Shark attacks: Authorities must do more to control the menace

Eric Lobbecke OPED Illustration for 3-8-15

It’s time to act. The list of Australian casualties from shark attacks is already too long, and increasing too quickly. The public barely has time to grasp the details of an ­attack before there’s another one.

The hidden toll is enormous. Dave Pearson, who survived an attack at Crowdy Head, NSW, in March 2011, told me last week that initially an average of about 100 people are significantly affected by an attack, including witnesses, rescuers, family, friends and acquaintances. Many of them are traumatised. If the attack is not fatal, recovery for the person involved, which is almost always only partial, can take years.

The solution is nets and drum lines, which are designed to target large fish while causing the least possible disruption to other marine creatures. On the Queensland beaches where both methods are employed, attacks are almost nonexistent. Queensland’s 30 nets and 360 drum lines have this year caught 142 tiger sharks, 72 bull sharks and three great whites. Of the 55 non-targeted rays, dolphins and turtles caught in the nets, many were ­released alive during routine ­inspections.

Last year a drum line caught a 3.4m tiger shark during the Quiksilver Pro surf contest. Had that line not been there, and the shark chosen to nibble on a pro surfer instead, the Queensland tourism industry would now be facing a future similar to that of tiny ­Reunion Island, one of the world’s great surfing destinations (also previously on the pro tour), where there have been seven fatal attacks in five years. The Reunion tourism and surf industries are now suffering considerable pain, thanks to bureaucrats and environmentalists allowing the population of bull sharks to escalate out of control.

Just a short drive across the border from Queensland to NSW, where the government is more squeamish about managing “apex predators”, the Byron Bay to Ballina stretch has become a world centre for attacks.

NSW deploys only 51 nets ­between Wollongong and Newcastle, which excludes the hot spot around Byron Bay. Further, the nets are deployed only from September 1 to April 30. The operator of the nets is under instructions to release great whites if it is safe to do so, which prompts the question: why place the nets there at all?

Western Australia conducted a 13-week trial of drum lines starting in January last year, which caught and killed 68 sharks, none of which was a great white. Extensive protests and a report from the Environmental Protection Authority helped end that program. There were four subsequent ­attacks at various beaches around WA that year, one of them fatal.

Perth beaches close whenever a tagged shark enters within the range of buoys equipped with ­receivers. But this system does not detect non-tagged sharks.

In South Australia, where no drum lines or nets are in place, there have been 21 attacks, three fatal, since 2002.

Finding accurate figures for attacks is difficult. As of yesterday, the Australian Shark Attack File website had not been updated to include Friday’s attack on Craig Ison, who fought off a shark at Evans Head, south of Ballina. Ison is now in the Gold Coast Hospital, with injuries to his left leg and arm. The size of the bite on his board suggests he and his medical team face a big challenge. If other attack survivors are anything to go by, Ison’s life, and that of his family, will now be largely defined, for better or for worse, by his seemingly innocuous decision to paddle out and enjoy a few fun waves at his local beach last ­Friday.

The beaches around Evans Head and north to Lennox Head were closed or deserted on the weekend after more sightings and scares. On a sunny weekend, with a sweet mid-size swell lighting up the region’s good-quality points and beaches, surfers who should have been enjoying a midwinter blessing stayed in the carpark. “If you see a break empty, it’s for a reason,” one surfer posted on Facebook.

The problem is exacerbated by officials downplaying the crisis. The ASAF, for example, is almost deliberately deceptive about the casualty rate. A tourist planning to visit Tasmania might be reassured after noting that the ASAF records no attacks, fatal or otherwise, in that state this year. It’s only in the fine print that the reader would notice there was in fact a fatal attack there last month. It is listed under “provoked”, which as far as the ASAF and other international record keepers are concerned is anybody who enters the water for the purpose of catching fish. In this case, the victim, Damian Johnson, was merely collecting scallops.

It doesn’t matter if the victim had only just dived in the water and didn’t even see the shark coming; the ASAF says the victim “provoked” the attack. The ASAF neglects to provide other useful information, such as maps or details of attacks, but it does emphasise “more research (is) needed” into sharks.

The shark in the Tasmanian incident was a great white, which is managed by the federal government’s recovery plan, implemented in 2002. When the plan was reviewed in 2013, it found “no evidence to suggest that white shark numbers have recovered substantially since receiving protection (in 1998)”. The report repeats the original plan’s objective to “develop and implement a monitoring program to assess population trends”, and estimates this will cost $1.8 million over three years.

When that expensive program reports its findings, it might confirm what fishermen and surfers could have told you years ago for free: great whites are bigger and more abundant than ever, in many places alarmingly so.

Or the report could continue to focus on the complexities. “The distribution and abundance of sharks in our coastal waters does vary from year to year for reasons that we don’t yet understand,” CSIRO shark expert Barry Bruce told the Nine Network’s Today showin January as he downplayed the danger of large sharks lurking off Newcastle, closing beaches for 10 days straight.

A cynical observer might conclude that over the years bureaucrats and environmentalists have put the preservation of sharks and associated research funding ahead of their fellow humans. Meanwhile, people are being unnecessarily killed and maimed merely for wanting to enjoy the wonders of the ocean.

Fred Pawle is The Australian’s surfing writer.