If a summer of sharks restores our respect for the ocean, that’s no bad thing
Idea
“Are you going swimming?” It was a stinking, hot working day and Manly beach was a few yards away but the shopkeepers weren’t paying attention. “I don’t stand a chance, not even down to my ankles.”
The Manly area has been a sobering sight since January 19, when a surfer was rescued from the waves at North Steyne with critical injuries in what was Sydney’s third shark incident but the third in 24 hours. Andre de Ruyter would lose his lower leg and 12-year-old Nico Antic was fatally injured the day before at Nielsen Park on Sydney Harbour. Between these two incidents, a surfer’s board was bitten at Dee Why, not far from where Mercury Psillakis died a few months earlier. If we’re lucky, 2025-26 will be a weird year where people in Sydney are too scared of sharks to go into the water.
They are slowly retreating. No Nippers yet, but the heat has pushed a handful of swimmers into the water at South Manly. There’s a lively business going on at the Queenscliff ocean pool, heated by weed and piss. Over the past few days, some swimmers have tested the open sea by sticking together and staying close to shore.
The patrolling jet skis and rubber duckies slowed down. Sirens, triggered by electronic signals from tagged sharks, sound as usual three or four times a week. If there were surfable waves (they weren’t), the boarders would retreat.
Fear is not meant to be logical. On a cape to the north, Freshwater, normalcy resumed more quickly. Beach life south of the harbor was only momentarily interrupted, as if bull sharks only knew how to turn left from Sydney Heads.
There is a pervasive sense of loss, as if people’s territorial rights to ocean summers have been revoked. Hot days increased the feeling that a right was being taken away. As one proponent of shark culling asked, “Sharks can take over the entire ocean. Can’t we just take the first hundred metres?”
While understandable, these feelings are based on emotion and habit rather than evidence. It didn’t take long for people to get used to the idea that this coastal water belonged to them, and that sharks, like other beach violators and cabana builders, were encroaching on their free space. I’m not saying selfish cabana people are smarter than sharks, but regulation and negotiation can at least change their behavior. Sharks tend not to listen to reasoning.
If one positive outcome can be drawn from this year’s shark incidents, it would be to overturn some assumptions and restore respect for the oceans. This is not our swimming pool. It was never ours to take.
An alarming and frankly surprising situation has occurred., The difference between Australians’ use of the ocean and their respect for its risks. March 2025 to work Research by Royal Surf Lifesaving Australia has found that almost half of Year 6 students cannot swim 50 meters or tread water for two minutes. Only one in six 17-year-olds can swim the national reference distance of 400 metres. Swimming lessons are dwindling in schools, a quarter of schools have no swimming carnivals and Australians’ swimming ability shows “little improvement” after year 7. Each of these indicators has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic, but still, people of all ages are increasingly turning to the beach.
Despite efforts to educate people about swimming in the current, especially Rob “Dr Rip” BranderThere were 357 drowning deaths in Australia last year. National Drowning Report84 of them are on beaches, a 27 percent increase over the 10-year average.
Shark cases are different, of course, but they also involve assessing the risk. Calls for improved education were made clear by the incident in North Steyne. I was there that day. The waves were ordinary, but Manly being Manly, there would have been dozens of surfers out under normal afternoon conditions. There were only three surfers in the entire area as days of rain had left the water murky. The rest weighed the possibility of infection and two other shark incidents and decided not to surf. Presumably de Ruyter and two others saw a rare chance for empty North Steyne waves. They measured the probabilities. The chances of a shark incident were very low, although well above normal. De Ruyter was incredibly unlucky and also incredibly lucky that two other people were there to pull him out of the water.
These complex risk calculations can be built on years of experience and based on respect for nature. But these are still new to the scale of things. It’s easy to forget how recently the coastal ocean became available to indigenous people. Beach swimming began for colonial Australians only a century ago and has reached mass popularity in the last 50 years. In the blink of an eye, society transformed the ocean environment from something unknown into a cultural identity feature as Australian as a quarter-acre block. From irrational fear to reckless overconfidence in two generations.
The high rate of beach drownings among inexperienced swimmers shows how long it takes to even begin to understand the ocean. This type of training is not a one-day course; This is a lifetime of knowledge, trial and error.
If there’s any hope to be gleaned from the sad sight of empty beaches in January, it’s that respect for the ocean must be restored. It’s not fear. Fear is not about climbing above your ankles one day and diving straight into a crevasse the next. Respect, on the other hand, is about gaining skills, calculating the odds, understanding when the odds are with you, when the odds are against you, learning from experience, and most of all, not taking the ocean for granted as if it were your personal playground. Being in the ocean is always a game of chance. Learning to swim, learning rips, and learning about shark conditions are no guarantees of safety; these are just ways to tip the odds in your favor.
The decline in swim instruction coinciding with the increase in beach use is a snapshot of irrational entitlement. The other side is irrational fear, Friendship Island jaws. The deaths on our beaches should not scare us; They should make us more humble, more respectful, and more willing to learn in our approach to the ocean. The terrible misfortunes of the past months, if internalized in this way, could leave a positive legacy.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist. Sydney Morning Herald.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
