Sharks have always stoked panic in Australia. While scientific understanding grows, conservation efforts can be unseated by fear, as Anna Clark, a professor of history at the University of Technology Sydney, explores in her writing on the history of the beach in Australia.
Fear Outweighs Risk
Although many more Australians drown each year at the beach than are killed by sharks, it is sharks that inhabit the jagged edges of the collective consciousness. After a spate of bites earlier this year, calls for shark culls resurfaced, and ocean swimming and surfing no longer seemed quite the same healthy pursuits they had just months earlier.
The Australian Shark Incident Database registers growing numbers of dangerous shark interactions in recent years, and anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in unreported encounters, but no one knows exactly why.
Historical Fascination
Archives reveal sharks have been a figure of fear and fascination throughout the human history of this continent. Western Australia's Murujuga rock art site, dating back tens of thousands of years, includes depictions of hammerhead and tiger sharks. On the other side of the continent, engravings at a First Nations fishing spot known as Murriverie, near Sydney's Bondi beach, also depict shark motifs, including one stretching 8 metres across a sandstone outcrop that angles towards an ancestral figure and is thought to depict a shark attack.
Early Europeans also noted the dangerous presence of sharks. William Dampier gave the name Sharks Bay to that part of the west coast in 1699 after being struck by their abundance. When the First Fleet arrived in 1788, officer Watkin Tench noted sharks of a monstrous size in Sydney Harbour.
Early Incidents and Public Panic
Early news reports catalogued the terror colonists felt. An article in the Sydney Gazette in 1807 reported an attack by a voracious shark on a swimmer in Cockle Bay, which grabbed him by the arm before letting go. An article from 1812 described an enormous shark that was dissected to reveal an entire pelican inside. More famous was the tiger shark caught alive off Coogee beach in 1935, which regurgitated a tattooed human arm after a few days of captivity, later revealed to belong to a murder victim.
At the turn of the 20th century, the growing popularity of surf-bathing increased the risk of shark encounters, and swimmers were essentially responsible for managing their own safety. A spate of shark incidents in the 1920s changed that: in Sydney in 1922, there were two fatal shark attacks in one month, and then another 13 at beaches in Sydney and Newcastle from 1924-34. This amounted to an average of just one shark attack a year, as the NSW Shark Menace Advisory Committee pointed out, but the public was panicking nonetheless.
Mitigation and Its Consequences
The state government initially resisted large-scale shark mitigation, offering rewards for shark captures and advising beach-goers to avoid bathing at dangerous hours, in isolated places, and going too far out. Some local councils adopted their own measures, such as steel cables and nets in Coogee, and swimming nets at other protected beaches in Sydney, Port Phillip Bay and Perth. Other proposals, including shark baiting and bombing, giant curtains of bubbles, concrete barriers, or electric fences, were rejected as impractical or untested.
By the mid-1930s, after further attacks in Sydney, the principal recommendation was for the systematic meshing of the city's beaches, with nets set parallel to the shore to catch and kill sharks. With no attacks in the following decades, meshing was extended to other beaches, and in the 1960s, Queensland adopted a strategy of beach nets and baited drum lines. Public sentiment largely held that a good shark was a dead shark, and big game fishers took up the challenge of catching monster sharks.
Over time, the consequences of these strategies became clearer: shark mitigation and fishing were affecting entire ecosystems. Scientists pointed out the importance of apex predators like sharks as keystone species, critical to the health of marine ecosystems, yet several are critically endangered. As more research was conducted, the language around interactions changed from shark attacks to incidents.
Public responses to recent shark encounters show how that shift towards conservation can be unsettled by fear. Politicians find themselves weighing up scientific evidence and public safety, but in the absence of robust data, that tension will only continue.
