Secrets revealed?

Last week, I spent one fascinating hour examining the new military-grade crankshaft tourniquets of Mr Jon Cohen, the emergency department doctor who has made it his business to stem the death rate from Great White shark attacks in Australia.

His new shark bite kits are a work of art.

Rip it open, pour the calico package onto the sand, it unfurls, the instructions are printed on the fabric and out spills the crank-shaft tourniquet, a smaller SWAT version you can keep in your wetsuit, as well as plastic gloves, and various pads for mopping up the expected torrent of blood.

Jon lives in Sydney most of the year but spends a little time each year in the ED of Esperance Hospital in south-west Australia, a town reeling from recent multiple attacks by Great Whites.

Seventeen-year-old surfer Laeticia Brouwer, killed; Sean Pollard, a surfer, left arm and right hand gone; Gary Johnson, hit by a White as soon as he dived into the water to set his anchor, killed.

Jon knows hits by Great Whites in Esperance are a new reality.

“I know some guys who were in the ED that day (Laeticia Brouwer was killed) and it was a traumatic experience to manage. Cases like that are preventable deaths. People can act on the beach if they’re there when it happens. It might be scary to talk about but it’s reassuring to know that there is something you can do and it’s not complicated.”

He doesn’t have, or won’t share, any opinion concerning solutions to a growing population but he does have a solution post-hit. His goal is to have a shark bite kit at all the main beaches, and he runs regular classes on what to do if a White takes a limb.

His kits even include a sticker to put on your car to show you’re packing a tourniquet and the skills to staunch a wound.

Esperance has become such a byword for Great Whites, the Discovery Channel brought a New York-based marine biologist, Dr Craig O’Connell, to the isolated town to film a documentary exploring the peculiarly aggressive nature of Esperance’s Great Whites.

All this went down before the hail of attacks by Great Whites on Australia’s North and Mid-North Coasts, including two fatalities, and a handful of near-misses, all within three months.

The film, called Lair of the Great White, made for Discovery’s Shark Week, investigates “why a population of great whites off the coast of Western Australia is so much more aggressive than others”.

O’Connell and his film crew only used a cage to get to the seabed and back to the boat. After that it was balls to the wall, so to speak.

“Once we were on the sea floor, we had a bunch of scientific tasks that we had to accomplish and a lot of those required us to get outside of the cage. We can use the caves and the crevices as a way to keep a nice ledge to our backs so the sharks can’t come from behind,” he said.

Any secrets revealed?

Only that the joint hosts a Great White nursery.

Reassuring?

(Watch here, although y’gonna need the keys to a TV-sub service.)

"The most brutal conclusion imaginable wrapped inside an ocean monster six metres long, weighing two tonnes, with an open mouth that is red, the colour of blood, and white, the colour of teeth."

It’s a quirk of fate that Mick Fanning, three-time world champion, will be remembered, forever, as the surfer who was almost cleaved in two, live, by a fifteen-foot White at Jeffreys Bay in 2015.

In a profile in today’s The Weekend Australian, the decorated journalist and author Trent Dalton works his lyrical alchemy, wrapping the attack around the death of two brothers, a divorce and a new documentary Fanning stars in called Save This Shark.

Five years on, Fanning tells his interlocutor that he still dreams about the hit.

And then he wakes and he realises he’s still alive. Still in one piece. Same ol’ unassuming, uncomplaining, knockabout, sun-bleached Gold Coast surfing genius Mick Fanning, flat on his back and sucking deep breaths in the darkness of early morning, sweaty head full of dreaming, ­beating heart too full of muscle remembering.

The most brutal conclusion imaginable wrapped inside an ocean monster six metres long, weighing two tonnes, with an open mouth that is red, the colour of blood, and white, the colour of teeth.

“I mean, it’s like I’m in the actual position I was in,” Fanning says. “It’s a reality dream. You sort of learn your body can do so many things to make things real and not real and I just had to learn, ‘OK, that moment’s been done. It’s not real. These dreams are just coming back’.”

He shakes his head in the cool winter air of Coolangatta, shivers with his hands in the pockets of a black winter coat, seated at a cafe table beside the footpath of a bustling post-morning-surf ­dining precinct. “I still have this PTSD where, if people splash behind me, it freaks me out,” he says. He chuckles when he says this. It’s not the laugh of a man trying to put on a brave face. It’s the laugh of a man trying to make sense of the absurd; a man grappling with a trauma that he realises he avoided confronting for close to five years.

Most of The Weekend Australian’s stories are shackled by a paywall.

This ain’t.

Read here.