The 1976 Dickson Beach Surfing Tournament Incident

by Emma Darcy

 

What happened on that beach in 1976 was a warning to all future city councils on the importance of maintenance. What do they say, a stitch in time saves nine? It also saves lives.

-Carlyle Merriweather, Surf Pro Magazine 1992 vol.6

“The staircase down to Dickson Beach consisted of 300 hand-adzed cypress planks held together with an iron frame constructed in 1930. It had not been formally inspected since. 

There were no survivors of the Dickson Beach Incident. Rescue attempts were hindered by the instability of the site. Excuses, however, were plentiful. No one at City Council believed that the tournament would have pulled such a large crowd. No one had thought that so many people would use the stairs, and not access the beach via the lower ‘Cathedral Cave’ entrance- forgetting that the lower approach was restricted by the tides.

When the stairs began to collapse, according to the coroner’s report, there were approximately 95 people stuck between the top and bottom. The top half of the stairs detached from the lookout landing and swung down and out from the face of the cliff. The people who attempted to push their way down the stairs created the downward pressure necessary to collapse the second half of the staircase which was still attached to the cliff wall. It fell straight down, burying people in rubble. It has been proposed by disaster theorists that it was the attempts of rescuers to uncover survivors from this stage of the disaster which caused the rockfall which buried half of the beach and crushed over one hundred men, women and children.”

-Shona Grendell, Dickson Beach 20 Years Later

Millie Tucker was only maybe a third of the way up the stairs, there was some kind of traffic jam. She had her towel around her shoulders and cooler dangling from her fingers, when she heard the rending of metal and looked up to see the incredible sight of the stairs bending away from the cliff. She could hear the terrified screams of the people holding on as they swung out into the air. Every juddering, jolting pitch and yaw seemed to be travelling up her legs into her chest. In disbelief, she watched as the first desperate souls began to throw themselves from the railing to the beach below.

“Jesus, don’t watch that,” Her father pulled her face to his shoulder. “You don’t need to see that.”

“Don’t push!” Someone shrieked, but it didn’t help. 

“The whole thing’s coming down, move it!” Someone shoved her, hard, and Millie felt the air in her chest whomp out in one painful breath. She missed a step and went down, grabbed at the back of her father’s plaid shirt. Missed. Her knee cracked painfully down into the wooden riser. Fear rose up in her chest, no one was letting her get back up. They just kept pushing past her, pushing her back down. She could feel the stairs beneath her, groaning, giving out. She opened her mouth to scream, and then they were all falling.

Betty Ketterman couldn’t hear the sound of the rockfall over the confused shouting of the people around her. Trapped in the mid-beach crush, she was trying to keep her arms around her daughters as those around them surged forward, they tripped over bags and picnic baskets, legs tangled in beach towels. Closer and closer, eyes wide with panic, they were pushed towards the water. 

The first shock of cold water around their legs should have been pleasant on such a hot day but all Betty felt was the icy realisation that things had gotten out of control.

Betty was distracted in the end. An older woman, heavyset, went down on her knees with a pained groan and Betty tried to help her. The mindless press of frightened strangers around them was simply too much. The woman couldn’t get to her feet again, and when Betty next thought to look up her daughters were gone. Calling their names, terrified, she caught the full weight of the body behind her, and fell face first into the water.

 She struggled to push back, to get a breath of precious air, but the feet of uncounted strangers pushed her down again and again as her hands sank into the sand. She scrabbled for purchase as black spots swam in her stinging eyes. A savage kick snapped her head back, filled her nose with blood, and everything went dark.

Out in the surf helping people cling to his board, their arms and legs scratched bloody from clawing at each other in their panic, Harry Sacks watched in horror as others fled the rocks crashing onto the beach by throwing themselves into the hostile sea. 

“What the fuck are they doing?” Juggling too many desperate people on his own board, Jeremy Lipman had one hand in his tangled blonde hair, his usually dazed expression sobered into one of shock. “There’s nowhere to go man, where do they think they’re going?”

Harry shook his head, the first ones in the water were already getting dunked by the brutal swell. The ones that followed were injured, from the stampede or from the rockfall, but they had no hope of swimming.

 To think only a few hours earlier they had been cheering their good luck, good weather, good waves. How quickly the tide, God forgive him, had turned. 

His board, already overcrowded and dipping below the waterline, rocked dangerously as a man tried to pull a woman off by her hair to take her place. Without thinking, Harry hauled back and cracked the guy right between the eyes. As he sank beneath the waves the woman held Harry’s gaze but they said nothing. 

He pulled the board toward the shore. The water, which had been so clear that morning he could see the sandy bottom, was turning red.