This was published 3 years ago
On Western Australia's beaches, it pays to be alert and alarmed
I was not really a swimming kid. That’s almost a sacrilegious thing to say when you come from Western Australia, which is not only the desert state but the coastal state, with more than 90 per cent of its population clinging to the red dirt borders of the cold, crushed sapphire of the Indian and Southern oceans.
WA has more coastline than any other Australian state – in excess of 12,000 kilometres – and more beaches: typically long and wide, with flat sea and scorchingly white sand. There aren’t many friendly headlands or sweetly curving coves; Broome’s Eighty Mile Beach is notable in extent but not in essence. WA’s beaches run like Euclid’s ruler: straight to the vanishing point in every direction.
Perth’s Cottesloe Beach has been the scene of two fatal shark attacks since 2000. Credit: Getty Images
I grew up in Karratha in the Pilbara, so we swam at Dampier, with the ore jetties in the distance and the shark fences marching down the sand, crossing the deep water like a person on tiptoes, then marching back out again, providing a three-sided rectangle in which to swim safely. Except on the day (perhaps imaginary) when a “baby” shark was swept over the fence at high tide and trapped among the swimmers. Did I imagine what happened next? A stubby-wearing/wielding dad (in my childhood, stubbies were both something you wore and something you drank) waded in and hooked it out, and everyone went back in the water.
The fact is, WA beaches are not a domestic joy, but a wild one. Even on a typical day – flat sea, flat land, flat cerulean sky without a single cloud – there’s nowhere else on earth I’ve been so conscious of creatures, unseen but close, that could kill me. The blue-ringed octopuses of the rock pools; the dugite snakes of the sand dunes; the shadows of tiger sharks and great whites out in the water. Not elegant, sinuous shadows, either, but big as camper vans: six metres long, weighing more than a tonne. At school we learnt that if a shark approached you, you should hit it on the nose or gouge it in the eye. At the beach, understanding the absolute irrelevance of this advice, we made children’s solipsistic deals with the forces of nature. If there’s no dog in the water, the shark won’t come. If there’s someone further out than me, the shark will take them first.
Things didn’t get noticeably more civilised after we moved down to Perth, which is why, as we drove our then three-year-old daughter to Cottesloe Beach from my parents’ house a few years ago, I was doing a new deal with fate, exactly the reverse of the old one. If I stay out further than her, I bargained silently, she won’t get taken. Right?
Cottesloe was not my first Perth beach. That was Port, in Fremantle, where there was not a single tree or blade of glass, and where only a Rosella-sauce-red nine-year-old could be oblivious to the semi-industrial surrounds or the goods trains rolling along the beachside tracks to the port just beyond the sand dunes.
There’s nowhere else on earth I’ve been so conscious of creatures, unseen but close, that could kill me.
Cottesloe was my teenage beach: beautiful limestone, trendy cafes and grass terraces where you could lie, covered in coconut oil, plotting to get into the CBH (Cottesloe Beach Hotel) with your fake ID. People like Narelle Autio and Trent Parke have photographed Cottesloe – it feels iconic, bigger than itself.
It also feels wild. In 2000 a man was swimming in front of the North Cottesloe surf club while his wife walked along the beach. He had his leg ripped off in waist-deep water by a four-metre great white, and bled to death on the sand in front of morning swimmers and coffee drinkers. In 2011 another man vanished while swimming to the famous Cottesloe buoy: the same regular morning swim he’d made for more than 10 years. The only thing ever found of him were his Speedos, slashed with tears “consistent” with the bite marks of a white pointer shark, the coroner found.
Watch out for dugite snakes among the sand dunes.Credit: Getty Images
Cottesloe Beach is now netted during the summer. But you might decide to stay on the sand anyway – in which case you should embrace the possibility of finding a dugite lying beside you eating a lizard, as a sunbaking tourist did two summers ago. Maybe this was the same dugite as the one found sliding along the carpark footpath three years earlier. Or maybe not.
Cottesloe and North Cott, I should stress, are city beaches – surrounded by streets and houses and cars and people, like Bondi or St Kilda. They’re as far from the wild as you could imagine. Yet the wild is right there, right up against us, despite everything we’ve done to destroy it.
My daughter has no fear of the ocean. That day, as has been her pattern at beaches from Seven Mile (only seven, ho hum) in NSW’s Gerringong to St Andrews’ West Sands in Scotland, she caught sight of the water, flung off her clothes and ran towards it. She ran towards the wild space. And I, the waist-deep sacrifice that nature might at any moment demand, was grateful – despite the terror – that the wild was still there to receive her.
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