The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  He refused to take it. He didn’t say he would be lonely travelling by himself. He said the company was too important and the economy too chancy. He said he didn’t want to be away from the office for too long while things were busy. Instead he took his first time off since my mother’s funeral and flew to Singapore for ten days.

  He brought us all back duty-free gifts. Mine was an Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter. I was surprised and delighted. It was the best present he’d ever given me. The office typewriters I used every day, the industrial-strength, cigarette-burned Siemens machines chained to their wheeled metal stands, were tools of the trade, as useful and as mundane as a telephone or a desk. What those heavy-duty models plodded through – their punctuation marks and lower-case es and os punching holes through the copy paper – was work. What the little blue-green Olivetti began to write at home was everything else.

  The Olivetti began tapping out magazine stories of shark attacks and Dutch shipwrecks and mutinies along the west coast. I sent them off to barber-shop magazines like Australasian Post and Weekend and People. Australasian Post in particular liked shark attacks and it liked the maulings to be described in gruesome detail. For badly needed extra money, I was happy to oblige.

  The West Australian, stern paper of record, frowned on its staff doing outside work for racy Eastern States magazines. Even its stablemates across the office corridor, the lighter afternoon Daily News and Saturday Weekend News, were regarded as barely proper. So the Olivetti and I indulged in this hack work under various writerly noms de plume (Scott Conrad, Joe Fitzgerald, Ernest Forster) and with a delicious, illicit sense of freedom.

  With my first writing cheque from Australasian Post I took Ruth to dinner at the Sea Crest, on Cottesloe Beach. The high tide lapped on the sand below us as we ate Steak Diane and drank Porphyry Pearl and watched the sun sink like a red whale into the horizon.

  We were commenting favourably on the glorious sunset and behaving like sophisticated restaurant patrons when it suddenly occurred to me that our meal had actually been paid for by the unfortunate Simeon Ettelson, mauled by the tiger shark just below our table.

  I looked down at the inoffensive waves breaking on the soft sand below and raised my glass to Mr Ettelson. I began this small toast feeling amused at the coincidence, but by the time I put my glass down I felt unsteady and quite moved. Almost misty.

  As I headed to the Gents to splash water on my face, I wondered if it could be the Porphyry Pearl. A minute later I knew it was. I hadn’t drunk wine before. I was a father, a husband and a newshound but I was still two years off legal drinking age.

  I’d grown up on the ocean and river shores. In younger days my friends and I had crabbed and prawned and fished, patrolled the rock pools and reefs with our gidgies and kylies, our versions of Aboriginal fish-spears and boomerangs. We knew the tides and reefs, the hot easterlies and blustery west-erlies of our coast. We swam in competitions at the Crawley and Claremont baths, earned our lifesaving bronze medallions, skin-dived, paddled canoes, built rafts, rowed boats and crewed on ancient varnished Gwen-12s and VJs and fourteen-footers. I’d even rescued a couple of swimmers in trouble in the surf – one of them a sportswriter who was so embarrassed he never forgave me.

  Everyone I knew lived near the riverbank or seashore. Some came from families who’d been boatbuilders for four generations. Two brothers, Kim and Richie Male, even came from a pearling family who operated luggers out of Broome in the far north-west. They’d come south to school where Richie and I had been in the swimming team together.

  All this coastal experience and I’d never seen a man-eating shark in its natural habitat. Nor had my friends. All I’d seen were potential man-hurters, plenty of them, but nothing that looked as if it could devour me even if it wanted to. Every summer, of course, there were ‘sightings’ of man-eaters reported in the papers. But never by anyone I knew.

  So why did I think of man-eating sharks every time I dived into the sea? Not that it prevented me swimming every day. I thought about them, then tried to put them out of my mind. But coming over the hill at North Cottesloe any still, hot, midday and seeing the human bodyslick floating out to sea, all that sweat and suntan oil, I thought of berley, the rich, greasy groundbait that fishermen tossed in the water to attract fish. Same principle. And sharks were supposed to have a miraculous sense of smell.

  I favoured the idea of shark nets, like the ones I’d read they used off the beaches of Sydney and Durban, South Africa. They set the nets off every beach and moved them each week. The success rate in Sydney was one hundred percent; no one had been killed on an ocean beach since the nets were installed in 1931. It wasn’t just that the nets trapped sharks, but they prevented them setting up a habitat. Intruders were kept out. A shark never got to feel at home and establish territory. I liked the certainty of nets. If our beaches were netted I knew I’d be a more confident person, happier and calmer. Then again, I might lose the shark-attack scoop of my life.

  It had to be that sharks were buried deep in my collective unconscious. I’d read this somewhere in my research, too, and I believed it. Clearly some of us were born with it – like the chicken’s instinct for the shadow of the hawk. It was amazing what I saw in the back-froth of a snapping wave, in the darker patchwork ripples of weed and reef. Was that surge just a diving shag? Was the shadow really a passing cloud? Or the first and last hint of the white pointer’s charge? This, I thought, was obviously the underlying anxiety of my life.

  One blustery Saturday afternoon in mid-November I was bodysurfing with Richie Male and three or four other fellows at North Cottesloe. Richie was seventeen, two years younger than I. He was a joker and a good swimmer, an easygoing boy. He was in good spirits that afternoon because his final school examinations had finished the day before.

  The early summer breeze was chopping up the beach surf so we thought we’d try the waves on the Slimy. This was a limestone and coral reef between Cottesloe and North Cottesloe carpeted with spongy, mossy weed. Even at low tide when only a few inches of water covered the reef you could usually bodysurf on the Slimy, skim over it with no worse injury than a grazed knee or stubbed toe.

  I was there for a quick surf. With my new responsibilities I’d only an hour to spare. Of course I didn’t mention this to Richie or the others when I spotted him and began chatting. I shut up about it. Even twelve months later the whispering and gossiping were continuing, from my mother’s acquaintances, from girls I knew, even from ones I didn’t know. The reaction from boys wasn’t so bad: just simple teasing and total incomprehension. None of them, certainly not a kid like Richie, would understand.

  Conditions at the Slimy weren’t good, but at least there was some surf – a small reef-break at the Cottesloe edge. By about three-thirty, however, the tide was rising. The surf rolling over the reef was cloudy and swirling with kelp and sand. I’d never seen so much seaweed. Then the surf began to dump heavily on the back of the reef.

  There were four or five of us crowded together out on the reef, stumbling and splashing and getting in each other’s way. Richie and I started using the back of the reef as a foothold to launch ourselves into the waves breaking on the southern rim. The idea was that they’d carry us diagonally off the rocks and over the safer sandy-bottomed basin beyond.

  This plan wasn’t a success. The waves had too much water in them; the tide was too high and the waves had no shape. The water was now shoulder-deep and murky. You had to feel for the reef with your feet, thrust them blindly down into the kelp and search for a crevice with your toes and heels. Who knew what was down there? In the currents the kelp seemed alive. One moment it was pressing against you all sleek and silky, stroking your thighs and stomach; the next it was scratching and lashing you.

  We soon got tired of being buffeted by the surf and the undertow and the rolling kelp. All of us were swearing in exasperation and dancing and stumbling on the slippery weed and rocks. It was hard to get a grip on the reef, much less position yourself o
n a wave. And yet you needed to catch a wave to get in to shore. To think about anything other than the next breaker and your own sudden intention was impossible. You had to concentrate.

  As if conditions weren’t difficult enough for bodysurfing, three board riders paddled out on heavy plywood boards and began cutting in on us. Those knife-nosed monsters were the last straw. They could slice right through you. With every wave-surge one or other of us gave up and swam, staggered and rolled through the froth to the shore. When I got to the beach I saw a straggling line of figures trudging back ahead of me along the shoreline to North Cottesloe. I headed back, too, and kept walking home.

  Night always changes the sea. Next morning it was calm and slick as I cruised the coast road in the Anglia, desperate for a shark story to make this humdrum Sunday day-shift worthwhile. Sharks were in the news. There had been several ‘sightings’ already this season and it was only mid-November.

  Passing Cottesloe, I noticed four surfboats strung out in a line beyond the reef, riding the light swell. The sweep oarsmen were keeping them parallel to the beach. On the boats there was no sign of physical effort or excitement. Their movements were so calm and measured they could have been fishing. As I passed, I wondered if the crews were trying some new training manoeuvre. One thing was sure: if they weren’t rowing they weren’t chasing any sharks out to sea.

  I drove further along the West Coast Highway, and from a sandy rise where suburbanites were beginning to build new brick houses in the dunes, I looked out into the low swell. And I actually saw dark shapes gliding there. Perhaps five or six of them. Gliding, not rolling and surfacing. There was no doubt. Not dolphins, sharks. I couldn’t have been more pleased. All morning I followed them north.

  Then a motor sounded above the shallows. The shark-spotter plane, a little show-off Cessna, was after them, too. There went my story. I could have cried. Even if the plane didn’t herd them out to sea, the local surfboats would give chase. The shark alarm was already sounding back on Scarborough Beach.

  I lost them then anyway, somewhere in the dunes between Scarborough and Trigg. The new breeze was just beginning to shirr the surface of the ocean. Once that happened you couldn’t see anything from the shore. Through the binoculars I saw the pattern and colour of the sea changing fast: small choppy waves darkening from turquoise to blue and losing their clarity. I saw that Rottnest Island had shed its mirages and returned to its proper anchorage. The sou’westerly had lifted the heat haze and brought reality back.

  On the two-way, the news editor was philosophical. ‘You’ve still got a story. Shark Pack Threatens Beaches. Get some quotes. Over and Out.’

  Somehow my shark story grew from a snappy news item into an information-choked feature article. Of course I had my background material already. My story was bursting with historical knowledge. For ‘colour’ I dropped in a couple of quotes from the obliging Ted ‘Sharky’ Nelson. But my coup was to bring in science.

  I got ‘the State’s leading ichthyologist’, Dr Byron McIntee, to leave his Sunday barbecue and come to the phone to declare that the sharks I’d followed up the coast were probably from the family Carcharhinidae, otherwise known as requiem sharks. Requiem sharks included some of the biggest and most voracious sharks: the tiger, whaler, bull shark, blue shark and grey reef shark. Dr McIntee said, and I duly wrote, they were characterised by ‘a nictitating membrane and a heterocercal tail’.

  Requiem sharks were everywhere, he said. They travelled long distances each day and migrated according to seasonal changes. They had a huge range of habitat: river estuaries, tidal pools, the open ocean, muddy bays and coral reefs. They weren’t put off by fresh water or hypersalinity and were found in all tropical and temperate seas.

  The biggest requiem sharks were the tigers, reaching about twenty-four feet. They were among the most important marine predators and scavengers, eating a ‘broad spectrum of prey’: bony fishes, other sharks and rays, crustaceans, carrion, sea-turtles, sea-snakes, sea-birds and large marine mammals.

  At last. ‘And humans, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s not sensationalise that aspect.’

  Naturally I asked him about the name. He said that with its funereal associations requiem was more stirring than tiger or whaler. Exactly. I asked him to elaborate. He said it was from the obsolete French requiem, a variant of requin – ‘shark’. And obviously influenced by the gloomier associations of the word requiem.

  Gloomy? This was more like it.

  ‘A requiem, as you know, is music for dead people,’ he said.

  ‘So,’ I asked eagerly, ‘their name comes from their habit of killing people?’ I quickly added the obligatory question. ‘What are the chances of a West Australian swimmer being killed by a shark?’

  His sigh was loud in my ear. ‘You’ve got more chance of dying from a bee sting or a lightning strike or murder. You’ve got several hundred thousand times more chance of dying in a car crash on the way to the beach.’

  Did scientists have no imagination at all? While he talked I was thinking up a heading. Requiem For WA Swimmers? sounded pretty good to me.

  He sighed again. ‘I hope you people aren’t going to beat this thing up.’

  When I arrived back at Fremantle, Dare grunted, ‘There you are. I need the Anglia,’ and speeded off down Queen Street. In the two hours when his and my shifts would normally cross he was nowhere to be seen.

  Next morning I was at the newsagent’s early to get the paper. The sub-editors had cut my thousand words to ten paragraphs. Cut hardly describes it. My shark story was more than filleted, more than slashed. It was flensed. The story ran on page seven with a single-column, much-used stock picture of Ted ‘Sharky’ Nelson, not a word from my ichthyologist, and the heading Shark Hunter Warns of Beach Threat. Dare, meanwhile, had got himself a story on page two.

  How did I know Dare’s story would be about Richie Male? I felt a complete lack of surprise. My brain turned the shock around, took it back a stage and changed it into something like retrospective premonition.

  At once my brain was saying I’d always suspected what had happened. I’d suspected it in the lessening of our numbers when we were out on the reef. I’d suspected it when I kicked the weed from around my legs and stumbled ashore. I’d known it for sure when I saw the searching surfboats.

  Student Drowns at Cottesloe. I felt no surprise at all. It seemed like I’d known many things like this for the past year or more, things I’d mysteriously witnessed, or hadn’t acted on. I didn’t feel numb either. Frankly, I had to struggle to keep my attention on it. My mind was already veering away and racing towards some other narrative.

  Dare’s piece was jammed into a longer story on the weekend’s rough seas and surf rescues. It was obvious his source had been the police. There was nothing of Richie’s family’s background in the pearling industry, no reminder that a pearler’s livelihood was always at risk from sharks, tropical hurricanes and a multitude of disasters on and in the sea. It didn’t mention the irony of the pearling industry’s youngest son drowning on a suburban beach down south in the city. Nor did it say who his companions had been when he drowned.

  It said his body, trapped in thick seaweed, had been found by a surfboat crew in knee-deep water only fifteen yards from shore. He’d been missing since Saturday afternoon. The police thought he might have become dazed after being dumped by a wave. The police officer in charge of the search said the seaweed was so thick near the shore it was ‘suicidal’ to swim there.

  The body had received a knock on the head and other abrasions which may have been caused by rocks. It had not been disturbed by fish. This surprised me. I’d always believed there were these tiny sea-lice that could reduce a body to a skeleton in twenty-four hours.

  CHEERING UP

  My father’s hard work was paying off. His tyre factory was well under way. Head office increasingly sought his opinion on a range of matters. But as he now told the friends and neighbours who dropped around on Sunday evenin
gs to cheer him up – the men with beer, the women with a week’s supply of his favourite offal treats (tripe, kidneys, brains, lamb’s fry) – there was one question worrying the company that they might be able to help him with.

  Although he quickly changed the subject if Bill or Jan, or even I, the married man, drifted in, I overheard him several times, after the third or fourth round of drinks, canvassing opinions on this curious matter. He put the question deadpan, and phrased it carefully, and his solemn expression didn’t change when they guffawed or, in the case of some of the women, affected shock.

  ‘Should Dunlop get into condoms?’ he’d ask.

  What? I couldn’t believe I’d heard right. I couldn’t imagine him asking this if my mother were around. But I had to admit it was an attention-grabber.

  When the tittering stopped, he’d tell them stoutly how Dunlop had once made condoms for the nation, but had been forced to dump them fifty years ago when a Catholic became chairman.

  ‘Shame!’ someone always cried.

  He’d relate how one of the shrewder employees, Eric Ansell, a former ship’s purser with an eye for an opportunity, had bought Dunlop’s condom machine, resigned from the company, and started making them himself. Over the years Ansell Rubber had kept making them, but had also branched out into less secretive latex products – surgical and household gloves, babies’ feeding teats, party balloons, hot-water bottles and so on. But naturally Ansell was best known for its condoms.

  Here Hilton Wittaker or some other life-of-the-party felt bound to butt in: ‘Let’s hear it for French letters!’ Some other fellow muttered, ‘Hooray for Frenchies!’ Then Gordon Beavis or Jim Lehmann or Ken Dengate would join in the hilarity by chortling, ‘frangers!’ and ‘raincoats!’ and ‘rubbers!’ and ‘safes!’.