It's the winter of the shark! Another attack, this time at Black Beach Head, near Forster…
Just off the wire: a man in his sixties, David Quinleven, was belted by a shark an hour ago at Black Head Beach, Hallidays Point, near Forster on the NSW mid-North Coast. The man was knocked off his surf-ski close to shore and his leg “bitten to the bone”.
A helicopter flew him to John Hunter hospital in the nearby city of Newcastle (Hello Craig Ando! Hello Ryan Callinan!).
Two surfers have died and two’ve been severely injured in the region in the last year.
It struck me as ironic that the attack came on the same day the writer Fred Pawle had a piece in Australia’s only national newspaper calling for some kind of management of shark numbers. And by sharks, ol Mr White-y, mostly.
(Read it here.)
Considering the timing, and because nothing is quite as satisfying as an immediate I-told-you-so, I asked Fred to write a piece on why the protection of sharks is no more than a piece of moral grandstanding.
This is what he came back with:
The arguments in defence of sharks were always cliches: It’s their home. They’re majestic creatures. They’re apex preadators. And, paradoxically, more sharks are killed by people than vice versa.
It was only a matter of time – sadly hastened by futile, tragic attacks on people – before those arguments lost their persuasiveness.
Now even career researchers can’t back them up. I’ve tried to interview two of Australia’s leading researchers several times during the past two months, to no avail. They’ve both appeared on the ABC, of course, because that taxpayer-funded sheltered workshop is a swamp of green algae that welcomes like-minded envirologues with the warm embrace of quicksand. But front up to some awkward questions regarding the human toll of their “research”? Sorry, not available.
Thankfully, if my reading of things is correct, normal people are less gullible.
The first time I wrote about sharks was for The Australian, in 2000, after two fatalities in South Australia (Cactus and Elliston) in consecutive days. I humbly argued then that our respect for great whites was as much cultural as it was scientific, and, tongue-in-cheek, pointed out that surfers understandably loathed the stoopid things. The letters to the editor from outraged green critics lasted for three days. Bless
I hope the parasites who study these things, pat them on the head, and set them free to continue their carnage on surfers are experiencing the opposite response.
I’ve revisited the issue with a lot more knowledge and fervour, not to mention urgency, this time, and am happy to report that the resistance from readers has been almost non-existent. The mood is changing because there is no freaking point in letting prehistoric monsters roam freely where we play.
I hope the parasites who study these things, pat them on the head, and set them free to continue their carnage on surfers are experiencing the opposite response.
There isn’t a single human activity that doesn’t somehow affect our environment. For some reason, it’s recently become common for paranoid, depressive people to think this is a bad thing, and condemns us to imminent planetary doom. Such people should develop a meth habit or join a transsexual burlesque troupe. Maybe then they’d realise how boring they’ve become.
Meanwhile, we should all be campaigning for great whites to be put back on the menu. I’ve heard the young ones are damn tasty.
(Fred Pawle is The Australian’s surfing writer.)
FFS , will some journalist investigate the Councils in Ballina /Coffs burying dead whales on the beach this year , and the affect rotting whale carcasses have attracting sharks.
all the cullees ,who just want kill the sharks , its your own councils burying whales on the beach that’s creating burley for the sharks.
get rid of the carcasses and watch the attacks go down or , suffer for another couple of years!
Whale buried at 7 mile Feb 2015;
http://www.northernstar.com.au……
Whale buried at Coffs July 2015;
http://www.coffscoastadvocate…….
Yes. Kill them. I care far more about me than I do them.
what would you expect from Fred pawle , writes for a right wing paper and has a right wing philosophy and what to do when nature does something out of the ordinary,kill it!
It seems like there is a hystircal reaction going on by a group of surfers who can’t handle the thought there is an apex predator other than humans , sniffing around having a nibble , grow a pair.
check out the links here where councils have been burying dead whales on the beach , Ballina being one of the worst offenders. Be scared of sharks but be more scared of the idiots who have created burley lines in the surf and probably are responsible for all the shark activity
Whale buried at 7 mile Feb 2015;
http://www.northernstar.com……
Whale buried at Coffs July 2015;
http://www.coffscoastadvoca……
Shit, that’s a good point. I’d always taken the angle that we were fairly safe, as we’d give off almost no smell, apart from the odd set of fungally-infected feet.
This sounds easy. Since so many of you ‘Stralians (Fred Pawle, BeachGrit, Tony Abbott et al) are ideologically opposed to bad-news environmental research, you must have some nice, simple, crap-free solutions!
So what’s the plan? First, I guess, write off all science you deem too envirologue/green-algae/boring/depressive/paranoid/planetary-doomish … , and sort the problem by … what … a bit of old school, mindless murder?
How many sharks? Which ones? For how long and over what kind of area?
Do you plan to ignore all scientific research and just keep killing until you feel better or the sharks are extinct? (At last! Now we can play safely, kids!) Or can we just cherry pick science that makes us sound heroic and human-first! down the pub?
(And, btw, are we good with those first responders who make difficult science-based guesses every day to try and save lives? That approach seems dangerously similar to these fuckwit do-good marine scientists who recommend rules about protecting species, habitats, ecosystems etc. Too much fuckin guesswork in this science bullshit).
Why not hand all decisions over to the real wise men – the delightfully rough-handed fishermen who obviously know best because, well, they’re salt of the earth, and they’ve been out there observing the ocean (and skewing the scientific data for their own survival/profit) for decades … ?
Just send them out with their guns, harpoons, longlines, gill nets and beer. Let them be the great no-bullshit protectors of us humans, defending us against enviro-give-a-shit wankers and those fucking “prehistoric monsters” that dare to “roam freely where we play”.
Yeah, keep things simple. Really fucking simple because the complex impacts humans have caused on this planet are just a myth, peddled by green cunts trying to get rich off massive science grants paid for by you, while they even fuck the rest of us over with their results, too! Do they care about human lives? Clearly not.
Thank god some of you spotted their evil trickery. You are true, simple, rugged heroes and I trust you to save us all!
I hear you AngleGrinder but you have to pay the mixed metaphor of a green algae swamp of quiksand.
Anglegrinder, it would help if you could put a rational argument for your case instead of invective
‘Invective’? Jesus.
You got a better word?
I apologise, I got mixed up and thought I was on Stab (where big words don’t fly). Carry on sir.
I will say this: Something needs to be done, I am not saying a cull, I am not saying don’t enter the ocean. I am not a scientist, so can someone else come up with something?
Righto boys then what’s the plan? How many we gonna kill? Some? Most? All? Kill them til they stop attacking? A beautiful symbiotic truce between shark and human.
ain’t that hard. Just open up fishing and eventually put quotas on it. We do it with pretty much every other type of fish.
“the protection of sharks is no more than a piece of moral grandstanding” this is so true for some 98% of people running their mouth on this issue. Thanks Fred for writing this piece.
“the protection of sharks is no more than a piece of moral grandstanding”
This is at best a stupid, subjective opinion.
But more realistically, it’s just nonsense.
Like, what exactly leads you and Mr Pawle to this conclusion?
If shark protection, then surely every other form of environmental protection, too, is “no more than a piece of moral grandstanding”.
Explain why it’s ok for you to attribute this – or anything you like, for that matter – to whole swathes of sentient people, including scientists with far more knowledge on the subject that yourself. Basically anyone who has concerns about human impact on the environment seems to be your target.
Why are those peoples’ readings of the situation “moral”? You’re projecting that onto them, i.e. making it up. And why is having an opinion that you dislike, “grandstanding”? Are we to believe those of other opinions are somehow doing a better job at having opinions?
Your whole approach seems to be driven more by a political/social agenda akin to your former Prime Minister’s, or Fox News’. It’s a sort of willful doublespeak. “There’s no evidence to show that the evidence is evidence! It’s just a conspiracy led by people who dress badly, shave less than they should and are annoyingly self-righteous. Therefore, it must be wrong.”
Thank God we’ve got people like you and Pawle looking out for humanity!
Seriously, the only reasoning I can see in Pawle’s piece is that he simply dislikes people with concerns about what we’re doing to the planet and wants them to shut up and/or disappear. That’s a pretty medieval way of thinking about real-life issues that we clearly need to deal with. Propagandists for this sort of simple mindlessness are everywhere these days, so you and Pawle are clearly not alone in your reason-free approach to a complex and nuanced problem.
Two-fifty k is being spent on tagging sharks on the NSW north coast. Problem therefore solved. Yes?
Nope. Just because it’s tagged doesn’t mean it can’t bite a hole in an ocean goer. There are zero tracking stations along the Ballina coastline.
I can see it now. Legions of men sitting in a radar room wearing matching blue “shark squad” jumpsuits. “We are defcon 2 people – we have an 8 foot white in the bondi sector doing 15 knots and closing!” – “Roger captain, deploying jetski squad now, we are armed and ready to engage!”
Thunderbirds are GO!
Newy also the home of secret buckets. In any case hard to argue with