Sharks and the unknown
In 2020, I witnessed something I thought you only read about in the papers. They say you have more chance of getting struck by lightning than being attacked by a shark. I wasn’t attacked, however, my husband and I were the first on the scene at a Northern NSW beach when another surfer was. A three-metre Great White took his life.
The experience was horrific yet humbling. It would have been more traumatic for the two men who paddled him into shore, one his friend and one a stranger. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the bravery of those men and my heart is still with them. Once the gravity of the situation sunk in, seeing the shock on their faces as we stood on the shore was probably the most harrowing part.
Even though I didn’t know the man who died, I felt a strange sense of connection to his life and then his subsequent death. Witnessing a soul leave their body and this physical earth is a surreal experience. Especially when you’re not expecting it. I don’t think it happens instantly, I believe it’s a slow fading of an intricate being that drifts away. All the years it took to make that person who they are can’t possibly just evaporate in a second. There was a profound sense of surrender that took over because in this circumstance we had to accept we couldn’t save him.
Acceptance for the things we can’t control is something I constantly struggle with in my life. I do know though, once we accept what we can’t control, there is peace. It just may take some time to get there.
The experience has made me realise how fragile our human bodies really are. When life comes down to a matter of millimetres depending on if an artery is torn or not, it’s the difference between injury or death. Our close friend Brett Connellan was also attacked by a shark four years ago in Kiama, NSW. However, Brett survived making a miraculous recovery. We weren’t with Brett when it happened, but we felt its impact more acutely as we supported his recovery, which took many months. This recent attack mirrored Brett’s – here we were again with another man going through a similar thing. Were we witnessing a second lightning strike? Why was it us who were there at that exact moment? It forced us into deep reflection as to what it all meant. Which was further compounded when three months later, my husband was surfing at Greenmount in QLD when another man died from a shark attack.
As gruesome as shark attacks are, and with all respect to the victim of these events, I couldn’t help but think what could be more natural than an apex predator hunting for its food. I was witnessing what would have been a normal event thousands of years of ago. A man dying in the wild. Curiously, I was also pregnant at the time, and having this life growing inside of me made it radically clear… you can’t have one without the other, life without death. Everything is full circle. For the first time in my life, I didn’t look at death as a negative thing but a natural thing, the only thing that gives way to new beginnings. It’s quite bittersweet.
In a paradoxical sense, I almost felt privileged going through this experience because I have gained a rare perspective now. The event instantly made the false illusions of life's securities, that have been built around us living in this shielded western society, fall away. Nothing was left but a stark knowing that death is inevitable and that could have been me who died. And if it was, that is ok. Death shouldn’t be feared, it should be accepted and acknowledged, even though it’s painful. I was forced to face my own mortality, a lesson we rarely get.
We hide death in this society and we dramatise it in the media, especially when the death is a result of an animal attack. When really we should turn towards it when it happens. Have open conversations about it. Respect it for the powerful force that it is and use it to make educated decisions about how to live, especially when it involves how to interact with predators.
I swim or surf every day in the ocean and I fully respect the risk I take when I enter the water, it’s always been something I’ve thought about. However, now I’m questioning our society's connection to our environment and its fellow inhabitants. Are we overfishing the oceans and taking the sharks food source, messing with the delicate balance of the ecosystem? If we protect the sharks, should we be protecting some of the fish species too? Are there more shark attacks in places where they weren’t historically common? Why did this Great White act so atypically for its species and keep circling the men, bumping them off their boards as they tried to paddle in? Why did the shark stay in the area for such a long time afterwards? Why was it spotted several times that morning when it is an ambush hunter? Should we be more careful in the water at certain times of the year when many sea animals embark on the great migration north to warmer waters and then back down south? The questions are endless. The answers, opaque.
We need a coming together of scientific research, policy, attention and funding to find solutions. We can’t fully eradicate the dangers and shouldn’t want to. Still, we can control how we interact with such an environment and make decisions accordingly. We need to replace the fear with education, then we can continue to enjoy one of nature’s most revered playgrounds.
Educate yourself on sharing the ocean with sharks by downloading
The Australian Guide to Surfing with Sharks
by environmentalist and filmmaker,
The Great White shark identified on that fateful day