Living with shark terror

WITNESSING her dad being taken by a great white shark near Maria Island four years ago could have been enough to scare Olivia Johnson out of the water forever.

But the 24-year-old from Battery Point faced her fears and continues to dive — forging a successful career in marine sciences. And today she tells her story.

WITNESSING her dad being taken by a great white shark four years ago could have been enough to scare Olivia Johnson out of the water forever.

But the 24-year-old from Battery Point faced her fears and continues to dive, forging a successful career in marine sciences. She has spent much of the past year enjoying dozens of amazing experiences in oceans around the globe after winning the prestigious $30,000 Our World Underwater Scholarship Society’s Australasian Rolex Scholarship.

She’s done everything from tagging turtles and manta rays in the Philippines to spotting icebergs and blue whales in Antarctica, going on assignment with National Geographic photographers at Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, exploring California’s giant kelp forests, and overcoming a huge personal challenge by diving with the very predators who robbed her of her dad.

Ms Johnson’s father, Damian Johnson, was attacked by a shark near Maria Island when he and his daughter were scallop fishing in July 2015.

Ms Johnson was in the water and witnessed the attack — she scrambled back into the boat, set off flares and made an emergency phone call.

Nearby boats quickly came to her aid but it was too late — her 46-year-old father had suffered fatal injuries.

“I saw the shark and Dad was in its mouth,’’ she recalls of that fateful day.

Ms Johnson took a sixmonth break from the water and wondered if she would ever dive again.

She also had to reconsider the entire future she had mapped out, as she was halfway through her second year of a Bachelor of Marine and Antarctic Science.

But she returned to her studies, slowly returned to the water and now works in a job she loves as a research assistant with the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, diving and surveying the rocky reefs around southern Tasmania.

Ms Johnson says her 12month exploration of the seas as part of the Rolex scholarship was valuable in helping her face her fears.

Only three people from around the world are chosen for these scholarships each year — one each from North America, Europe and Australasia — and Ms Johnson was the first Tasmanian ever to be selected.

“Diving provides me with a great connection to my Dad that I don’t really experience with anything else I do,’’ she said.