If it bleeds, it leads – the old newsroom term for the allure of horror – is one of the great survivors of shrinking newspapers and their strangled budgets. Indeed, as accidents require minimal journalistic analysis and their aftermath is frequently captured on cellphone cameras, they’re even cheaper and easier fodder for news editors everywhere – especially those who put together numbing television news bulletins.
So it was at twilight on January’s last Monday when a bull shark attacked 29-year-old Sydney microbiologist Lauren O’Neill as she took a dip in the warm evening waters of Elizabeth Bay, the leafy inner Sydney sanctum.
Fortunately, she was close enough to struggle to a wharf ladder, trailing her bloodied, broken leg. Her cries were heard by many in the surrounding waterfront apartments and they rushed to help – among them a vet who had that day bought compression bandages because she feared just such an event.
Happily, O’Neill is recovering – although less than helpfully aided by the ambulance officer who posted online graphic photos of her injuries; perhaps the tabloid gore culture has wiped more boundaries.
Still, her escape and the rapid, life-saving aid she received provided the basis for a week of intensive shark coverage in the Sydney media – the good and the garbage. My old colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald, the former rugby international turned author Peter FitzSimons, a man with an eye for colourful history, recounted the story of fisherman Bert Hobson, who, in 1935, hooked a huge tiger shark off Sydney Heads.
He towed the beast to his brother Charlie Hobson’s famous Coogee Aquarium, where the shark recovered and quickly drew the punters – until, on Anzac Day, before a crowd of returned servicemen and their families, it disgorged a human arm, crudely tattooed with two boxers.
The arm was quickly identified as belonging to a small-time Sydney criminal, Jim Smith, whom the police were unsurprised to discover had gone missing – and in suspicious circumstances. On the eve of the inquest into Smith’s death, the man suspected of his murder and dumping his body at sea took his own life. Smith’s arm remains preserved in Sydney.
More usefully, we have learnt after the attack on O’Neill that sharks are swimming further south down Australia’s east coast as ocean temperatures increase, and coming closer to shore.
The East Australian Current – brought to life for millions in the 2003 American computer-animated film Finding Nemo – is shepherding bull and tiger sharks south from the tropics as climate change increases the strength of the warming current. Both shark species live in tropical and temperate seas. The turtles and fish they eat are also moving south as waters warm.
Two years ago, several Sydney beaches, including the iconic Bondi and Bronte, were closed to swimmers temporarily after a great white killed British expat Simon Nellist off Little Bay in Sydney’s south – the first fatal shark attack at a Sydney beach in nearly 60 years.
More than three decades ago, the city stopped abattoirs dumping blood and offal into the harbour and shifted sewage outfalls further out to sea. Since then, Sydney Harbour’s water quality has soared, encouraging sharks and other marine life to return.
All scary enough, until you remember between 2001 and 2017, horses killed 172 people in Australia, cows killed 82 and dogs 53. In the same period, sharks were involved in only 27 deaths and snakes killed 24 people. Accurate records of fatal crocodile attacks are harder to find – my count is 32 for the period.
But when it bleeds, it leads and sharks are the masters.
