The gigantic Cronulla sand dunes were a wilderness when the First Fleet arrived in the land that would be Australia. More than 200 years later, they are far smaller.
The dunes in Sydney’s Sutherland shire, once the set for films such as 40,000 Horseman (1940) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), have been slowly trimmed down by sandmining and are increasingly hemmed in by development. They remain, however, a strange window into Australia’s colonial history.
The early settlers
When James Cook first encountered the dunes, he almost missed them entirely, according to the NSW Heritage Office, as they were covered in vegetation. To the first European settlers, they were known as the Kurnell dune forest.
After passing through the hands of a number of settlers, in 1861 the land came into the possession of Thomas Holt.
In 1868, Holt began grazing sheep and cattle on the dunes and removed trees and shrubs, exposing the sand. Once the dunes were uncovered, they were revealed as enormous, covering the area from Wanda beach and up past Kurnell.
Oil and film: new uses for the dunes
Sydney was built on sand, as the old sandstone buildings still scattered around the city attest.
Cronulla’s dunes were one source of this sand for industry. From the 1930s they were mined by a range of companies that took tonnes of sand away to help build the growing city.
Then the oil came. The area became increasingly industrialised and in 1951 Caltex applied to the local council to construct an enormous oil refinery. Despite protests, it was eventually approved.
Sandmining continued to chip away at the dunes, and although industrial operations began to taper off in the 1970s and 80s, the damage had been done. The dunes were diminished and left vulnerable to the weather.
The mayor of Sutherland shire, Carmelo Pesce, says that when he was a boy, he could see the dunes from his childhood home, kilometres away in Miranda.
“I remember standing up as a child on our veranda and we could see them,” he says. “We would get a bit of cardboard and slide all the way down the dunes. You don’t see that any more. It’s a shame that things weren’t put in place to properly protect them.”
Others did find more creative uses for them. Perhaps most famously, the dunes provided the backdrop for scenes from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The apocalyptic film imagined a barren desert world ruled by warring tribal groups. The film set involved the recreation of a crashed 747 jet half-buried in the sand.
It was not the first film to be shot on the site. As early as 1938 the dunes were used in the shooting of 40,000 Horsemen, starring Chips Rafferty, about the Australian Light Horse cavalry campaign in Palestine during the first world war.
The next wave: developing near the dunes
In 2003 Australand announced plans for a housing development north of Wanda beach, including a village just south of the remaining dunes.
Sutherland shire council and residents fought the development amid environmental concerns, but Australand appealed to the land and environment court. In January 2004 the court approved the development, but with strict conditions.
The court found the proposal would have no adverse impact on nearby ponds and wetlands, but noted they were vulnerable to being swallowed up if the dunes were not revegetated.
The Australand development is now complete and two further significant applications have been made near the dunes. The first, by Breen Construction for a new village between Cronulla high school and Wanda beach, was approved in 2013 and is now under construction.
The second, by construction company Besmaw, has had difficulty gaining approval and sits further north off Captain Cook drive. It is currently before the NSW Department of Planning and Environment pending an application.
Pesce says none of these developments sit on the remaining dunes, but border them to the south and north. He says he would much rather see the area used for housing than industrial purposes.
“The two developers that are developing there have contributed back to the community and are contributing to the space,” he says. “The outcome is not bad considering where the dunes were left.
“I’m glad it didn’t become industrial. It’s housed some quite beautiful homes and it’s opened a sort of gated community.
“Factories I’m not a fan of. We’ve got some beautiful beaches here, why would you put factories here?
“If it was my personal opinion, I would’ve loved to have kept the dunes. They were amazing.”
