Sydney.

A third suspect is Christopher Wilder. Wilder was known to police in Sydney but did not become infamous until he became a serial killer in America in the early 1980s. In the first half of 1984, he committed eight murders and attempted several more. He accidentally killed himself during a struggle with police in New Hampshire on April 13, 1984.

Cronulla sand dunes, Kurnell Peninsula

The Cronulla sand dunes are located on the Kurnell Peninsula in the local government area of Sutherland Shire, Sydney Australia. The Cronulla sand dunes are a protected area that became listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on the 26th of September 2003.

Looking over the dunes, south towards Cronulla.

History

The sand dune system which is also referred to as the Kurnell sand dune is estimated to be about 15,000 years old. It was formed when the sea reached its present level and began to stabilise, between 9,000 and 6,000 BC. The Georges, Cooks and Towra Rivers flowed to the south-east beneath the present sand dune system near Wanda and joined the ocean at Bate Bay. This resulted in the isolation of Kurnell, (which was an island) from the mainland. The rivers eventually became blocked with accumulating sand and sediment as the sea level rose. As the rivers gradually silted up they were forced into changing their course and were led out to sea via La Perouse rather than continue to maintain an opening in an ever-growing sand barrier near Wanda. This resulted in a tombolo being formed and joined Kurnell with the Cronulla mainland. The deepest part of the ancient river channel now lies 100 meters below the surface at the southern end of the peninsula, near Wanda Beach.

Aboriginal Culture

The sand hills of Kurnell possess historical, cultural, scientific and natural significance as a place of early European contact with the Gweagal Aborigines. The site has significant Aboriginal signs of habitation, from carvings, ceremonial sites, middens and sites of flaked sharpening stones. The site is of significant interest to the Aboriginal community as many of the other hills and dunes that were inhabited by their ancestors have now disappeared. As the dunes move or drift, most of the sites once occupied by the Aboriginal people have been covered and preserved.

The original inhabitants on the Kurnell Peninsula were the Gweagal people, a clan of the Tharawal (or Dharawal) tribe who occupied the region for thousands of years. Their tribe spanned the area’s between the Cook's and George's Rivers from the shores of Botany Bay and westwards towards Liverpool. According to a Gweagal elder, Dharawal is similar to a state and Gweagal is similar to a shire within the state, Cunnel (Kurnell) is a family village within the shire. A tribe consisted of approximately 20 to 50 people who lived in their own territory. They had no written language and each tribe had its own dialect. They knew how to light fires long before the arrival of white man. Their clothing consisted of a woven hair sash in which they used to carry tools and weapons and sometimes the optional possum-skin coat for the winter season. The Gweagal Aborigines were the northernmost tribe of the Dharawal nation. They fished from canoes or from the shore using barbed spears and fishing lines with hooks in and around Botany Bay and the Georges River. Waterfowl could be caught in the swamplands (Towra Point), and the variety of soils would have supported a variety of edible and medicinal plants. Birds and their eggs, possums, wallabies and goannas were also a part of their staple diet, in which they made fur coats and ceremonial attire. The abundance of fish and other foodstuffs in these heavily timbered waterways meant that these natives were less nomadic than those of Outback Australia. The various middens, rock carvings and paintings in the area confirm this.

The Gweagal Aborigines were the guardians of the sacred white clay pits in their territory. Members of the tribe walked hundreds of miles to collect the clay, it was considered sacred amongst the indigenous locals and had many uses. They used it to line the base of their canoes so they could light fires, and also as a white body paint, (as witnessed by Captain James Cook). Colour was added to the clay using berries, which produced a brightly coloured paint that was used in ceremonies. It was also eaten as a medicine, an antacid. Geebungs and other local berries were mixed in the clay and it was eaten as a dietary supplement with zinc. The Gweagal Aborigines made first contact (of a hostile nature) with James Cook and his crew, occupying the area which is now 'Captain Cooks Landing Place Reserve'. Today members of the Tharawal people still live near the Cronulla sand dunes and participate in their traditional Aboriginal art and culture.

European Settlement

The Kurnell Peninsula, also the site of the Cronulla Sand Dune System was the first landing place for Captain James Cook in Australia. On 29 April 1770, HM Bark Endeavour landed in Botany Bay and Cook stepped ashore. Shortly after, James Cook looked down from the sand hills at what is now known as Cronulla Beach. The sand dunes were completely covered in vegetation, so Cook made no mention of any sand dunes during his visit to the Kurnell peninsula. Captain Cook along with his crew stayed in Botany Bay for eight days. During his visit he collected botanical specimens, mapped the area and tried to make contact (unsuccessfully) with the indigenous population. When Cook reported back to England he said that the land was suitable for agriculture, it had sandy soil and the area was lightly wooded.

Less than 100 years after Captain Cook's landing, most of the original vegetation had been cleared and burnt, larger trees had been ring barked or simply cut down. By 1868 the forests of blackbutt and ironbark were cut down for houses and bridge construction whilst the remaining vegetation was cleared for grazing.

Captain Arthur Phillip, arriving with the First Fleet, stepped ashore on 18 January 1788, after following Cook’s advice. They began to clear land and dig wells, but a week later decided to abandon the site and sail north to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour).

Cronulla dunes with the city of Sydney and a rubbish dump in View

The first land grant was issued in 1815 when a whaler and merchant by the name of James Birnie, was given 700 acres (2.8 km²) of land and 160 acres (0.6 km²) of saltwater marshes on the Kurnell Peninsula. The grant included Captain Cook’s landing place. He called it ‘Alpha Farm’, and built himself a cottage there. In 1801 John Connell, an ironmonger, arrived in Sydney as a free settler. In 1821 Connell was granted 1,000 acres (4.0 km²) at Quibray Bay next to Birnie’s grant.

When James Birnie was declared insane in 1828 John Connell gained possession of his property. John Connell now had full ownership of the Kurnell Peninsular. Connell erected a new house, which he named ‘Alpha House,’ built on the foundations of Birnie’s original cottage.

James Connell and his two grandsons, Elias and John Laycock, were the first land owners to log the peninsula. They began to harvest timber from the estate in 1835. In the 1840s a canal from Woolooware Bay was built so that logs could be floated into Botany Bay, loaded onto ships and sailed up to Sydney. When John Connell passed away in 1848, he left his estate to his two grandsons. The first Crown land auctions in the area took place in 1856. It was here that John Connell Laycock bought another 700 acres (2.8 km²). This increased the size of the estate to 4,500 acres (18 km²).

Looking south at Cronulla from the dunes

Thomas Holt purchased Laycock’s entire estate on the peninsula in 1861 for £3275. Holt, originally from Yorkshire, sailed into Sydney sometime in 1842. He made his fortune during the gold rushes of the early 1850s. Holt moved to Sutherland and further increased the size of his property to approximately 13,000 acres (53 km²). He erected several mansions, ran his ‘Sutherland Estate’ in the English manner, and travelled into Sydney to manage his business affairs.

In 1868, Holt’s land was still mostly uncleared virgin bushland. After Holt had cleared most of the timber, he began to plant grass seeds imported from Germany. The Sutherland Estate was divided into eleven portions. It was then divided into 60 smaller paddocks using Brushwood fencing. The fence posts used to divide these lots can still be found in Towra Point, which is also part of the Kurnell Peninsula.

Holt attempted grazing, first with sheep which had to be destroyed when they became infected with footrot, and then with cattle. The land on his estate was not suited for intensive grazing, so after most of the trees were felled, herds of cattle then removed the stabilizing grass cover and exposed the sand dunes underneath. Large expanses of sand had been exposed along the coastline. The dune system that covers an area of 1,000 acres (4.0 km²), measuring 40 meters above and 90 meters below sea level, became unstable and began to move north at a rate of 8 meters a year. Land clearing and cattle grazing resulted in a degraded landscape, but created the distinctive Cronulla sand dunes of today.

Between 1920 and 1930 the sand hills were acknowledged to be a deserted and desecrated landscape, and their economic value was minimal. However, by the 1920s Cronulla had become notable for its beaches with over five kilometres of sand stretched along the coastline. The bare sand dunes became synonymous with Cronulla. Between the 1920s and the 1950s the large expanses of sand became a popular playground for generations of children for activities such as sandboarding.

In more recent times, the site has been used as a backdrop for several Australian movies, such as the epic 40,000 Horsemen (1941), The Rats of Tobruk and more recently Mad Max 3.

In January 1965 the bodies of two 15-year-old girls were found in the sand hills just off Wanda Beach. They had been bashed, stabbed and sexually assaulted. The murderer has not yet been identified and the case remains one of Australia’s most notorious, unsolved crimes, known as the 'Wanda Beach Murders'.

Sand mining

In 1933 the Sutherland Shire Council asked the Government to set aside the 2,000 acres (8.1 km²) between Cronulla Golf Club and Kurnell as a reserve. In April 1937, Haymarket Land and Building Co. offered Sutherland Shire Council 720 acres (2.9 km²) of land near the entrance to Kurnell for 8 pounds per acre. Most of the councillors wanted to declare the site a National Park. They wanted it to be titled "the Birthplace of Australian History and Gateway to Captain Cook's Landing Place." The dunes at Towra Point were to be included in this park. The Council was evenly split, but Joe Monro, the Council's President [now referred to as the Mayor], argued that because the site "was nothing but sand it was completely useless". He decided to vote against the purchase. The sandhills were doomed from that point. The Government couldn't see any reason to establish another National Reserve so near to Captain Cook's Landing Place Reserve.

In the 1930s the Holt family began its sand mining operations to supply the expanding Sydney building market and continued until 1990 with an estimate of over 70 million tonnes of sand being removed. The sand has been valued for many decades by the Sydney building industry, mainly because of its high crushed shell content and lack of organic matter. The site has now been reduced to a few remnant dunes and deep water-filled pits which are now being filled with demolition waste from Sydney's building sites. Removal of the sand has significantly weakened the peninsula's capacity to resist storms. Ocean waves pounding against the reduced Kurnell dune system have threatened to break through into Botany Bay, especially during the storms of May and June 1974 and August, 1998.

Looking north over the Kurnell Peninsula.

Caltex oil refinery

In 1951 Caltex Oil Company approached Sutherland Shire Council for the first time with a proposal to build an oil refinery at Kurnell. It required a large block of land of approximately 400 acres (1.6 km²) in size. At first the Council rejected this proposal. The matter sparked a number of protests from environmental groups and those concerned that the refinery would mar Captain Cook's Landing Place Reserve. Not long after the proposal, Sutherland Shire Council withdrew its objection, and what became known as the Australian Oil Refinery Company, a subsidiary of Caltex, began operating in 1954. Whilst the refinery was being built, the Council also built Captain Cook Drive to allow access to the refinery.

Further development

Looking south with the Australand construction zone in view

Industrialisation of the Kurnell Peninsula continues to be an ongoing problem amongst community groups and environmentalists. Plans for further development at the site has been cause for continual public protest between developers, locals and environmental groups. A proposal to build a chemical plant by the German pharmaceutical company, Bayer in 1986 resulted in public protests, environmental objections and a Commission of Inquiry. The plan never went ahead on the grounds of both environmental and economic issues.

On top of the Cronulla Dune looking towards Wanda Beach.

In 2004 a major industrial development at the Kurnell site just north of Wanda Beach has been given the go-ahead by the Land and Environment Court. This has prompted fears that the State Government will now approve the construction of hundreds of homes on the site. The court upheld an appeal by Australand, allowing it to build on one-third of the 62-hectare site, "subject to conditions such as safeguarding the environment."

Sutherland Shire Council had objected to the proposal, citing issues such as the impact on the threatened green and golden bell frog. The Council also put forth their concerns about the ecosystem, the two key areas in question were the sandhills and the freshwater wetland area. The court's commissioners rejected Sutherland Shire's case, ruling in favour of the Austaland development. The court also accepted that the Wanda sand hills had to be revegetated to stop the sand from filling up ponds and swallowing up the vegetation in the area. The council has spent $650,000 on the case and wants the area set aside for tourism, environmental conservation and heritage.

Sandminers, aware that their resources are dwindling, are looking to further profit from the stripped land by building residential housing or recreational resorts or industrial complexes. In 2000 a proposal by Australand for 250 houses on the same site was called in by the then Minister for Planning, Andrew Refshauge. The Opposition said the Land Court's decision could encourage the Government to allow for the construction of a large housing development on the site.

Geology and Geomorphology

The geology and geomorphology of the area is characterised by an island of outcropping bedrock on the eastern headland and joined to other bedrock outcrops on its western end by a sand spit which forms the main part of the headland. The Peninsula still has quite a view overlapping transgressive barrier dunes and it is believed that they have shifted north from Bate Bay. Older stable parabolic dunes occur on a series of north to south oriented ridges and while most of the vegetation has been cleared, some dry sclerophyll woodland remains.

Fitness training

Amateur and professional athletes on a daily basis push themselves to exhaustion in unforgiving soft-sand conditioning sessions at the Cronulla sandhills.

Amateur and professional athletes on a daily basis push themselves to exhaustion in unforgiving soft-sand conditioning sessions at the Cronulla sandhills. This is to either keep fit, stay in shape or prepare for amateur and, or professional sporting events, events like Rugby league, Rugby union, Cricket, Soccer and boxing.

At one stage professional cricketers Glenn McGrath, Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting, Brett Lee and Brad Haddin trained at the sand dunes on daily basis in preparation for international test cricket.^[14] Anthony Mundine held a one-hour workout in the sandhills to prepare for his bout with WBA super-middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler.

Amateur and professional Rugby league teams, especially those of the NRL also use the sandhills.

At inclines of 45 degrees or more, these sandhills rise upwards and all but collapse downwards in hour-long sprint sessions. According to the conditioning coach of the Australian Cricket team Jock Campbell, these sandhills, along with gym programs is the best way to train athletes for endurance work. "Working in the sandhills is hard aerobic interval training, and good specific leg training without the shock on knees and ankles.