What happens to a small Australian town after four shark attacks in one day? PART THREE

"The cries for help from the surfer were the stuff of nightmares."

(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, the removal of shark nets and the obfuscation of public servants wildly out of their depth. It’s based on the experience of Ballina, if y’hadn’t worked that out yet. Read part one here. Part two here.)

Pedro awakened Bill before dawn at 5 am, before waking the rest of the crew.

“Today’s going to be a stinker, forecast to rise to 35 degrees by midday. This morning we’re going out on a trawler with a fisherman called Frank. When we get back, after lunch, we have an IV with the Mayor, and tonight there’s a public meeting at the Town Hall, which should be interesting.”

Bill loved this aspect of being a journalist.

Fieldwork had taken him to many different places during his long career, including over 100 countries, war zones, army and government coups, natural disasters, and more. Getting out and amongst it was so much more exciting than sitting in the studio, trying to drum up interest in a story for his audience. As he stood alongside Captain Frank in the wheelhouse, the camera crew recorded their conversation.

“How long have you been fishin’ these waters, Frank?” Bill expertly dropped the ‘g’ off the end of the word fishing.

“Since I was a boy. My father and my grandfather were both trawlermen, here in Freeport and further up the coast in Davenport.”

“Have there always been lots of sharks around?”

“Back in the 60s was the worst, especially out front of the Whaling Station and abattoir up in Davo.”

“Why the abattoir?”

“They pumped the blood and offal off the killing floor straight out into the surf.”

“And that attracted the sharks?”

“Yeah, but even more than that, it gave them a constant food source, so their numbers skyrocketed.”

“What’s the shark situation like now?”

“Worst I seen since then. Ten times as many as there were twenty year ago.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Same reason, food source has grown.”

“What’s their food source?”

“The Whales, since they protected the Whales, the sharks’ numbers have grown.”

“And what about since they’ve protected the Whites?”

“Whadayou recon?”

By 7am, off the back of the trawler was a shiver of grey sharks of all types and sizes, all swimming excitedly, expecting some food to drop off the nets when they were wound in. But Frank had not put the nets out. This was just a quick trip out and around Frier’s Island to show Bill and his crew how many sharks were about. The footage they got was fantastic.

A few hours later, despite a convivial initial meeting with Mayor Maddison in her air conditioned office at the council chambers, things went badly for her very quickly, with Bill asking her if she had ever been out on a trawler before.

“No, no, I haven’t. Why, have you?”

“Well, we just came in from a quick trip around Frier’s Island.”

“I hear it’s beautiful out there at this time of year. I really must go one day, they tell me the snorkeling is world class.”

“I agree, you really should go, but I wouldn’t recommend snorkeling. There were hundreds of sharks following our boat.” Bill exaggerated the shark numbers.

“Oh, really? I had no idea.”

“Don’t you think it’s your job to know these types of things? I mean, what if a pack of Dingos was terrorising the beaches? Surely you’d make it your business to cull them.”

“Well, Mr Cunningham, we don’t cull animals anymore in Australia.”

“Yes, we do, you yourself okayed the cull of the Brumbies down the coast at the old Wicker’s Station, only a couple of years ago.”

“Well, you certainly have done your homework.”

“Of course I have. That’s my job. I’m just doing what I’m being paid to do. What are you doing?”

“What you need to understand, Mr Cunningham, and if you had done your research correctly, you’d know that wild horses are a non-indigenous species, unlike the sharks.”

“So they don’t have the same rights?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Is that what you think of the non-indigenous human population as well?”

Incensed, Mayor Maddison called off the interview. “I’ve never been treated so rudely in my entire life,” she complained to Pedro, ignoring Bill. But Bill was pleased with her storming off and nodded to the camera crew to keep recording as she collected some paperwork and left the building in a huff.

That afternoon, before the public meeting, Pedro led Bill and his camera crew on a walk through the outdoor food court at Freeport Shopping World. Bill, a Vox Pop expert, asked a variety of shoppers and diners, who were struggling to shelter from the direct sun and avoid the heat,  what they thought of how elected officials were handling the shark situation. Very quickly, it became apparent that the population was evenly divided between those who thought the sharks should be protected and those who believed they should be culled.

“It’s their environment, we enter it at our own risk,” one woman with a child in a pram stated boldly.

“Kill the bloody lot of them, they’re stupid and dangerous creatures,” an elderly man seated waiting for his wife outside the hairdresser stated emphatically.

“Surely there’s some way of making it safe at the beach for swimmers without killing animals in their natural environment,” an electrician installing a striplight concluded.

That evening, the public meeting at the town hall got off to a bad start when a couple of old surf club members jeered during the Welcome to Country.

“Give it a fucken break, will ya!” Jim Prior called out.

“My ancestors built this town, I worked on this building, this very hall, when I was a boy, my family go back two hundred years in this valley, no one needs to welcome me to my own fucken country,” Jim muttered to no one in particular. 

The media, standing at the back of the crowded hall, behind the hundreds of seated locals, were relishing the conflict. Twenty-five-year-old Deputy Mayor Monica Bridey lowered the microphone so she could speak into it and tried to settle things down.

“While we might not all agree with one another, we can at least agree to disagree,” she both pleased and confused the audience.

“I agree you let down the ones we have to bury because you took down the shark nets last summer,” someone shouted.

“And what about how no warnings were placed on the beaches until after three people had died in separate incidents?” a mother of four stood and asked.

Mayor Maddison saw that Monica was overwhelmed and stood and took control of the microphone and called for order.

“Everyone will get a chance to ask questions after we have delivered our various reports. We have Veronica Tombe here from the DPI, Dr Timothy Cleary from Shark Safety, and Deirdre Macdoogal from Save the Planet. First, I’d like to offer my condolences to the family and …” The Mayor was interrupted when the lights went out and the room plunged into darkness.

The large screen behind the speakers on the stage lit up with a full-colour photograph of a shark that had had many bites taken out of it, lying on the deck of a trawler in a pool of bright red blood. The whole room gasped with shock and horror. The next photo was of a Whale’s carcass, lying on a beach, pockmarked by the round core bite marks of the many sharks that killed it. Everyone stared at the graphic image with fascination. Then a photo of a human shark-attack victim’s bloody, dismembered body being loaded on a gurney into the back of an ambulance forced many to cover their eyes or look away. People started getting up and leaving.

“Who’s doing this?” Mayor Maddison demanded, blocking the light in her eyes from the overhead projector hanging from the ceiling.

“Stop them, this isn’t what we planned,” she ordered. “Please play my PowerPoint presentation,” she ordered, but it was too late. Video footage of a man being mauled by a shark shot with an iPhone from a break wall in Adelaide the previous year terrified everyone. As if the visuals weren’t bad enough, the cries for help from the surfer were the stuff of nightmares. Everyone got up and stormed out of the hall, angry and even more disappointed in their councillors.

“What did you think of that? It seems like they’ve got a fight on their hands.” Bill Cunningham asked one of the old clubbies outside the hall.

“Mate, they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag this lot,” he summed up the way most were feeling.

Later that evening a southerly buster hit and the temperature dropped dramatically. By three in the morning, it was down to 15 degrees.

To be continued…