"He tried his whole life to warn people of things to come and now it’s happening."
If you were a little boy growing up in that long-gone version of Australia in the seventies and eighties, you knew the name Vic Hislop, a beefy shark fisherman whose skin wore a lingering fragrance of shark blood.
Vic would drive his little dinghy into the wilds, deploy multiple lines simultaneously from his boat to tire out these enormous sharks then deliver, as the shark came alongside, the coup de grace – a steel-jacketed bullet from a high-powered rifle into the White or tiger’s brain.
As he wrote in his self-published Shark Man (1993),
“They cruise around 24 hours a day tearing apart family-oriented animals such as dolphins and dugong, eating or maiming the young as well as their mother and father… Surely the creator must have realised the terrible imbalance and injustice and must have put me here to help and restore the balance and justice for all the gentle creatures of the sea”.
He was also into the protection of non-dangerous sharks, grey nurses etc.
Towards the end of his public life, Vic was the British pop artist Damien Hirst’s go-to shark man. Beginning in 1991, the Australian shark hunter supplied and prepared a dozen sharks for the British artist’s installations, most of them destined for exhibitions selling for millions of dollars apiece.
It was Hislop who hauled in the 14-foot tiger shark from Hervey Bay, Queensland, that Hirst preserved in formaldehyde as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the piece that turned him into a household name in the art world. Hislop’s fee for catching and shipping the shark ran to around £6,000, a rounding error against the roughly $8 million the finished work later fetched.
By 2005 the original specimen was falling apart inside its tank, forcing Hirst to ring Hislop again. This time Hislop delivered five sharks to a UK warehouse, three more tiger sharks plus a great white, and threw one in at no charge, so the work could be restored.
Obvs, it all got a bit too much for the shifting tastes of the mainstream populace and Vic soon disapeared from our screens.
Anyway, the modern incarnation of Vic Hislop, BeachGrit habitué Joel Nancarrow, has written movingly of Vic, now seventy-nine, and hopes he can help bring a few viewers to Vic’s YouTube channel.
Anyone that has ever fished/swam/known what a shark was will know This man.
His names always mentioned by people asking what he would do in shark attack posts.
I’ve never really spoken about him in my posts because he has done a lifetime of incredible things and doesn’t owe anyone a thing.
If I have a question about white sharks, I call Vic, if I need to know something I can’t afford to be wrong on with whites, I call Vic, this man has forgotten more about sharks since breakfast than we could hope to learn in 10 lifetimes, he was and will always be ahead of his time with Knowledge.
He tried his whole life to warn people of things to come and now it’s happening, he may not shark fish anymore but he’s had a gut full of this stuff and asked if I can help get his YouTube channel out there and he’s uploading everything that used to get hidden before it ever made the media that genuinely would have saved so many people.
I grew up in awe of this bloke and hopefully this stuff he’s about to release finishes what he worked his whole life for.
I’ll turn the comments off in this one for obvious reasons, he’d still turn everyone of them inside out but they don’t deserve the chance to have a say.
I’ll post the link in the comments to his stuff on YouTube, I’ve seen some of it and after I post this, I’m having the night off to watch the rest as it is unbelievable!!!!!!
Interesting, yes?