Dunedin capital of ‘Jaws’
Crawford said he was struck by the ‘‘life altering nature of these single events’’.
He said: ‘‘You had people whose whole lives were basically wrapped up in the water/land interface and when this happens they never went back.’’
He had no doubt the Dunedin attacks were the work of one shark.
‘‘There is strong reason for suspecting in space and time that it was a single individual.’’
That was because the attacks were localised, and happened across several years.
His interviews revealed sharks often stayed in a particular area, in courtship and mating territories, such as the sandy areas near seal colonies off the Otago coast.
‘‘You effectively have dinner and a movie.’’ harpooned the shark, which had ‘‘been prowling about the harbour for some time past’’.
That excitement led a large crowd ‘‘desirous of seeing the shark’’ to crowd onto a landing stage which began to sink under their weight.
The shark was recorded as 5.5 metres, but that was believed to be an overestimate. Just a few years later, and further up the coast in the picturesque seaside town of Moeraki, Dunedin engineer William Hutcheson became the fourth recorded shark attack victim.
He was standing in chest-deep water, his son diving off his shoulders, when he was bitten and his calf ‘‘stripped from his knee to his ankle’’.
‘‘Get ashore quickly,’’ Hutcheson told his son. ‘‘I have been bitten.’’
A coroner’s report of the 1907 incident said Hutcheson died on the beach within minutes, after ‘‘all the arteries in the leg had been severed’’.
The Press at the time warned ‘‘the bay is infested with sharks’’.
Hutcheson was one of 11 shark fatalities recorded in New Zealand, of which six were in the North Island.
The online encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Te Ara, claimed another fatality in Moeraki in 1967, but there are no other supporting records. Meanwhile the International Shark Attack database, compiled by the Florida Museum, noted there had been 51 confirmed unprovoked shark attacks in New Zealand.
Of those 10 were recorded in Otago and five in Southland.
That places New Zealand fifth in the world for unprovoked shark attacks, behind United States, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil.
The largest confirmed record for a female great white shark – usually larger than their male counterparts – was just over six metres. Even larger sharks have been reported but questions remain over the accuracy of the measurements.
When the shark caught in Otago Harbour in 1975 was dissected the then Otago Museum zoologist, John Darby, conducted an autopsy on the specimen, finding in its stomach a skate and various molluscs and crabs. The impressive jaws from that female remain on display at Otago Museum.