Sharks have long stoked panic in Australia, even though more Australians drown at the beach each year than are killed by sharks, according to historian Anna Clark. In a recent article for the Guardian, Clark explores how sharks have been a figure of fear and fascination throughout the continent's human history, from Aboriginal rock art to colonial encounters, and how that fear continues to shape public policy today.
Recent Incidents and Calls for Culls
After a spate of bites earlier this year, calls for shark culls resurfaced, and ocean swimming and surfing no longer seemed as healthy as they had months before. The Australian Shark Incident Database registers growing numbers of dangerous shark interactions in recent years, with anecdotal evidence suggesting an increase in unreported encounters. However, no one knows exactly why the numbers are rising.
Clark, a professor of history at the University of Technology Sydney, notes that public responses to recent encounters show how the shift towards conservation can be unsettled by fear. Politicians find themselves weighing scientific evidence and public safety, but in the absence of robust data, that tension will only continue.
Historical Evidence of Shark Fear
Archives reveal that sharks have been a source of fear and fascination for millennia. 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, near Sydney's Bondi beach, engravings at a First Nations fishing spot known as Murriverie depict shark motifs, including one stretching 8 metres across a sandstone outcrop that angles towards an ancestral figure, thought to depict a shark attack.
Early Europeans also noted the dangerous presence of sharks. William Dampier named Sharks Bay on 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.
Colonial Encounters and Early Mitigation
Early news reports catalogued the terror colonists felt. A 1807 article in the Sydney Gazette reported an attack by a 'voracious' shark on a swimmer in Cockle Bay, which grabbed him by the arm before letting go. An 1812 article 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; tests revealed the arm belonged to a murder victim and had been severed and dumped.
At the turn of the 20th century, the growing popularity of surf-bathing increased the risk of shark encounters. While the government recommended surf lifesaving clubs be supplied with first aid kits, swimmers were essentially responsible for managing their own safety. A spate of 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 panicked nonetheless.
Modern Mitigation and Conservation Shift
The state government initially resisted large-scale 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 in Coogee, where enormous steel cables and nets were strung from the middle of the bay, cordoning off a large section of the beach. Swimming nets were also built at other protected beaches in Sydney, Port Phillip Bay and Perth. Other proposals suggested shark baiting and bombing, giant curtains of bubbles, concrete barriers, or electric fences, but each was rejected for being 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. The nets wouldn't be full enclosures but set parallel to the shore to catch and kill sharks. With no attacks in the following decades, meshing was extended to beaches in Newcastle, the Central Coast and Wollongong. In the 1960s, Queensland also adopted a strategy of beach nets and baited drum lines.
There wasn't huge opposition to these safety measures through the middle decades of the 20th century; 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, however, the consequences of these strategies became clearer: shark mitigation and fishing were affecting entire ecosystems, and their efficacy was thrown into question. 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 our interactions also changed, from shark 'attacks' to 'incidents'.
The tension between public safety and conservation remains unresolved, with politicians facing difficult choices in the absence of robust data. Clark's forthcoming book, a history of the beach in Australia (Penguin, 2027), will delve further into these issues.
