Hugh Edwards

Edited extract

In Western Australian waters swim most of the 350 or so species of sharks known to science. All the big names are there: Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark; Galeocerdo cuvier, the tiger shark; Carcharhinus leucas, the bull shark, or bronze whaler; Isurus oxyrinchus, the mako; Prionace glauca, the blue shark; Sphyrna mokarran, the Great hammerhead; and of course the largest shark of all, Rhiniodon typus, the famous whale shark of the Ningaloo Reef.

The whaler family, which includes the bull shark, statistically responsible for more human deaths world wide than any other species, has as many as two hundred sub-species, the most numerous of all the orders of sharks. Whalers of all shapes and sizes thrive in Western Australian waters. They have been responsible for a number of recorded human fatalities. To balance the ledger, whalers are the shark most frequently caught by professional fishermen and eaten by humans as ‘ fish-and-chips’. Far more sharks are eaten by humans than the reverse.

Humans naturally see sharks in terms of their danger to themselves. Indeed sharks and crocodiles are the only marine predators that kill and eat humans on a regular basis. Deaths from shark attacks occur less often in WA than on the east coast. This is perhaps because the shallows of the coastal shelf fringing the Indian Ocean near the major centres of population extend much further out to sea.

There has been at least one fatality in the Swan River, that of Charlie Robinson, a Scotch College student taken near the Scotch boatshed in Freshwater Bay in the summer of 1922–3. There have been only two fatal attacks at Perth’s metropolitan beaches in more than one hundred years, with seventy-five years between them. Simeon Ettelson was killed by a tiger shark at Cottesloe Beach in 1925, and Ken Crew by a Great white at North Cottesloe, only a kilometre distant, in 2000. Both November deaths caused a huge public reaction including a predictable demand for a culling of sharks.