Deep Water: The Real Story  (16 Oct 2016)

Deep Water: The Real Story  is a stunning feature-length documentary in which individual stories are woven together by emotional first person interviews and detailed re-enactments, piecing together the facts of these unsolved cases, decades later.



PRODUCER: Darren Dale
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: John Godfrey
WRITER: Jacob Hickey
DIRECTOR: Amanda Blue
CAST: David McMahon, Dean Ingram, Sue Thompson, Les Skidmore, Peter Russell, Shane Brown, Ted Russell, Malcolm Smith, Susie Elelman, Paul Simes, Craig Ellis, Alan Rosendale, Duncan McNab, Steve Page, Jacqueline Milledge, Dr Allan Cala, Rick Feneley, Steve Johnson, Dan Glick
GENRE: Documentary

In the 1980s and 1990s a wave of murders bloodied the idyllic coastline of Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The victims: young homosexual men.  

Disturbing gang assaults were being carried out on coastal cliffs around Sydney, and mysterious deaths officially recorded as ‘suicide’, ‘disappearance’ and ‘misadventure’.

It was December 1989, and David McMahon was out for a night time jog around the cliffs in Bondi. David was attacked, dragged down three flights of stairs and managed to escape, but not before hearing one of the attackers say: ‘let’s take him up and throw him off where we threw the other dude’.

In November 1989, John Russell shared drinks with a friend before making his way towards Marks Park above Bondi Beach, a well-known gay ‘beat’. The following morning a local jogger discovered his body at the bottom of the cliffs covered in blood. The inquest into John’s death lasted seven minutes, with a conclusion of ‘death by misadventure’.

In July 1989, Wollongong newsreader Ross Warren was last seen driving along Oxford Street, Darlinghurst after a night out with friends. Two days later his car keys were found on the rocks beneath Marks Park at Tamarama. Police concluded Ross fell accidentally into the sea. His body was never recovered.

Survivors, witnesses, families of victims and many of those involved at the time including ex-police, investigative journalists, forensic pathologists and the ex-Deputy State Coroner are now candidly speaking out on the events of the past in the hope that new evidence might rise to the surface.

Deep Water: The Real Story  raises the complex question of where the responsibility lies for these crimes - the perpetrators, the police, or a wider society in the grips of homophobia, misinformation and fear?

Deep Water: The Real Story  is a Blackfella Films (First Contact, Redfern Now, First Australians) production, directed by Amanda Blue (Prescott: The Class System and Me, Young Black Farmers, After The Wave) for SBS, with major production investment from Screen Australia.

The file is a cropped and remastered PDTV rip from SBS Australia.  The watermark is not visible as it was on the black lines they used to bring it from the original 2.4:1 aspect ratio to 16:9 for broadcast. It runs for 86  minutes.

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