CHARLES WOOLEY

Sharks only kill about five people each year worldwide so why do we worry?

Every summer sharks make the news but this year they didn’t even wait for summer. Already there has been a media feeding frenzy over two reported shark attacks at Cid Harbour in Queensland’s beautiful Whitsunday Islands. It’s one of those fabulous tropical environments that I reckon are better than anything I’ve seen in Asia or the Caribbean. If it’s natural pristine beauty rather than tucker and culture you are after, forget the sharks and always go for Queensland. I remember staggering down from Whitsunday Peak one humid summer day to where thick tropical vegetation meets a blinding white beach and the blue-green sea at a spot called Dugong Bay. Without reservation I leapt in. As do millions of Australians around our coast every year and later I came out again refreshed but unscathed. As millions of Australians always do every year.

Can we all agree that shark attacks occur only if people go in the sea? A shark won’t get you golfing, playing tennis or even sunbathing. In that sense being killed by a white pointer is as much a personal choice as falling off Frenchman’s Cap or perishing on a remote wilderness trail.

Every human activity has some risk. Playing tennis can be risky for umpires (and newspaper cartoonists) when racquets are smashed and tantrums thrown. Exposure to the sun will increase your risk of skin cancer even while you dither on the beach worrying about the dangers of going in the water. Melanoma killed 2000 Australians last year. Globally sharks managed to score only five humans, according to the University of Florida’s Shark Attack File. Meanwhile worldwide 40,000 golfers were struck by golf balls or club heads. Merely watching that silly game can take your eye out as we saw at the Ryder Cup last week. The victim is suing, as you might expect.

Going in the sea does not greatly increase one’s chances of being killed by a shark any more than buying a lottery ticket much increases the chances of becoming rich. Among the millions of Australians who will immerse themselves in the sea this summer, on average a shark will get only three of us. About 270 people will drown, but the greater danger lies in actually getting to the beach. While 1207 Australians were killed in cars in the past 12 months.

Then there are the adverse reactions to bee stings, which kill more Australians than sharks, snakes and crocodiles combined and most bee stings occur at home. Google the number of people who choke to death in restaurants or who die falling off their own roof. There are so many prosaic ways to die; a shark attack is at least one of the most interesting. But it is also certainly among the most unlikely.

I’m sure the anti-shark lobby and drumline manufacturers might dispute this but scientists generally agree that while sharks probably don’t kill more than five humans a year, humans are killing 20 to 30 million sharks. Exactly who is the menace here?

The argument that we should pursue and punish the local population of sharks on the rare occasion a human is attacked has always seemed to me a bit “flaky”.

I have never met an expert who thought a shark attack on a human was anything other than a mistake: a surfer in a wet suit mistaken for a seal, or a surfer lying on a board with flapping arms and legs mistaken for a turtle. Seals and turtles and not human beings are what sharks eat.

In Queensland and Western Australia a rare shark fatality is always followed by reprisals against the local shark population. Just as Nazi occupiers executed French civilians to discourage the Resistance from killing German soldiers, so too did Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk send in the troops with drumlines to execute six sharks. It was a thoroughly unscientific exercise with no evidence of any deterrent value let alone whether any of the sharks hooked and shot were the real culprits.

The Premier foolishly admitted it was a purely political action. “Can you imagine the public outcry if anything else happened in that region during school holidays, if the department of fisheries took no action,” Palaszczuk said.

My wife Donna tells me she would wish our Premier to leave the sharks alone if she is ever taken on her morning swim at the beach. I agree it would be entirely her fault though I might have to refrain from eating flake for a couple of weeks.

A good deal of this mindless shark phobia should be blamed on Peter Benchley who wrote the 1974 novel Jaws, about a malevolent man-eating great white shark, terrorising a seaside town. The following year Steven Spielberg directed the scary movie of the sensational best seller and it’s fair to say we have never recovered. Nor has the shark.

Back in 1974, sharks killed only three Americans. Obviously Jaws was just a rattling good yarn without any statistics or science. Later in life Benchley actually studied sharks and recanted. He became an environmental advocate for the shark’s place in the ecology of the sea. He even came to wish he’d never written the book. “The shark in an updated version could not be the villain,” he said. “Knowing what I now know, I could never write that book today. Sharks don’t target human beings and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

What a pity we can’t say that about Queensland premiers.