"Stories about the warnings by surfers and fishermen who raised the alarm about the rapidly increasing shark population over the last decade had been ignored."
(Editor’s note: This an eight-part fictional story about a little surf town that is forced to confront the real world effects of shark protection and the removal of shark nets.)
It was just after sunrise on Tuesday, October the 9th, 2025. At Flynn’s Beach, four kilometres up the coast from Freeport, Titus Bartholomew was doing the only thing he knew to clear his head from his terrible hangover: driving to the beach to have a swim in the ocean. As he pulled up, he saw a whale breach majestically right out in front of the car park in the orange sea of reflections.
Simultaneously, a tall spray of water from a whale’s blowhole off to the north materialised, stood momentarily above the sky-coloured glassy water like a ghost lit from the east, before disappearing into a rain of droplets which fell and once again became a part of the ocean.
THE FIRST SHARK ATTACK
Far out to the south, he saw a mad thrashing about and wondered what was going on; Yellowfin Tuna, he supposed, chopping up the surface while feasting on Whitebait, no doubt. What he didn’t realise was that a baby whale was being mauled by several large sharks. It was October, and many sea-creatures, great and small, were migrating south as the Spring temperature of the water warmed off the coast.
Out in the small surf, he let the river-like rip-current by the rocks suck him out beyond the sandbank into the deep, where he floated on his back and wondered what he was going to do about his drinking problem.
As he returned from resting horizontally to treading water vertically, he was bumped on his leg by something underwater. He thought at first that he had kicked a rock but was shocked when he saw a tiger-striped dark gray shark swim right by him.
It was the flick of the shark’s tail that knocked the wind from Titus and drew blood from a wound on his right side. Fortunately, a wave came at that moment, and he stroked hard and caught it and bodysurfed into shore.
On the sand, blood flowed from the two-inch cut and soaked his wet skin and white board shorts and he realized he needed stitches.
THE SECOND SHARK ATTACK
Half an hour later, Frank Marpazzo was walking quickly in his wetsuit with his bodyboard under one arm and his flippers swinging in his other hand. He was trekking along the sandy track from the beach past the rocks at Freeport Main Beach, south of where Titus had had his encounter with a shark, when he saw the dolphin that had been bitten in half on the rocks. Its intestines draped from the curved shark bite behind the dorsal fin like a chain of sausages hanging in a butcher shop window.
Frank knew that his friends surfing off the end of the point would not have seen the carcass, as, unlike him, they had walked out to the point along the platform from South Beach, while he was approaching the surf break from the north.
When he reached the end of the point, he waved to his mates, who were already catching waves and getting barrelled on the sucky right-hand slab of reef known as Deeps. Deeps was the closest surf break on the entire coast to the Continental Shelf.
The closest recreational zone to the deepwater highway of sea life passing by to the east.
Sitting on their body boards while waiting for waves out there at this time of year was like being seated in an aquarium of passing marine life. Pods of dolphins, manta rays, and turtles were year-round, daily visitors, also moving north and south, but in a 24-hour cycle.
But in Spring, there were the annual passing Mullet and Mackerel, as well as sharks and whales. This morning, the pungent stench of Deep Sea Mullet and Slimy Mackerel was strong in the air. Tightly packed schools of the bullet-shaped Mullet filled each passing wave, the water a milky green from the muddy river water washed out by the recent rains on the mountain range upstream.
The boys had become familiar with many of the larger fish, in particular the dolphins, and knew them by their dorsal fins. Some fins were so big they flopped over, others so small they were recognisable as juveniles.
Then there were the fins that looked like they had been bitten.
As he stood on the rocks and prepared to jump off onto the back of one of the waves, Frank wondered whether he was making a mistake. A pang of intuitive fear churned in his stomach, and he thought perhaps he should call out to his friends and tell them about the dead dolphin. But when he saw one of the sea turtles surface for air, a sure sign a set was on its way, he reacted accordingly, leaping into the cool green-blue deep water just to the south of the surf break.
He and his bodyboard disappeared completely.
Frank’s friends, who saw what happened, freaked out completely and paddled as fast as they could, yelling, screaming and crying, into the rocks where they grappled up the mossy boulders, injuring themselves on their way to safety. A fisherman on South Beach heard the boys yelling and wondered what all the commotion was about.
THE THIRD SHARK ATTACK
Only 20 minutes later, Penny Silvestor was swimming at Davidson’s Beach, about six kilometers to the south. Penny had taken up swimming daily, weather permitting, on the advice of her psychologist, to relieve her stress and anxiety.
This morning, she was thrilled to pass right through an enormous school of Whitebait. Although she had swum the one-kilometre ocean beach over the past winter months, she had never found herself in such a wondrous situation.
It was, she thought, like being in her favourite nature documentary, The Blue Planet.
Penny was accustomed to the frantic behaviour of the Morwong and Luderick ducking for cover and hiding in the labyrinth of crevices and caves in the seaweedy rocks below; her presence made known by her shadow, passing like an airplane across a beach, along the hilly topography of the craggy seabed.
But she had never found herself right in the middle of a school of fish. It was mesmerising. Intoxicating.
Thousands of individual flashes of silver morning light reflected in unison off the flanks of the small fish as they swam like a single, sweeping organism. Penny stopped stroking momentarily and washed the fog from her swimming goggles, but by the time she had looked back underwater, the fish were gone. Gone too were the Morwong and Luderick.
It was an eerie feeling seeing no other living thing for the first time on one of her swims, and a primordial fear emerged from somewhere deep inside her.
The Bull shark hit her like a fast-moving truck from behind and underneath, taking her by the leg and knocking her goggles and swimming cap off her head. Penny had never been struck by anything before, not man nor animal, and went into shock.
Leg clamped in the mouth of the beast, she was violently dragged underwater, trailing a wake of bubbles and blood. Mercifully, she was knocked unconscious and died moments later from blood loss, as her leg was torn from her body just below the hip.
On shore, an elderly couple sitting on a park bench under a Norfolk Pine, whale watching while enjoying the morning sun, discussed what the activity so close to shore might be. With no more movement, they decided it must be dolphins. The water around where Penny was taken quickly settled back to its previous calm, with only a few seagulls hovering and squawking over the site of her bloody demise.
Her towel and car keys, alongside the freshwater shower on the promenade, went undiscovered for many hours.
THE FOURTH SHARK ATTACK
At 9.10 am, another woman, Jill Brewster, happily married mother of four, made the mistake of having a quick dip after work in the estuary to the north of Freeport Harbour, right out in front of the house she lived in with her family. Jill worked in a nursing home and was pleased to have switched from the daytime shift to the overnight shift. She preferred her morning swims to evening ones, not just because there were more people around, but because swimming at dusk in the river felt spooky.
It also refreshed her in time to get the kids off to school before going to sleep for a few hours.
Of the three people to die that day, Jill suffered the most, as the initial attack did not kill her. The shock she experienced from being nipped on the thigh by a curious one-meter-long Bronze Whaler was almost insignificant in comparison to the horror of what was to come.
On her way wading into shore, she was circled by a group of much larger Whalers who flapped about in the shallows taking turns mauling her as she fought valiantly to save her life. She was in shock and still of the opinion that she could brush off what had just happened, if only the sharks would stop attacking her.
She didn’t have time for this, she had responsibilities, she had to make breakfast and lunch for the kids.
Jill was looking futilely at her family home, thinking it was so close but so far away, hoping that her husband, Tanner, might see her and come and save her, but he was not there. Her final hope was that her children wouldn’t witness her dying like this. They were good kids and didn’t deserve it. As she was taken under for the last time her only thought was for her children.
She wanted to warn them not to go swimming that day.
News of the four attacks in one morning in the bustling surfing and fishing town of Freeport made both the national and international news, as did the council’s supposed bungling by not placing warning signs on all of the beaches after the first encounter was reported by Titus Bartholomew at Freeport Base Hospital.
Stories about the many warnings by surfers and fishermen who raised the alarm about the rapidly increasing shark population over the last decade had also been apparently ignored. Mayor Brittinay Maddison, who had recently overseen the pulling down of the town’s shark nets to prevent unfortunate bycatch, held an emergency press conference and was now under attack herself.
To be continued…