SYDNEY, 13 July 2004 — Surfers are back riding waves at Left Handers break, 250 kilometers south of Perth, where 29-year-old West Australian Brad Smith was attacked and killed by a shark at the weekend.
It’s just what archetypal beach-boy Smith himself would have done. “My brother lived for surfing. It was his life,” said Stephen Smith. “He was a carefree character, a quintessential Australian.”
As Stephen Smith and others have remarked, surfers get accustomed to sharing the ocean with sharks, in much the same way that people in the wetlands of the Northern Territory coexist with crocodiles - there are injuries and deaths but it’s all part of the lifestyle.
It’s an attitude that helps explain why many in the surfing fraternity are aghast at the decision of the Fisheries Department to hunt down the killer shark. “I don’t believe the shark should be killed just for the sake of what happened,” Smith said. “I don’t think he can be revenged by killing the shark.”
Four years ago, the family of 49-year-old Perth lawyer Ken Crew was also against authorities going after the shark that killed him in the shallows of Cottesloe Beach. They reasoned that Crew knew the dangers, accepted them, and would have been appalled at eye-for-an-eye retribution.
Statistics show that over the past 34 years sharks have killed only 31 Australians — fewer than have been killed by bee stings or by lightning. Against that human death toll, environmentalists say, should be balanced the accidental deaths of the 500 or so great whites that each year get tangled in the shark nets that are put up at beaches to protect swimmers.
But West Australian State Government Fisheries Minister Kim Chance is adamant that the killer shark be hunted and killed because it might return to Left Handers and try for another surfer. “Large sharks can cover up to 200 kilometers in a day,” Chance said. “What’s keeping that shark there, or what might keep that shark there, is simply a behavioral pattern that we don’t understand. Why a particular shark might return to an area is an ingrained hunting instinct, I imagine.”
Such pop-psychology is given short shrift by marine biologists, as is the notion that seeking out and dispatching a killer shark might deter that shark, or other sharks, from preying on humans.
Barry Bruce, a shark expert with the government-funded CSIRO research body, said authorities in Western Australia should think carefully about why they want to hunt the killer fish.
“Is it to avenge things? Is it because of closure? Is it to make the world a safer place?” he asked. “I can tell you that from a scientific perspective there’s no evidence that we can see that would make a shark more or less likely to bite a person after it has already done so.”
But there is strong pressure on the state government to take punitive action. This cry for blood has grown with the publication of accounts of the grisly death at Left Handers.