For the Wrights, who
moved here from Adelaide with their two young sons in 1985, that
constant presence has become more than a figure of speech. Since
September 25 last year, when their son Jevan was killed by a
massive white pointer while surfing, the couple's thoughts are
rarely free of what Jeff calls the "vivid picture" of
the 17-year-old's last moments. They weren't with him when the
attack occurred at Elliston, 170 kilometres north-west of Port
Lincoln, but eyewitness accounts of what happened on that
overcast Monday afternoon suggest their son probably died not
knowing what had hit him.
The shark struck as
Jevan paddled ashore from a popular reef break at Blacks Point,
where he'd been surfing with his girlfriend's father, Graham
Chapman, and a couple of local boardriders.
"He was almost
to the cliff face [where surfers enter and leave the water] when
the shark came up from behind and took him," says Jeff.
"Chappy [Chapman] and another bloke were paddling in behind
him. They saw the shark's tail thrashing, and the shark..."
He hesitates, adjusts his glasses, starts again.
"It was quite
shallow there, perhaps three metres. We believe the shark ... had
Jevan and the board in its mouth, and they were forced against
the rocky bottom with such pressure the board snapped in two at
the bite mark." Jeff says Chapman and the other surfer got
off their boards and stood on a partly submerged reef, about 10
metres to seaward. "They couldn't [accept] what they'd seen.
One of them yelled, to people up on the cliff, 'Where's
Jevan?'... then they saw part of his board pop up and start
floating back out on the rip. Chappy jumped in, grabbed the
board, and paddled to shore across the same area where Jevan was
taken."
As boats searched in
vain for some trace of the victim, Chapman and the other surfer,
Craig Pringle, gave statements to police. Jeff: "They said
they could smell death, and smell Jevan, but there was no visible
blood in the water. It was a very big shark, and there was no
struggle. Jevan was just gone." The Wrights learned of the
attack in a phone call from their younger son, Reece, who'd been
travelling with Jevan and others. Incredibly, the call came as
they sat in their kitchen reading a newspaper report about the
previous day's fatal shark attack at Cactus Beach, 300 kilometres
north-west of Elliston, where New Zealander Cameron Bayes, 25,
was torn from his surfboard and devoured within seconds by
another large white pointer.
Jevan (Welsh for
"warrior") was farewelled by 400 friends at a memorial
service on what would have been his 18th birthday, October 7. A
month later, on November 6, businessman Ken Crew died when his
leg was ripped off by a four- to five-metre white pointer during
an early morning swim at Perth's popular Cottesloe Beach. Jeff
Wright, himself a longtime surfer and sailor, wept as he read of
Crew's fate while crossing the park with the morning newspaper.
The next victim, on
November 20, was Port Lincoln abalone shucker Danny Thorpe, 47,
who - because of his terror of sharks - had opted to cling to an
upturned boat while his friend Howard Rodd survived a marathon
swim to shore near Ceduna. (The discovery of Thorpe's
tooth-shredded life jacket and lunch box left little doubt as to
his fate.) Including Michael Peter Edwards, 39, who was taken by
sharks after falling from a fishing boat off Townsville on August
27, that brought the toll in the spate of attacks to five dead in
three months.
In Port Lincoln,
those who had seen attacks, or lost a friend or loved one, began
meeting at one another's homes to, as one puts it,
"rationalise" their feelings of grief and horror. And
still the menace persisted: in late November, police chased
hundreds of bathers from the waters of Boston Bay when several
big whites were seen in the shallows. The Port Lincoln Yacht Club
abandoned a weekend's sailboat races for juniors, and a local
State school cancelled its summer camp at a beach where sharks
had been sighted. Even in December, when white pointers
patrolling the Great Australian Bight normally move to deeper
water beyond the continental shelf, fishermen and divers
continued to report "freakish" numbers close inshore
from Adelaide to Ceduna.
Like others touched
by the grim season, Jeff and Katrina Wright believe depleted fish
stocks, environmental changes, and the ban on killing great white
sharks - protected by Federal law since 1997 - all have a role in
what's been happening. They've called for changes to the
protection laws so that a shark which has attacked a person can
be killed immediately after the attack. (As things stand, anyone
killing a white pointer - even during an attack - faces a fine of
$50,000 or two years' jail.) "Governments have a duty of
care to do this," says Katrina, "because there's strong
evidence that [some] killer sharks keep on killing." The
Wrights also want warning signs placed at known danger spots,
government funding for the development of an effective shark
protection device, and an end to what they see as a deliberate
campaign to downplay the risk of shark attacks in Australian
waters.
"Every time
there's a death," says Jeff, "the media go straight to
a handful of so-called experts who say things like, 'It's sad,
but he or she knew the risks of entering the magnificent
endangered sharks' domain.' But people don't know the risks,
because the same bunch who got white pointers protected have told
us for decades we have more chance of dying from bee stings or
falling coconuts ... It's absolute bullshit! These things are the
ultimate stealth killing machines, and there are a lot more of
them around our beaches than the 'experts' would have us
believe..."
In the beginning,
when life was simple, we killed them all. Sharks were the enemy,
and no one quibbled over the difference between small, relatively
harmless species and large scary ones such as tiger sharks and
great whites. Our shark authority figures were Sydney film-makers
Ron and Valerie Taylor, Queensland shark-hunter Vic Hislop, and
Rodney Fox, an Adelaide spear fisherman who survived a white
pointer attack in 1963 and went on to become the world's first
successful pro-shark entrepreneur.
For a while, all of
them slaughtered sharks. Collectively, they killed hundreds -
probably thousands - using set lines, spears, powerheads and
guns. The Taylors and Fox made documentaries of their sporty
hunts, with hyperbolic scripts and spooky music. Hislop, who
still operates a couple of savagely realistic shark shows, used
to turn up at the scene of every shark attack with his boat and
set lines, and crowds cheered when he dragged ashore the huge
whites or tigers deemed responsible.
Later, when
conservation and environmental themes swept the world, Fox and
the Taylors adjusted their output accordingly. Hislop, a driven
man who genuinely believes he's providing a much-needed service,
continued killing large sharks at every opportunity. For years,
the divided experts slugged it out in the media, each camp
accusing the other of being motivated by financial gain in
adopting its position on sharks. "If it wasn't for me,"
cried Hislop in 1993, "people would be ready to have white
pointers as pets!" By then, he'd already lost the image war,
while Fox had become world-renowned as the Man Who Always Finds
Pointers.
It was Fox, now 60
and reputedly a millionaire, who, in the '70s, introduced
cage-diving with white pointers as the ultimate eco-thrill. He
became the darling of international film-makers and marine
researchers, leading more than
200 expeditions and
establishing the waters off Port Lincoln as the world
headquarters of Carcharodon carcharias ("ragged tooth")
- the ever mysterious and increasingly revered great white shark.
(Much earlier, in the same waters, Fox and his dive cages were
involved in the filming of underwater scenes for the original
Jaws movie, in which a midget stunt diver was used to make the
sharks look bigger.)
By the mid-1980s, the
theme of that horror story had been all but reversed by the green
lobby. Men like Hislop were the new "mindless
predators", while great whites became "magnificent
survivors" which attacked humans only through mistaking them
for seals, or because they were "curious" or
"playful".
This clashed with
reality, but it suited the cage-diving industry, which at its
peak had seven companies competing for international eco-tourists
in South Australian waters.
But the continued
success of the industry was linked to the area's reputation for
unfailingly producing lots of large, impressive white pointers.
And by the mid-1980s, according to Fox and the Taylors, the
larger sharks had stopped showing up. There could have been many
reasons for this: whites are migratory, following whales in their
annual trek up and down the Australian coastline, and researchers
say environmental changes affect their movements in ways that are
yet to be understood.
Fox called in
acquaintances at the Cousteau Society, and after a couple of
expeditions with Fox and the Taylors off Port Lincoln, the
researchers aboard Alcyone declared that white pointers were
close to extinction in South Australian waters - "with just
45 to 50 left here..." How they established this knowledge
of a transient creature in the vastness of the Southern Ocean
wasn't revealed, but the figures were often quoted in the
campaign to have whites protected. (Over the same period, 200
white pointers were tagged in a small area off Port Lincoln in an
ongoing project to learn more about their movements. Fox says now
that the decision to protect whites was based mainly on reduced
numbers caught in beach protection nets along Australia's east
coast.)
Fox and Valerie
Taylor have never concealed the commercial aspect of their
interest in the ocean's largest predator. "A dead white
pointer is a useless piece of meat; a live one is a valuable
asset which brings tourists, film-makers and researchers to the
area," wrote Taylor in 1988.
Oddly enough, in the
years between the bombshell that whites were all but extinct off
South Australia, and their protection under federal law in 1997,
cage-diving continued to flourish. According to its own
promotional material, Fox's Adelaide-based company enjoyed
"good exciting cage diving action" on 102 of its 117
expeditions, with only seven trips in 33 years failing to see
sharks. A rival company says its cage diving charters have
averaged an almost 100 per cent success rate, with up to 14 white
pointers encountered during the four-day trips.
Over decades, tour
operators have dumped countless tonnes of offal and fish oil into
the sea off Port Lincoln to attract whites to their cages.
Fishermen and abalone divers say the berley trails extend up to
30 kilometres and attract dangerous sharks inshore. Some also
believe that finding caged humans at the end of the enticing
trails is teaching far-ranging sharks to associate people with
their feeding patterns. ("Sharks are good learners. Some
have been trained to swim through mazes and seem to learn as well
as rats, pigeons and rabbits." - The Cousteau Society
magazine, Dolphin Log, July, 1990.)
Vic Hislop says Fox
used to stuff wetsuits and attach them to surfboards, or lower
them to the seabed, then film white pointers attacking them.
"He stuffs wetsuits with fish," says Hislop. "If
that's not training sharks to eat people, I'm f...ed if I know
what is."
Asked about this at
his shark museum in Adelaide, Fox says he did it only once, and
that the wetsuits were stuffed with foam, not fish:
"It happened two
or three other times, but that involved film companies..."
Fox in turn accuses Hislop of using "scare tactics to
promote his own business interests".
South Australia's
wild west coast is so empty a landscape that motorists wave to
one another as if to confirm their existence. During stops, I
mark a map of my 500-kilometre trip from Port Lincoln to Cactus
Beach with the locations of seven shark attack fatalities since
the 1970s. (Details of many other attacks in these parts have
been lost to time.) Newspaper files show that - like the attacks
on Jevan Wright, Cameron Bayes and Ken Crew - each fatality was
marked by the swift and deadly intent of big white pointers.
Port Lincoln student
counsellor Jeff Hunter, who saw Bayes taken during an early
morning surf at Cactus Beach, says there was no hint of the
predator having confused him with another type of prey. It
circled in behind the surfer, who was looking out to sea, then
charged him with "...unhesitating ferocity". Himself a
surfer for 30 years, Hunter was holidaying at the remote beach,
near Penong, with his two children. He says the four- to
five-metre white raced in circles around Bayes with such speed
that it looked like several sharks, then took him down.
"From [atop a
sandhill] I saw him come to the surface, get his board and start
paddling towards the shore. I saw his face ... he looked quite
calm. But he only made about three metres before it attacked
again ... then, suddenly, he was gone. There were a few bits of
board floating, and a pool of blood." Bayes and his wife,
Tina, had been on their honeymoon. "Tina was woken in their
tent to this news," Hunter told me. "I went to her, and
of course she was absolutely distraught ... I held her hand, she
said, 'I don't want to be a widow: I've only just found the man
who loves me.'"
The Hunters cut short
their holiday and headed for home. Next day, when they were at
Elliston, Jevan Wright was taken. The horrible coincidence was
compounded by the fact that Hunter knew Jevan: they'd worked
together in a group trying to get a skate park established in
Port Lincoln. "When they told me Jevan was gone," he
sighs, "I believed it instantly. It was the same scenario;
I'd seen it the day before..." Hunter says he hasn't surfed
since, but hopes to get back to it soon. "It won't ever be
quite the same ... because we know now that as soon as you enter
the water - anywhere - you can be taken."
It's like Jaws all
over again. But with a novelist twist: in this real-life version,
Peter Benchley - reportedly appalled by the mindless slaughter of
sharks unleashed by his blockbuster - has joined the pro-shark
backlash. His reaction to the recent Australian attacks appeared
in newspapers around the world. "Though I did not witness
the hideous moment [of Ken Crew's death]," he wrote, "I
can say absolutely that the shark was not acting with malice
towards the man; not with intent to do bodily harm..."
In Benchley's
seemingly omniscient view, the spate of attacks were innocent
mistakes, and humans were still more likely to die of - yes - bee
stings. The soothing bee comparison is repeated endlessly by
local shark authorities in a bulging clippings file on the car
seat beside me. (On examination, it turns out to be meaningless:
on average, bee and wasp stings kill two Australians a year, but
only 2.7 per cent of the population is affected by the
generalised allergic reaction to stings that can cause death.)
And in quoting the "official" toll of humans killed by
sharks - an average of one a year according to a file kept by
John West of Sydney's Taronga Zoo - no-one mentions that only
witnessed attacks are recorded. Given our vast coastline, logic
suggests at least some of the many people who vanish from the sea
without a convenient witness (like Harold Holt did) are shark
victims.
At Elliston, local
surfers Dane Grocke and John Newton show me the spot where Jevan
Wright died. "Blackfellas", as they call Blacks Point,
is a lonely expanse of kelp-studded sea at the entrance to
Anxious Bay. Swells roll in from the icy south, hit a rock shelf
and rear into one of the most admired left-hand breaks in
Australia. Atop the crumbling sandstone cliff, a rock pile
commemorates the lost surfer, Elliston's first shark fatality.
"It sorta buggered up the innocence of the place," says
Newton. "Now, when you're out there, it's always on your
mind."
Like many other
west-coasters, Newton, an abalone diver, believes large whites
are being drawn inshore by warmer than average currents. In the
past, he says, considerable numbers of coast-cruising whites were
killed accidentally in the four kilometre-long set nets of
fishermen catching gummy and school sharks for seafood markets:
"One of my mates got 12 whites in one spot over a year ...
Another bloke got six tangled in his nets in one night." But
as catches of table shark fell off over recent years, the
fishermen hung up their nets and turned to other pursuits, ending
the accidental control of coast-cruising white pointers.
Dane's father, Geoff
Grocke, 43, says he and scores of other abalone divers are
returning to the use of motorised anti-shark cages since the
recent attacks. "In Geoff's case, I insisted," points
out his wife, Jo. "I'm a born worrier anyway, and with both
our sons surfing, and Geoff diving, sharks are always on my
mind." Most west coast divers have had close encounters with
whites, but being on the seabed - aware of what's around them -
they're at less risk than surfers.
Grocke gives a
hair-raising account of how a fellow diver almost lost his mind
after being "played with" for an hour by a large great
white: "It held him down, lay on top of him, dragged him
along the bottom, knocked him around like crazy. He punched it as
hard as he could, but it was like it was laughing at him. It
knocked his mask off ... he felt around and put it back on. When
he could see, there was this head about half-a-metre away, just
looking at him. He crawled from rock to rock trying to escape,
but it just kept after him. He told us he was hysterical, howling
and screaming into his mask. In the end, it just got sick of him
and swam off. He wasn't the same after that: he gave up diving
for a while, and now he won't even talk about it."
At Ceduna, retired
shark fisherman George Mastrosavas is still burdened by his role
in the death of a young shark victim in 1975. Mastrosavas lives
alone in an old house fringed by sea and fish factories, a
stone's throw from where his Greek-born father once ran a corner
store.
He doesn't respond to
my knock, so I follow the advice of his son, encountered in the
local pub, and go inside. It's noon, and the fisherman, 62, is
lying on a small bed with his face to the wall. He gets up,
waving aside apologies, and settles on a broken sofa as though
not disinclined to talk.
He says he always
loved fishing, and began catching whites that were wrecking his
offshore set-lines in 1958. "People told me, 'You're mad!
More of them will just keep coming.' And I said, 'I'll get rid of
them all eventually.' That's how we thought then. There were so
many whites around then, you'd see at least one every
day..."
Had he known another
season like this for shark attacks?
"Never, never
... and the strange thing is that when white pointers were so
plentiful, you hardly ever heard of an attack." Mastrosavas
estimates he killed 100 whites over the years, but others reckon
his tally was much higher. He recalls terrifying scenes as he
battled them at sea, the huge sharks rearing up "like
frilly-necked lizards", or ripping chunks from the boat
while his young helper lay sobbing at his feet. "There was
no real market for whites until the Jaws movie came out," he
says. "That's when the demand for their jaws and teeth began
... the first I knew of it was when a bloke from Sydney offered
me $4,000 for five sets of jaws."
In February of that
same year, 1975, a boy called Wade Shippard died after his leg
was severed by a white pointer at Port Sinclair, near Cactus
Beach. The attack occurred behind a sheltering headland where
Mastrosavas and his fishing partner were gutting and cleaning
school sharks they'd caught at sea.
"I told my mate
we shouldn't clean them there," says Mastrosavas. "I
told him kids might swim there, and the blood would bring sharks.
But he was the skipper, and he said, 'Blow the kids! They can
swim in the dam.'
" A bout 6 pm we
saw this young lad swimming, and next thing he was yelling that a
shark had bitten him. We sped towards him in the boat, but before
we got there we saw the shark - a small [three-metre] white -
come up behind him and swallow his leg. It just rolled and
snapped his leg right off ..."
Mastrosavas says he
bashed the shark with a gaff as it came through the boy's blood
for another attack, then pulled the boy into the boat. "He
seemed all right for a while ... but we couldn't stop the
bleeding because the leg was severed so high up. I ran down the
jetty with him in my arms, and his mother asked me to drive their
car because of the state she was in. We drove like mad towards
Ceduna, and after a while the lad sorta sat up. He called out,
'Mum!' And that was the end - he died in the car."
Mastrosavas dabs at his eyes with
a well-used hankie.
"It was our fault," he says.
"It should never
have happened. We caused it."
How did the mother
cope?
"She got drowned
not long after that. They were farming people, and they went out
fishing. The boat turned over, and two of them drowned."
At this point, the
story grows even more harrowing. Mastrosavas says he got letters
suggesting it should have been him "lying on the beach with
my guts cut open". He took them to his former fishing
partner, and they had a fight in which he was hit repeatedly over
the head with a heavy broom. Mastrosavas thinks the blows induced
a return of the schizophrenia he had suffered as a teenager. A
few years later - obeying voices in his head - he drove his car
into an approaching motorbike, killing its rider and pillion
passenger. "I was committed to a psychiatric ward in
Adelaide," he says. "I stayed in there 10 years."
After Jevan Wright's
death, a large white was seen frequently in a bay off Elliston
where children swim. Geoff Grocke phoned Kate Rodda, a South
Australian government research scientist studying white pointers,
to ask if anything could be done about the lurking shark.
"She wouldn't hear of it," he says. "She said,
'Don't you dare touch that shark; no-one is to go near it!' She
said they'd send a couple of boats to chase it away, which made
me laugh. When I saw her up here a few days later she said,
'How's that beautiful creature in the bay?' I told her if I had
my way, it'd be hanging from a tree..."
I catch up with Rodda
at the South Australian Research and Development Institute in
Port Lincoln, where she's involved in a white pointer tagging
program around nearby islands. Rodda says 200 whites have been
tagged over 12 years. (As she admits, the Cousteau/Fox claim of
40 to 50 whites left in the State's waters was "clearly not
correct".)
Does she see any
justification for killing a suspect shark hanging about after an
attack?
Rodda:
"Personally, [no]. I think they are a creature that needs
respect ... we have to realise it is an endangered species, and
we need to conserve it."
Australia's rich tuna
industry is largely based at Port Lincoln, where pole fishing has
given way to the more lucrative practice of exporting the fish
live to Asian markets. Tuna are netted at sea, then towed slowly
inshore in floating cages - followed, inevitably, by hungry
sharks. The tuna are placed in holding pens eight kilometres off
the shores of Boston Bay, and fattened for months on tonnes of
dead pilchards. There's no doubt the process attracts sharks, but
the town's dependence on the industry is such that protests
remain muted.
One of the large tuna
companies is Lukin and Sons, although these days the sons -
including former Olympic weightlifter Dean - have left town,
leaving the business to their irascible father, Dinko. A few days
after declaring in the local paper that man was the "master
of global life" and white pointers should be killed, the
towering Dinko Lukin, 66, ushers me into his boardroom for a
chat.
I tell him his
comments evoke the scriptural concept of man holding dominion
over all creatures. "There is nothing wrong with that, my
friend," booms the Croatian-born empire-builder. "That
is the way it is!"
Okay, but what
about...
Lukin holds up an
enormous hand, then issues a sort of mission statement. "I
am a fisherman," he roars. "I am destined by God, by
nature, to be what I am. And if I fall in the water, and I am
attacked by a white pointer, it is an enormous loss. In this new
country I have adopted, I have contributed enormous value ... I
have done a lot for mankind. And if I want to take a white shark
from [Boston] Bay, why shouldn't I?"
But don't tuna pens
attract sharks?
Lukin smiles.
"Beaches attract sharks, too, because humans are there. A
shark is only interested in how he's going to get a mouthful. And
if they come to the tuna farms, then they are being diverted from
the beaches ... if we are allowed to, we can kill them at the
tuna farms. Then they will never make it to the beaches!"
Before leaving Port
Lincoln, I pay another visit to Jeff and Katrina Wright, who've
just heard that the inquest into Jevan's death has been set down
for this week in Adelaide. We drink a few beers at the kitchen
table, and they talk about how they're coping. Jeff says he
alternates between longing - "for the sound of Jevan's car
on our gravel driveway; a glimpse of his face" - and anger
over the improbability of his fate. Katrina had lain awake for
hours the previous night. "I can't stop myself trying to
imagine it," she says. "Did he have any pain? Did he
see the shark, or was it that quick that he saw nothing? It just
... won't stop."