Shark hysteria only diverts attention from the real danger at our beaches

This summer, shark alarms have often closed Sydney’s most popular beaches. Some weeks in November and December, Manly Beach was closed every second day after shark sightings. With shark-spotting drones, helicopters and other new surveillance methods, more sharks are being sighted, and beach closures happen too frequently to make the news. Arguably, it’s also in the interest of the state’s $53 billion tourist industry to not make too much of it.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

When a shark alarm goes off, an interesting pattern of behaviour emerges. The distinctive siren sounds, the lifeguards announce the shark sighting, and most swimmers come in. A second siren sounds and the rest of the swimmers come in. Meanwhile, almost all the board riders stay in the water. After a third siren is ignored, a lifeguard goes out on a jetski and makes the universal shark signal (hand shaped like a fin over the head). If the waves are good, or even if not, the board riders continue ignoring the guard, who gives up.

Shark facts are, increasingly, at our fingertips. The Taronga Conservation Society maintains a database of every one of the 1233 reported bites in Australia since 1874.

On social media, you can follow individual tagged sharks around NSW thanks to the state government’s SharkSmart program. On one day this week, bull shark #207 was at Forster, having been tagged on the Manning River a month ago. Bull shark #577 was visiting Maroubra, having been tagged in Sydney Harbour in 2019. Bull shark #1723 was very busy at Evans Head, and great white shark #1734 was down at Sussex Inlet, having travelled via Sydney from Coffs Harbour since being tagged late last year. If you follow them every day, you’ll know these sharks like your Facebook friends. The SharkSmart app will ping whenever a tagged shark is in your vicinity. SharkSmart also tells us where nets are and what animals get caught up in them.

But – as with so many polarising debates – information is quickly put at the service of emotion. Shark netting is often simplified into dipolarities: safety versus recklessness, “nanny state” wokeism versus Trumpy libertarian defiance, care for human life versus care for the animal world. As with most of what stresses our social fabric, everyone claims to stand in the middle.

Surfers are resistant to shark warnings.Credit: Getty Images

Super-abundant information is not so much a case of mixed messaging as providing messages which are readily mixed by those who receive them. For example, the website of the Surf Life Saving Association of NSW, tasked with protecting people in the water, also reassures us that we are four times likelier to be killed by a horse or a cow than by a shark. We are 200 times more likely to be killed by a crocodile, which makes sense to me, having seen both species in the wild. Even great white sharks in South Australia, given daily buckets of chum and hunks of bloody meat, are tentative and exploratory in the way they dart at the food and swim away. They don’t “attack” people. Saltwater crocs, on the other hand, want to eat everything.

But the SLSA is also patrolling beaches for our safety, so does this information mean I should climb over everyone else to get out of the water when “Jaws” is coming? Or should I only go for dry land if I see a cow or a horse swimming towards me?

The more information we have, the more it can be weaponised in a debate that is not so much a discussion as a trench battle. For example, since shark netting was introduced in Sydney in 1937, there hasn’t been one fatal attack at a netted beach. This would seem a slam-dunk argument for netting at the city’s 51 open beaches, where 25 movable nets are now enhanced by seven drones, plus 60 drumlines and six sonar listening stations that tag sharks. The drumlines were deployed on a large scale three years ago, after the death of 35-year-old diving instructor Simon Nellist off the headland at Little Bay.

Rather than settling arguments, however, surveillance data gets thrown from both sides of the shark netting stoush. Surfers who download the SmartShark app soon delete it. It pings too often, confirming that the sea is teeming with sharks who’ve got better things to do than chase humans. Sharks are one of the lesser risks of going into the sea. But for many others, the pings affirm the need for nets. It depends on underlying assumptions and emotions, and currently, the extreme position exerts an irresistible pull.

Drumlines being deployed off Manly. There are 60 of them along Sydney’s beaches.Credit: Department of Primary Industries

Bycatch is a constant in the netting debate, but there too, the evidence is used both ways. In the twelve months to June 2024, the 25 nets being moved up and down Sydney’s beaches caught 85 sea creatures, fewer than one a day. Forty of these animals were killed by the nets, mostly rays and harmless sharks like hammerheads. An occasional dolphin and turtle also succumbed. Just two great white sharks were caught in Sydney nets. They were tagged and released. Whales were more likely to get tangled up in them.

The paucity of bycatch is used both for the nets (they kill very few creatures) and against them (if nets trap so few dangerous sharks, what is their point?).

Ah, politics! Whenever there’s an attack on a human, successive NSW premiers project an image of being tough on sharks like they’re tough on crime. It’s a performance that serves as an insurance premium for the tourism industry. To its credit, the state’s Shark Management Program uses its $21.5 million budget trying to provide evidence to inform policy, but the purveyors of science have less of a voice than the tourism industry, and a fraction of the budget. As for politicians, fear is mongered even more widely than fish.

Outbreaks of shark hysteria only divert attention from the real danger at our beaches, which is swimmers getting caught in rips and anglers getting swept off rocks. For every fatal shark bite on NSW beaches, there are more than 100 drownings. Beach safety is where education – as opposed to fearmongering – can make a real difference.

Information, especially when it’s abundant, soon comes to the service of emotion. When we grow cynical about the way information is weaponised by others, the temptation is to weaponise it ourselves.

So, back to those surfers who ignore the lifeguards. Surfing is a self-centred pleasure that sometimes suits self-centred people. My nephew, a professional lifeguard, once rescued a swimmer from a rip. He then had to get to a second swimmer. A nearby surfer refused to help. “No, I’m here to surf,” he said. Surfers can be selfish to the point of stupidity. I once drove from Perth to Margaret River and paddled out even as other surfers were clearing the water due to a shark sighting. It was a long drive, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

When the shark alarm sounds, the prevailing response among surfers is a mixture of defiance (“can’t make me, don’t want to”), post-COVID weariness (“bloody nanny state again”), and opportunism (“if other surfers go in, that leaves more waves for me”). Surfers have done their own research; they accept that sharks are everywhere. Dawn and dusk, when sharks are supposedly the biggest threat, are often the most popular times to surf: lighter winds, no sunburn, and, if you’re lucky, fewer competitors in the water. When it’s dog-eat-dog, sharks are the least of your worries.

But even if you’re not bothered about sharks, and you see netting as a cynical political exercise and shark alarms and jetskis as an overreaction, there’s another reason to get out of the water. Those lifeguards are only doing their job, so why be a dick?

Are a couple more waves more important than respecting your place in a broader community effort which the guards represent? And if the worst does happen and your foot ends up hanging off your leg, who are you going to look to? Is it going to be the “no, I’m here to surf” guy? Who’s going to bring you in? And who’s going to be traumatised by the memory of holding your bloodied gristle together? Who will get you to hospital and save your life – that same nanny state that you were just sneering at?

Information is only as good as how we use it. If it gives us a dogma and a tribe, if it tells us only what we want to hear, it can also blind each of us to a bigger picture.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.