From Surf Havens to Ghost Towns: The Shark Threat to Regional Australia

"A decade after the sharks moved in, it feels like the surf culture of the town is dying."

(Editor’s note: This story appears in the latest issue of Surfing World, called Shark Country, which is a comprehensive examination of the dramatic shift in Australian surfing where every other month, a surfer is taken down either by a Great White or a bull shark. Why, how and what the hell? Contained within the magazine, a handsome independently owned journal, just Sean Doherty, Hannah Anderson and the villainous Nick Carroll on the tools, is some of the best writing you’ll have the pleasure to soak in, even if it all makes you wanna shelve the fibreglass forever. Twenty bucks plus postage, but not the US.)

GOD’S WAITING ROOM – another Tuncurry shark story

I’d just hit the 80-zone coming into Forster when I saw it. What had once been a hobby farm on the outskirts of town was now an over-50s retirement estate – million-dollar, blindingly white, two-bedroom coffins stretching as far as the eye could see. It was huge, as big as the whole town of Forster had been when we moved here in the ‘70s. I thought, Jesus, this place has really got old. Then I had the sobering realisation I was just a couple of years away from qualifying for one of these villas. I turned my head and kept driving.

I hadn’t been back to Forster in a long while, a decade at least. Things had changed, as they have tendency to do. Growing up here in the eighties, it was a small town with an old population, but its sleepy, septuagenarian core was orbitted by some of the loosest surfing units anywhere in the galaxy. There was Spider, Dog and Mullet. Buckets, Boon and Wingnut. Occasionally dangerous men in bright pink surfwear. Swell or no swell, the place fizzed. The town had a mad surfing energy to it.

I drove in on a Wednesday afternoon and thought I’d check the surf. The wind was from the south, as was the swell. Prime Tuncurry conditions. The car park was packed, and I figured there must have been waves. What had once been a giant sand flat between the car park and the beach was now tall coastal scrub, all of it planted. The win? Nobody has to sweep up all the sand in the car park. The loss: the Tuncurry Bar, once the best wave on the east coast.

There was nobody in the surf at all. Not a soul. There were little peaks from the wall all the way up to The Spot, but nobody was surfing. I knew why… that’s why I was here. All the cars were parked for the nearby Tuncurry rockpool, which had safe, netted swimming inside Wallis Lake. I laughed. A couple of weeks earlier a small great white shark had somehow got around the net, and the pool’s elderly dawn patrol arrived for their morning swim to find it doing hot laps of the pool.

Back in 2022 I’d written a Surfing World story on the twin towns of Forster-Tuncurry, and how they’d become the white shark capital of Australia’s east coast. It was prompted by five years of close calls in the water; white sharks having moved into the area in numbers after being given protected status two decades earlier. The surfers in town were already on edge when in May 2021 a visiting surfer, Mark Sanguinetti, was killed while surfing at Tuncurry. My brother had been surfing a few metres away when it happened, and along with Mark’s mates had got him to shore, but there was nothing they could do. My brother has described to me what he saw that day, and we won’t be describing it here. A fireman who’d seen all sorts of carnage in is job; he didn’t surf again for six months. Some guys in town have stopped surfing altogether. The place changed.

Surfing began to die.

I didn’t want to write another Tuncurry shark story. To be fair, I could write a similar story about any number of towns on the NSW North Coast – Port Macquarie, Ballina, Lennox, Coffs – all of which have seen white sharks move in. But the problems in Tuncurry five years ago haven’t gone away; they’ve grown, literally. The small sharks are bigger, the close calls continue. The sharks have become part of daily life for surfers.

A couple of weeks earlier, four bull shark attacks in four days around Sydney had seen the issue splashed across the media globally. You never hear about Forster though, nor towns like it. This is as much a story about what happens to towns like Tuncurry and Forster in between encounters, when sharks just become part of life and a discordant, low frequency anxiety drifts through the place.

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

Walking into the foyer of the Forster RSL Club triggered some major flashbacks. Back in my late teens, it was where we’d spill out after a Saturday night of teenage drinking upstairs in the Galaxy Room. The  smoking, wrestling, fighting and hook-ups would continue on the lawn out front until the cops showed and started taking people away. It was wild, and half the towns surfers were banned from the club at some point. Beau Emerton might still be banned today, 30 years later. The sliding doors opened it was 1989 again and I could taste Southern Comfort in the back of my throat.

I’m there to meet my brother, Tim who’s there with a handful of his Bite Club mates. Walking out into the beer garden, they’re hard to miss. There’s a table of them, all wearing their black Bite Club shirts. They know I’m working on a shark story and they’re all very keen to chat.

Bite Club started as a support group for survivors of shark attacks but has evolved to become something more. Today it’s also an advocacy group, a social club, and a collective stakeholder in the shark issue. To become a member, you either have to have been on the wrong end of a shark, or close enough when it’s happened to have made it back to the beach a changed person.

Along with my brother, there’s Blair Hall from down at Pacific Palms, who got hit way back in the late nineties on the Sunshine Coast. There’s Brett Burcher, who got hit straight out the front of his house at North One Mile three years ago. And there’s Bite Club founder and figurehead, Dave Pierson who got whacked by a bull shark at Crowdy Head back in 2011, almost dying. They’ve been through the therapy part together and most are out the other side, and all still hang out. Half of the Bite Club are currently working on Dave’s house renovation on his place up at Coopernook. They’re a unique group with a unique aspect on what’s going on.

But what they’ve become more than anything else are shark nerds.

Between beers they discuss how a shark drone was launched at a local surf club but flown remotely from Sydney. They talk about a bite proof mesh wetsuit they tried out recently in the Sydney wavepool. They talk about Kai McKenzie’s surfing clip he dropped the other day. Dave talks about a trip he did to Reunion Island in the wake of the bull shark attacks over there. They talk about a 3.2m white shark that was picked up on a drumline at Tuncurry the week before. They know their shit. They watch everything and even have an inside line to the scientists in the NSW Government shark program, who’ve effectively been gagged from talking to the public.

They don’t appear to have an outright agenda. None of them want a wholesale killing of sharks, but neither do they want more members in their club. In that way they’re pretty representative of the rest of the surfing crew in town… and maybe the rest of the country. Someone mentions they saw Col Rowland in town a few days before. Col’s a Bite Club member, his attack back in November 2016 at Bulls Paddock marking the point where the white sharks moved into town and became a part of life. Col’s been away, travelling Australia in his van. Doesn’t surf much anymore. Someone later mentioned he’s fine paddling out, but turning to catch a wave was triggering. That’s what he was doing when a white shark burst through a pack of dolphins swimming nearby and launched him into the air.

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

The following morning, I message a mate, seeing if he wants to catch up for a beer after work. He replies, ‘No worries, meet me for a schooner at the Golfy in an hour.’ I look at my watch and it’s 10.45am. He’s taken the day off work, and he’s nursing that schooner when I walk in. I figured to get a gauge on what’s happening in the water around town, I needed to speak to the guy who spends more time in the water than anyone else.

He’s got a book of shark stories but asks me to leave his name out when we tell them. He doesn’t want to be seen to making a big deal. But even the loosest description of him, his surfing mate, and their surfing exploits over 40 years will make them instantly recognisable to every surfer in town. Since the ‘80s they’ve been chasing it harder than anyone, looking for quiet windows in quiet corners. Big days and small. You rarely see one without the other. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call them Tom and Greeny.

Tom didn’t have to go back far to start cataloguing his shark encounters. He’d had one the previous week. He’d been buzzed out at Janie’s Corner, just out of town. He reckons it could have been the same 3.2m white that was eventually caught and tagged in town.

But then he hit play on his greatest hits.

He recounts another incident at Janie’s that went down a couple of years ago. Surfing with Greeny and their other mate, Jim – just the three of them – Tom had been sitting there waiting for a wave, minding his own business when he turned to his left and saw a 10-foot white literally a foot away, sitting there staring at him. “It was just… there,” he recalls, reaching an arm out like he’s patting it. It wasn’t attacking but had snuck into his blind spot to have a look. Knowing he couldn’t panic, he had no choice but to freeze. “I was just trying to project myself over there, but I couldn’t move.” The shark slid away and he paddled over to Greeny, who was sitting nearby. That’s when they saw it. “Greeny just goes, ‘Is that a second one?’” The pair yelled out to Slim who was down the beach, then found a wave to the sand. That was when Greeny spotted a third one, circling out the back. They started walking back to the car when they looked down. In big letters, someone earlier that morning had written something in the sand.

“3 X SHARK”

I asked him if the incident had pulled them back from surfing Janie’s. “We gave it a day,” he sniggers. “Greeny said, ‘Let’s just get back out there,’ so we did.” The postscript to the story was that he’d been sitting at the Golf Club a couple of weeks later, recounting the story over a beer, when the guy on the next table leaned over. “That was me, mate.”

The same week as the Janie’s incident, Tom was surfing the other end of Seven Mile Beach at Bulls Paddock, with his son and Jim. “My son saw it first. He goes, ‘What the fuck’s that, Dad?’ I turned and it was coming toward me, pushing a bow wave. It was a big shark. Then I turned enough to make it change its line and it’s swum past me and this big, black eye looked at me and this white belly that kept going and going and going. I turned to Jim and said, ‘I think we need to go in.” My son afterwards was like, ‘Holy shit, Dad, I thought you were going to get eaten.’ It traumatised him more than me.”

There may be a case for Janie’s Corner to be the sharkiest wave on the east coast. “Out of all the shark encounters I’ve had,” reckons Tom, “80 per cent of them have been there.” Janie’s feels sharky. Sitting at the northern end of Seven Mile Beach, it’s always full of fish. It’s also remote, a washed-out dirt road the only way in. There’s no facilities, no nothing. Over the headland to the north is the old sewerage plant overflow. And the name of that beach? Sharkies.

Throughout all of this, Tom has observations about what’s happening. “Nearly every time we’ve seen a white it’s been between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty in crystal clear waters. Crystal clear until the thing is sitting next to you.” He feels the sharks are worse in town than they are down the coast. The drum lines bear that out. “They thought they’d get them all at Hawks Nest, but they get more at Forster. The Pebbly drumline gets heaps, and the one out front of my place at One Mile picks up heaps too. The shark boat goes out every day, and you can get on the binoculars and watch them as they pull the shark up.”

When I ask him about the shark program in town with the drumlines and receivers and how the shark issue is being managed, he chuckles. “Manage them,” as he makes air quotes. “When they catch the big ones, they should manage them permanently out of the system. If there’s a three-and-a half metre shark hanging around it’s going to bite someone eventually.”

The white sharks caught on the drumlines over the past five years have almost exclusively been juveniles, all around two, two-and-a-half metres. Increasingly though, sharks north of 3m are now being picked up. “They caught a 3.7m one here a month ago,” says Tom. “That’s a big shark. At that size they’re eating mammals. They’re into bigger stuff… and we’re the slowest bigger stuff out there.”

Even though they’re getting a bit long in the tooth, Tom and Greeny are refusing to slow up and not conceding an inch of territory to the sharks. The only concession they’ve made to fate is both wearing a SharkBanz deterrent. Tom had been wearing one the week before. “The way the shark reacted the other day made me think it was working. The way they flick away, that’s how it reacted. I don’t know if it’s a placebo or not, but we wear them.” He explains their mate Jim doesn’t wear one. “We need him to sit next to us more often to test the placebo theory.”

After surfing being his life for almost 50 years now, he’s philosophical about it all. “What are you gonna do, play golf?” When I suggest it’s probably safer, he replies, pointing down at the front nine. “You seen some of these old blokes hit a golf ball?” It feels like after dealing with the sharks for so long, they no longer keep him up at night. “Luckily, I must be pretty stupid because it doesn’t seem to mess with me.” When I comment that he and Greeny have always been lunatics he corrects me.

“Calculated lunatics.”

Tom picks up his free garlic bread voucher and we’re off to the bistro for lunch. He’s planning to surf this afternoon somewhere; he’s just waiting for Greeny to knock off.

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

When Brett Burcher moved to Forster in August 2022, he was entering a new phase of life. His partner, Holly was due to give birth to their first child at the end of the year, and he was leaving the reefs of his hometown of Ulladulla to move to the low consequence beachbreaks of Forster.

“I’d had a good run down there,” he offers, “and I knew that life wasn’t all about that anyway.” Brett and Holly moved in with Holly’s folks, Donna and Dave just across the road from North One Mile, a protected, white sand town beach. With the baby due in December, Burch was ready to focus on his new role as a dad, exchanging swell missions over South Coast reef for 45-minute wiggles across the road while the baby slept. The new dad bubble. “It was one of those cases where life as you knew it was about to change… then it really did fucking change.”

One Mile Beach is just over the hill from Janie’s but doesn’t feel sharky at all. It’s a mile of unbroken white sand, protected from southerly swells by the bulk of Cape Hawke. The banks are generally terrible, but the North End always seems to offer some kind of surfable wave and occasionally something far better.

North One Mile had been our hang out as teenagers, and it was there one Saturday morning in autumn, 1987 that we emerged from ‘The Hut’ – a nearby clearing in the banksias where we’d smoke weed – to discover Ross Clarke-Jones had paddled out on the same board he’d rode in Mad Wax and was tearing it apart. We all looked at each other, unsure the Mad Weed hadn’t teleported us into our own surf movie.

One Mile is quiet today. Forster Golf Course sits behind it, dog walkers and retirees do laps of it, kids and clubbies swim down the southern end. “It’s just this idyllic strip of sand,” says Brett. “It’s not really a serious surf zone, but it was straight out front, and that’s all that mattered.”

Burch secured some work doing disability care and outdoor mentorship for young crew in town, and as part of that he took them surfing across the road on small days. Some of the kids surfed, so Brett could paddle out with them and sneak a few waves himself. That’s where he was on an autumn morning the following year, when his idyllic world would get a jolt.

The shark, as with most of these local encounters, came out of nowhere from gin clear water. Around 10-foot, it swam in from the left side of Brett’s board as he was looking out to sea, and it was only that he caught a flash as it surged toward him that allowed him to react, pushing his board between him and the shark. The thing was very far from just inquisitive. It was aggro. We know how it ends because Burch is here to tell the story, escaping physically unscathed, but the fact the attack was captured on drone footage allowed a rare insight into how these things happen.

Burch couldn’t watch the footage for weeks but seeing the faces of the crew watching it on the beach, he knew he was lucky. “I knew it was bad, and I knew I’d been lucky. This thing was just in predator mode, ambush mode. You get to watch how quickly they turn and how quickly it happens.” He pauses for a second. “It’s a beautiful thing in a way, like, take all the emotion, all the fear out of it, to watch an animal move like that is pretty amazing. But then being there next to it when it happens isn’t so amazing.”

In the weeks ahead, the attack saw Burch in the room of mirrors as he processed what had just happened… and more to the point, what could have happened. “I was doing the inner work, learning about myself and my reaction to it, but then I was also trying to learn a lot about the sharks as well. I was kind of like, this is my only ticket out of this, in a way. I’ve got to trust the work. But it was a funny time. I was thinking about sharks so much and it was like I manifesting them. They just kept showing up in my life.”

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

Last year a clip popped up on social media from the big July swell on the east coast. Posted by a mate from Forster, it was footage of a big, heaving bommie that for the life of me I couldn’t place. I knew it was local, but where? As the camera panned, I jerried it was out the very end of Bennetts Head, the swell so big it had turned the headland into a point that’d I’d never seen break in 40 years.

Amongst it that day was Joss McNamara. Along with his brothers, Harry and Jack, he’s generally involved in all the big days around town. The McNamara’s are amongst the handful of crew who still tackle Tuncurry Bar, now a shadow of its former self, breaking only on the biggest of swells. The sand out there is long gone, and the sharks have moved in.

“We had a surf there last year,” Joss says of the bar. “It was solid, but it’s semi-novelty wave these days, not drawing sand like it used to.” When I asked how spooked he’d been out there, he replied, “When there’s a bit of juice out there its somewhat peaceful for me. I’m not worried about getting picked off on the edge of the bank. Paddling back in through all that slack water is another matter though. I just put my head down and try not to think about it.”

Joss has surfed down in South Oz and recalls immediately feeling unsettled. It was clear he was in shark country, and he couldn’t shake the feeling the whole time he was there. “You’ve got that anxiety and that haze over a surf down there, but I feels that’s creeping in over on the east coast now. It’s bizarre.”

“That day the young guy got done in Sydney Harbour, there was a nice little south swell here. I was with my brothers, and we rocked up to a spot up north and the waves were good –  7/10, mid-week, no pressure from the missus to be home, no work or distractions – and I just brushed it. Just driving up there copping Triple J saying, ‘Don’t surf’ put it in my mind and we drove back home. That never really happens.”

Like all local surfers, Joss has seen white sharks in the water, and whether subconsciously or not, he’d run through scenarios in his head about what he’d do if one of them turned on him. “We generally chase waves where there’s nobody around, and you’re surfing the back of Janie’s or Sharkies, wherever. It’s on your mind a lot, so I’ve always tried to have a plan.” That plan came in handy one morning.

Joss was surfing Janie’s  with Joey Haddon and Brett Burcher, who was having his first surf back after being hit at One Mile. Burch had been carrying some psychological baggage and decided he needed to get back in the water. “It was blue, pristine perfect little wedges,” recalls Joss of the conditions. “Joey was out there on his own with his kids. I was a bit hyper vigilant because I was taking Brett for his first cruise back out there. It was typical male approach. It wasn’t a psych session it was, you know, let’s just do it.”

You know what happens next.

Joss, Joey and Brett were sitting together when Joss saw it, a young white cruising inside them, just off the edge of the bank, in waist deep water a few feet from shore. “It was almost comical,” he recalls, “to see this little two-and-a-half metre white and where it was in relation to where we were. Like, are you really kidding? It was basically drydocking itself where you kick out.”

Joss turned to Joey and Brett and said calmly, “Boys, come in close, there’s a little white shark between us and the beach. It’s just cruising but keep an eye on it. We’re bigger than it, just relax. Don’t splash. Don’t rush it, just let it know we’re moving slowly toward it.” The shark moved on, and the boys paddled into the beach. A white shark swimming through the lineup isn’t unusual in the area, to the point where some guys are happy to stay in the water if they feel the shark is small enough and just cruising. But for surfers to hold their ground like that, and have a response already workshopped, was straight out of the Greenough playbook… and a glimpse into a future where shark encounters are normalised. In Forster for now however, this is where they are.

“My brothers are crazy confident divers, and I learned lot off them,” explains Joss. “They’ll swim at a shark if it comes at them underwater. Don’t turn sideways, don’t provoke it, but just let it know you’re another apex. I’d love it if there was more awareness around that, but it could open people to thinking it was safe to do that all the time, which it isn’t.”

“His pulse didn’t get above 45 I reckon,” recalls Burch of the incident. “Just the way he delivered it was so calm and confident, and so immediately, so were we. Mate, I really needed that.” At that point, of his last four surfs, Burch had seen white sharks three times, including the attack at One Mile. “They were just repeatedly showing up and testing me. It was a bizarre feeling, like… such a bizarre feeling. I was just, like, what’s going on?  This was something I hadn’t had in my life before, and I was already pretty traumatised, so I’m like, have I just got to kind of keep reliving this?”

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

On the Thursday afternoon I took a drive down to the Palms.

I could do the drive with my eyes shut. For surfers from Forster, Pacific Palms has always felt like an escape, even though it’s just 15 minutes south. It’s also felt like an escape for surfers from Newcastle and Sydney too, the beaches of Boomerang, Blueys and Cellito conjuring core memories for a generation of surfers who made it a regular detour off the Pacific Highway. On its day its otherworldly. The cleanest water anywhere on the North Coast, the best backbeaches in Australia. The whole thing strung like jewels.

It was quiet back when I lived here, and outside of summer, it’s still quiet today. Many of the places are multimillion dollar holiday houses and sit empty. There’s a small local surf crew who hold it down and they largely have the place to themselves, which used to be idyllic but, for local surfers anyway, isn’t so much anymore.

Mick Moltzen was the best young guy in the water at Tuncurry but has lived down at Boomerang for almost 20 years, raising three kids with wife, Lara. He’s just knocked off work building and as we crack a beer the three boys walk in the door from school. Omar, Reko and Albe all surf, and are at the age where it consumes pretty much their whole lives. The tide is too high at Boomerang this afternoon and there are no waves, so Reko comes out and goes, “I’m gonna go over and have a spear on my own.”

“No, you’re not!” Barks his old man. It’s overcast, raining, and there’s not another soul in the water.

Like all the surfing dads in town, Mick is wrestling with his kids being in the water. “The boys have a rule, they’re not allowed to surf if nobody is out and I’m not there,” he explains. “It’s constant anxiety in the water. When my kids surf, they’re oblivious to the danger. I paddle out and I’m the bait. I sit furthest out. I’ve had a good enough innings; I’d rather it be me. But Omar is 14 and Reko is 12 and they tend to paddle away from me now. Over those months June to September with the whale runs I don’t take them to Tuncurry, Elim or Janie’s. Then it depends on numbers in the water for Bulls Paddock.”

When I ask him how many local kids are still surfing, he replies, “Ten per cent, at best.”

Mick hasn’t surfed Tuncurry in a long time; the Tuncurry Bar in 25 years. “Tuncurry as a town, the community is scarred. It’s quiet. It’s sad to see. Growing up it was such a competitive and hardcore spot. There were heavy locals. You got in anyone’s way you got sent to the rockpool. Now it’s a ghost town.”  We talk about Bruce Thomson, the local postie at Tuncurry who used to be one of the main guys in the water. In a twist of fate, Thommo’s nephew, Tim was killed by a great white while surfing north of Coffs five years ago. It knocked Bruce around and he hasn’t surfed much since.

But while the government swooped in after the fatal attack at Tuncurry and placed SMART drumlines and shark pingers around, that hardware stops at Janie’s. There’s nothing further south than that, so the Palms crew are on their own. Some crew believe there are more sharks congregating in town, others think it’s worse down at the Palms. Who knows? The very first attack however, a decade before the current run even started, was down at Cellito in 2007.

Dave Sparkes had been hit early one morning, launched into the air, the shark fortunately taking his board and not him. The shark was identified from the bite as a  3m white shark, but at the time most put the attack down to the fact he was surfing the lake mouth at Smiths, which only opened to the ocean every few years after heavy rain. The attack was an anomaly. The pattern was a decade away.

The year after the pattern began, the WSL launched a qualifying contest at Boomerang.

Held in February and running annually for four years, sharks were regularly an issue. In June 2023 however, the NSW State Titles at Boomerang had to be abandoned after sharks continued to cruise through the lineup. Omar Moltzen and his mates had been surfing North Boomerang that day, and the contest ski raced up and let them know a big white was heading up the beach toward them.

At this point Terry Lee shows up, with his young bloke, Sol.

Terry – ‘Otto’ since he was a kid – grew up in Seal Rocks, back when it was still a fishing town, full of ‘bush ticks’ living and drinking rough, connected to the Lakes Way by the old dirt road. With older brother Andy, the pair would drive into town on big swells to charge Tuncurry Bar. Their old man Maurie had been one of the original Seal Rocks fishermen, so Otto has seen the place change radically in his time.

The sharks at Tuncurry tend to all be heading north, which means they’ve passed Seals on their way up from the great white nursery in Stockton Bight. The first bit of bitumen on the old Seal Rocks Road famously had ‘Save Seal Rocks: The Last Frontier’ sprayed on it, but not even the sharks have been able to save it. The houses at Boat Beach in Seals now go for $5 million, you can’t swing a cat there in summer, and the Treachery camp is booked out months in advance. It’s boomed despite the sharks. Nobody seems to care it’s on the Great White Highway.

Don’t get Otto started on it. “Can we put in the story how they raise the price for nine holes at Sandbar Golf Course over summer?” He and Sol recount driving their ski back along Yagen Beach, coming back from surfing the Gibber, and seeing a conga line of whites, 10, maybe 12, all swimming north. “I’m on the back going, ‘Geez, this one looks like it wants to have a go here!’ laughs Otto, who wasn’t laughing at the time.

Mick and his kids are members of Boomerang Boardriders, and the tiny club have made the national boardriders final at Burleigh in a few weeks’ time. Both Mick and Omar are surfing in the team. It’s a huge effort from a club with just a few dozen members, but for Mick it’s almost as much a relief to get out of town for a week. “I can honestly say it is. Nowhere feels as bad as home. Not even Lennox.”

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

The week before I arrived, my brother bought a drone.

He bought it to keep an eye on his young bloke, Dorian in the surf, although it’s as much for his own peace of mind. He’s lived through the shark experience and continues to live through it. It’s hard to escape around here. He lives at North One Mile, four doors down from Brett Burcher, and like Burch he’d once believed One Mile was relatively safe. He found out firsthand last summer it wasn’t.

“There’d been a few sharks pinging, so I knew there were a couple around,” he recalls of the day, “but Dorian had a new board, and it was school holidays so the surf club down the beach had the drones up. I thought we could surf out in front of the drone, and it would be as safe as it’s going to be. There were other kids there, so we paddled out, straight into the path of a three-metre white. It was literally just sitting there. There was a wave there luckily, so I swung and pushed Dorian onto it, then the shark came between me and the shore before it swung out again and I caught a wave in. As we got in the drone operator came running up the beach and goes, ‘You don’t wanna go out there! There’s a big white!’ I said, ‘Bit late for that, mate.’”

He doesn’t blame them but It highlighted for Chook the limitations of the drones. “The guy was looking wide which is where you’d expect to see them, but this shark was right on the inside… and a lot of them are on the inside. You can only really use the drones over really small areas, and that’s what I’m doing with Dorian now.”

Growing up as a surfer in town today is a very different experience compared to what Chook grew up with. “Dorian is 10 and he’s seen two sharks out in the water now, and he would’ve seen no less than 15 from shore. I’d seen one shark here until I was 30. It’s changed the way we go about things that’s for sure.”

As a Bite Club member, Chook is right across the whole suite of mitigation that got rolled out in the waters off town four years ago, after the fatal attack at Tuncurry that he found himself in the middle of. There are 12 drumlines and two pingers spread between Tuncurry and Janie’s Corner, while the local clubbies fly drones during holiday season. The NSW Department of Primary Industries originally left Forster-Tuncurry off the first full-time roll out of shark mitigation, but the fatal Tuncurry attack and further attacks up the coast saw them roll it out over the whole state.

“From a research standpoint I can see why they do it,” he says of the SMART drumline program, which tags and releases the sharks, “but it don’t think it offers much protection. And I think there are huge holes in their drone capability.” We discuss the natural limitations of the mitigation program that’s there now, which had been lauded as state of the art when it was launched. “It feels old already,” he offers.

It feels like a precarious time. White shark sightings are increasing, the sharks themselves seem to be getting bigger, the mitigation program has stalled and the guys running the shark program have largely disengaged from the public. The general feeling is nobody in town feels any safer. But while last time they wanted more hardware, what they want now is information.

After a decade, there are over 1500 tagged white sharks in the NSW shark program now, yet  the public has no access to data around where these sharks are beyond them setting off the local pingers. There’s certainly no interpretation of that data being made public, exploring patterns in it, where white sharks are congregating, when and why. If the tag and release program has a scientific purpose, where’s the science? The reason for Chook is simple: “They don’t want the public to see what’s really happening out there.”

The space vacated by the government shark program is being filled by citizen scientists. Chook follows a guy named Ronnie Vickery, who runs a social account under the Bitemetrix handle. Ronnie analyses factors like ocean currents, temperatures and upwellings along the NSW coastline, and uses them as predictors for where dangerous sharks are likely to turn up. He then gives a green, yellow and red rating for each area. Many of the surfers in town follow the account, which is run voluntarily and hasn’t posted since February. They feel this is what the government should be doing.

There is a general sense amongst surfers in town that the DPI has reached their limit as to how involved they’re going to get. They’re equal parts resigned to it and pissed off. Some feel that the government want to avoid state liability by pushing the onus back on personal responsibility. Some feel they’re trying to manage people more than they manage sharks. Some feel they don’t have the appetite for getting their hands dirty and controlling shark numbers. Almost all feel they’re way out of their depth and have no idea how to handle the problem.

Chook is clear what he feels the way ahead here is. “Theres two fronts. One is the understanding of what brings them in and where they’re going to be. Then it’s going to be some sort of deterrent you can strap onto your leg that really works.” He feels there’s a technological solution waiting to be developed. “I’m big on the R&D in mitigation,” he says. “If a tech billionaire came along and threw money at it, the program would be funded and in a couple of years you’d get something that would be really effective. It’s going backwards right now. The one thing we had was gone,” he says in reference to Shark Shield going out of business. Their technology has been bought by FCS, who are currently working with scientists to develop it. FCS is owned by a guy named John Gowing… who lives down at Pacific Palms.

Chook muses the local council might want to get involved in helping out, before realising there’s no chance of that. For reasons known only to themselves, the local council recently rebranded the area as the ‘Barrington Coast’, named after the Barrington Tops, 150km inland. Even though the only local shark fatality was a tourist, no local authority has shown much interest. They’re in denial. Mayor Vaughan would be right at home here. The week after I was in town, Forster hosted a major national triathlon event. They had to delay the start of the swim leg at Forster Main Beach for an hour after a three-and-a-half metre white did a lap of the course.

For now, the local guys have got to do it themselves. “The only way I’ll let Dorian surf now is I’ll pack a trauma kit, put the drone up and I’ll sit on the beach and keep it on him. I’ve got a whistle system with him: one long is blast paddle in, three short blasts is stay still, I’m paddling out.”

He stops for a second before adding, dryly, “Takes the fun out of it a bit.”

*                                 *                                 *                                 *

The last time I’d caught up with Joey Haddon was down at Bells a few years back.

He’d driven the family down in a rented RV to compete in the National Indigenous Titles, which he’d won a few years earlier. He had one surf at Bells that day before news came through that the Victorian government were locking the state down at midnight after a Covid outbreak. He packed the family up and bolted for the border, stopping only for a three-hour session at the Tullamarine wavepool on the way through.

Joey hasn’t changed in the three decades I’ve known him: never a bad surf, rarely a bad day, but this shark thing has really got him pretty twisted up. His two older boys, Lakey and Aloha are at an age where keeping them out of the water is impossible. “It’s a big problem, hey,” he offers. “We’re riding the foamball at the moment, just hanging on. I’ve got two boys who love it just as much as me, and it’s tricky. The boys are so strong with it, my two. They’re so connected with surfing and they’re trying to be smart about it, but it’s been a rough ride for sure.”

Like all surfing dads in town, Joey’s had the talk with his kids. “I said, ‘Boys, just be careful out there. It’s a big problem and we didn’t have this problem when I was your age. It wasn’t a thing. Their eyes were lit up a bit for sure, but I slept better after we had the chat. You’ve got to be honest with them.”

Joey has been one of the key figures in the resurgence of the local boardriders club, FBI –  Forster Boardriders Incorporated, which had its heyday back in the late ‘80s when dangerous men in brightly coloured clothes roamed the beaches. For the past decade, the club has been able to build its numbers despite the shadow of sharks in the water. It’s a family club now more than anything, and that’s become the predominate surf energy in town.

But running a boardriders round with the spectre of a shark swimming through a junior heat presents some issues. FBI have their own resident drone pilot – a Mexican legend named Pep – who does hundreds of volunteer hours a year keeping eyes on the water. The club takes it seriously. They have to. “It’s on our agenda every meeting with the committee,” says Joey. “They pull a little crew aside to discuss it so it’s not too hectic.” He says they’ve just been given permission to run a generator and fly a drone in the National Park at Janie’s and Bulls Paddock, although he thinks they’re unlikely to run a round out there.

It’s a heavy responsibility for a gathering that’s supposed to be a bit of fun. The previous club president, ‘Doogs’ has stepped away after years building the club up. The job came with pressure. “He was really worried about anything happening on his watch,” say Joey. “As president of the club he makes a call to surf, but we made it really clear to him and guys like Pep that it doesn’t sit with them.” He cackles, “Everyone’s keen and we’re mad surfers. We’re just a bunch of mad people!”

The week I was in town FBI had sign-ups for the new season and got a rude shock. They’d had 124 members last season, but only 58 signed on this year. Everyone’s at a bit of a loss as to why. There’s hasn’t been a bad shark incident in a while, but some think the bull shark attacks in Sydney the week before might have spooked people. Or maybe it’s just shark fatigue, and for some parents footy and soccer seem a lot safer.

“It’s more than halved,” says Joey of the number of young crew in the water, day-to-day. “I can’t walk to the beach or go to the beach without someone making a comment about sharks and that’s hard especially with the groms around listening. If it’s sunny and the waves are on there’s a bit of a crew in the water, but it comes in waves. That’s the scary part. People let their guard down and you get a bit blasé and you surf, surf, surf again, then out of the blue the sharks are back.”

A decade after the sharks moved in, it feels like the surf culture of the town is dying. Between the sharks on one side, and the retirees on the other, it feels like the life is being squeezed out of the place. What remains are the young tradies, a staunch older crew telling sharks to get off their lawn, and young families second-guessing whether it’s a good idea for the kids to surf or not. There’s no alternative surf scene… there’s little surf scene full stop. It’s kind of sad that it can happen to a place so naturally blessed, but the issue here is the place has become too naturally blessed. And as Joey points out, it’s hard to make an issue out of this.

He shows me a video on his phone, shot from the back of a local trawler. There’s probably 50 whaler sharks scrapping over a feed. “And god knows how many nurses are around, they’re thick as,” says Joey of the local grey nurse shark population. “There’s more of those than retirees! It’s like a tourist attraction now that stuff, they’re everywhere.”

The grey nurse is listed as critically endangered, although you wouldn’t know it if you walk around the foreshore of Wallis Lake. They’re everywhere, feeding on fish scraps. Years ago, we used to fish a spot called The Pinnacle out off Cape Hawke, where grey nurses would congregate with everything else. They were getting smashed, so it was designated a marine park 20 years ago. At the same time, the state government has bought back many of the local commercial fishing licences.

The result of all this is that while white shark numbers have rebounded, so too it seems has everything else. Humpback whales occasionally swim into Wallis Lake, grey nurses hang around the cleaning tables. There are even Australian fur seals back at Seal Rocks for the first time since the 1960s. The water is alive. “You sit out there and you can smell fish,” offers Joey. “I surfed North Oney a couple of days ago and you could smell the fish. They’re out the back just smacking each other.” Tuncurry in Worimi means ‘plenty of fish’, and the water around town might be starting to resemble what the waters Joey’s ancestors swam and paddled and hunted in thousands of years ago.

Joey summarises the conundrum shared by pretty much every local surfer this way. “There’s just too many sharks, full stop, but I’ve sat and thought about it, and I’m like, do I hate these things or not? I don’t hate ‘em… they just scare the living hell of out of me. I don’t want to kill them, but something needs to change. We need a change, whatever that change may be. This place is beautiful. The surfing has slowed up but the rest will hold. Then hopefully we can turn a corner at some point. The waves are our place, that’s our culture. We’re saltwater people, we can’t stay away from it.”